Standard.site in Micro.blog: manton.org
@manton I was literally just going to reach out to you and ask about this. With the posts going to Standard.sit, my understanding is that they will have an ATProto ID and will reflect changes you make to the original back on Bluesky. Is this the case?
@canneddragons Not yet, but I think that is possible. Right now if a blog post is edited, we don’t update the record on Bluesky. I think that’s straightforward, just didn’t make this initial rollout. In practice, on Bluesky the user will see a link to your blog and not the full text, and the blog will always have the latest version.
@manton Manton, do you have an example of what a micro.blog post looks like over there, not sure If they end up on Bluesky or some other jumbo size blogging platform or both?
@dave For some reason the latest two posts on my Bluesky profile are not showing up in the special way they should. Trying to figure it out. It should show up kind of like this post where it has the blog info at the bottom.
@manton I like this direction. I’ve been using it on my own infrastructure lately and it brings up a lot of cool prospects, but also many questions.
I’m a paying Micro.blog customer, but I have had one foot in, one foot out this past year primarily because of how things have been evolving in the ATProtocol sphere with more adoption, app views, and Standard.site. It increasingly has me evaluating every platform I use through the personal PDS lens. In a lot of ways, this direction seems like a better implementation and evolution of the indie blogging dream.
I am a relatively non-technical person who likes tinkering and feel very empowered by AI coding in this realm. Previously, I was constantly waffling between the two philosophies of indie blogging: PESOS vs POSSE. I valued content ownership, but I also prefer to use native tools and experiences. PDS and AT Protocol seem to accomplish both goals. This has me wondering where Micro.blog sits in the mix.
On the one hand, I really like the tools and flexibility of Micro.blog. The apps and thoughtfulness with which apps and backup options and transferability of content are great. I love the community, following along even as a passive observer to interesting people’s lives. But in the coming era of Personal Data Servers as repos for our online lives, I am increasingly seeing that as the obvious source of truth and the place where things should go first, not secondarily. The whole protocols over platforms things. The static sites and tools to draft content/or interact through appviews are secondary display and interaction mechanisms.
I guess what I’m getting at is that I am interested in these developments, but also curious more about how Micro.blog views AT Protocol philosophically, especially in a world where the PDS becomes more central to our online lives. Of course things come and go, but whereas I was skeptical of Bluesky before, as I’ve learned more I’m increasingly feeling like this is a complete seismic shift in the blogging and social media sphere. Those who don’t perhaps don’t fully understand what is happening.
@bryan does bsky still suffer from the issue where the main relay needs to be funded and handled centrally for everything to work? The last time I looked into a PDS, I realized it was largely moot because it required a big central server that was well funded to persist.
I’m on Eurosky and found the transition seamless. That experience alone made the whole “portable identity” concept feel much more real to me than it did a year ago.
I think your criticism is still partially true today, but increasingly less true over time. Right now Bluesky’s relay infrastructure is still fairly centralized in practice. But philosophically and architecturally, ATProto seems to be moving toward a world where identity and content become more portable and less platform bound, with a lot fewer headaches over ActivityPub.
To me, the important shift is that the PDS is becoming the canonical layer, while appviews and relays increasingly feel like interchangeable interfaces on top of it.
Part of what changed my thinking is that I’ve started using my own PDS with SvelteKit on a Cloudflare worker to pull external activity into it. Things like music posts from Crucial Tracks and Album Whale, and location check ins from Foursquare data through Swarm. I’m not really getting boxed into a single platform anymore. The PDS increasingly feels more like a personal repository of online activity that different apps can sit on top of. There’s also much less tradeoff using different apps for their Individualized experiences than (say) having to use one app for long and short posts and subjecting all your content through one opinionated app developer. I personally like using the Bluesky app, for example, and like my short downloads to originate there.
Honestly, I probably never would have been able to build any of this without agentic AI and vibe coding lowering the barrier to entry. But it’s also made the larger idea feel much more tangible to me. The fact that an ordinary person can now start wiring together their own portable identity and activity layer feels like a pretty meaningful shift. As hard as I tried to do that on my own with Acitictypub and my own servers and websites and different platforms, managing that always introduced a lot of risk. Whether that was platforms going away, errors in data transfer, bad moderation policies/censorship, auth, running your own infrastructure, etc. I don’t think the “indieweb” as it was developed could have really succeeded at scale with all of that nonsense. That, quite frankly, is how Micro.blog exists. People needed help with it. I don’t know that that will be the case much longer. There are many other benefits and avenues, but that side of things seems to be on a much healthier path for broad adoption.
@bryan thanks for the write up. The theory does sound really good to me. Maybe it’s only about a year out for my taste, but I’m keeping an eye on it. It’s good to hear they haven’t neglected the PDS concept and have improved upon it.
I pay for a 2 gig connection, so maybe I could host all of this stuff myself.
@manton @bryan I don’t know about the “I’m not technical” stuff Mr. Wiring up a Cloudflare worker to use Sveltekit as the middleware.
I’m certainly inline with your vision but I like that Manton is making it more accessible for normies. Social isn’t fun if you are only getting people who can do the work of chaining all these things together.
@canneddragons fair enough. And I like that, too, about the service. I just meant I am not a programmer. I’m a professional urban planner who is interested in tech with no real skills in that area beyond basic web dev stuff.