New blog post: You should start a blog now (or later)
@iChris Bear and Pika are both great, but I wonder why not Micro.blog? Would love your feedback. I won’t be offended. 🙂 Just want to keep making things better for long-form posts.
@manton I’m not Chris, but I’m going to give you feedback anyway. I fiddle around with both Pika and Bear, because I like to see how these systems work. Neither is anywhere close to being as full-featured as micro, but I think for the average person who isn’t strong with tech both have a simpler user interface. There’s less to understand – to figure out.
Pika’s post editor is more like what people are used to seeing. On both micro and bear there’s an assumption that people will learn some markdown. That is a point of possible confusion for new users – “what is markdown? Why are there so few buttons?”
I think bear and pika have nicer themes to choose from. Just my opinion. And by nice, I mean very simple.
You are doing about 1000x more than either of pika or bear, but for some people that might not be an immediate advantage. It adds complication.
@bloftin2 Good feedback, thanks. That sort of matches some of my assumptions. I know we can do a better job of being accessible to new folks.
@manton Ha! It was one of those blog posts that just came from a quick idea and I got rolling without giving it too much thought. My guess is that because I don’t use Micro.blog for blogging so much as a social network + cross posting app first?
@manton There’s an element of Micro.blog being more nerdy somehow, but that just may be my own bias more than how someone brand new would view it. Fediverse and cross-posting are very important features to me, but not essential for writing a blog.
@manton This is all very much just guessing as to why. 😆 I didn’t consciously think of Micro.blog and decide not to include it. I wasn’t even going to reference Ghost initially either but remembered where I was posting it.
@iChris Cool, makes sense. Hope it didn’t sound like I was complaining. A post like that doesn’t need to include everything. I think “more nerdy somehow” is fair and both a strength and weakness we can work on.