Micro.blog

Micro.blog is the best of everything: Your Twitter, Medium, and LinkedIn accounts (Tumblr and Mastadon, if you use those), and your independent blog — all in one. Your words and conversations remain yours, no matter what happens on the corporate-controlled sites. Save yourself.

@strengthentheverbs What if something happens to micro.blog though? I mean, it’s still some platform that you don’t control and that has all your data. What if they close their shop tomorrow?

@nekr0z That's why you purchase your own URL that can take anywhere. Or you use Micro.blog to post to your own WordPress website. I actually haven't taken all the steps myself because I'm not that tech savvy.

Having your own domain is a first step, but definitely not a complete solution: yes, you keep your identity when micro.blog is gone, but you lose all your content. Having your own website (and options are definitely not limited to WordPress here) is actually the answer, but that makes micro.blog altogether unnecessary.

In my experience, Brid.gy is a much more flexible instrument when it comes to controlling and owning your tweets from your own website.

Having your own domain is a first step, but definitely not a complete solution: yes, you keep your identity when micro.blog is gone, but you lose all your content. Having your own website (and options are definitely not limited to WordPress here) is actually the answer, but that makes micro.blog altogether unnecessary.

In my experience, Brid.gy is a much more flexible instrument when it comes to controlling and owning your tweets from your own website.

@nekr0z Is Micro.blog unnecessary? It depends on what you're looking for. If you just want internet independence, then perhaps that's true. May I ask why you're here?

@gpittman For me, Micro.blog is a positive place to interact, without ads, where the timeline remains chronological and uncluttered, and instead of arguing about what makes them angry, people share things they create and enjoy.

@nekr0z In my understanding of the micro.blog platform, ownership of your content is exactly what micro.blog hopes to achieve. If for whatever reason Micro.blog stops, as a user we can downlod all content and upload it again to a different platform. In most ways that is the same as with Wordpress. I can understand that if you have a wordpress site, micro.blog would have limited value as a standalone. That said, the community behind micro.blog connects these sites so that you do not have to fiddle around with contact forms or accounts of visiters on your website if they want to reply to your post.

@strengthentheverbs That is a nice thing about Micro.blog. As it was about App.net. I really liked App.net. Twitter started out that way. But the inertia of onboarding new users is strong. Platforms morph over time. I’ve been on Twitter since the beginning. Different place now.

@strengthentheverbs I’m not at all trying to be argumentative. I’ve only recently heard about Micro.blog so I’m still trying to figure it out. I already have a self-hosted WordPress site so I already own my material. That isn’t a big concern for me.

I’m here for several reasons. One is the fact that, as you’ve already aptly pointed out, the community here is positive. Another reason is that it was extremely easy to setup. The main reason, probably, is the fact that I’m a big IndieWeb afficionado, and micro.blog being heavily rooted in IndieWeb protocols makes me want to support it.

You’re right, and yet this is probably the one thing that frustrates me about micro.blog the most: micro.blog does everything it can to drag you in. You can’t reply to a micro.blog post from your own site without being registered at micro.blog. You don’t receive webmentions on your site from the conversations you participate in on micro.blog. Instead of being a good IndieWeb citizen, micro.blog actively tries to be the center, the single point to concentrate your social interactions, and, admittedly, is quite good at it.

I’m here for several reasons. One is the fact that, as you’ve already aptly pointed out, the community here is positive. Another reason is that it was extremely easy to setup. The main reason, probably, is the fact that I’m a big IndieWeb afficionado, and micro.blog being heavily rooted in IndieWeb protocols makes me want to support it.

@gpittman Every time I go to Twitter, I have little interest in interacting there anymore, let alone saving tweets. It's secondary to my microblog, and I cross-post there only because I can. I use Micro.blog for the positive interactions, simplicity, and calming white space.

@strengthentheverbs That’s understandable. Twitter is a different place than it used to be. And that’s why I really liked App.net. I just haven’t found the content I might be interested in longterm here on Micro.blog. But I’m going to hang around a while and see how it develops.

@nekr0z I'm curious if you may have blocked incoming webmentions from micro.blog in webmention.io? (I've accidentally done it once or twice for other domains.) Look at: webmention.io/settings/... to see if that's the root of your issue. I have my own stand-alone WordPress site and frequently get webmentions from micro.blog. Here's an example: https://boffosocko.com/2020/04/25/55770533/#comment-285985.

I also frequently reply to others on micro.blog without issues, though depending on how they set their preferences, micro.blog sites have the choice of either showing or not showing Webmentions. (And this is a relatively new feature that's supported in the past few months.)

If you're having issues on the back-and-forth, you should definitely ping @manton, who I've always found to be incredibly helpful.

I rarely visit micro.blog on the web since I read all of the sites I'm following on it either individually in my feed reader or in aggregate using the feed: micro.blog/feeds/c.j... (You can get yours by replacing the "c" with your username. I'll also mention that Inoreader pushed some changes for titleless posts in December that makes the presentation of feeds from micro.blog much better than most other feed readers.) Since all the comments on my posts come back to me as webmentions, I never really need to visit its site other than occasional visits to the "discover" tabs to see things that don't make my personal feed.

Thank you for your replies to my recent post! I must admit I’m rather flattered by the attention you gave it, and your input prompted me to re-visit my thoughts on Micro.blog. You are two of the few people whose authority and expertise in the IndieWeb field can hardly be questioned.

You both speak highly of Manton Reece, and having no personal experience communicating with him I gladly take your word on his good intentions. I may have been unnecessarily harsh and over-suspicious in my post, and I’m ready to apologize if he or anyone on the Micro.blog team took offence.

Still, I must point out that my own experience with Micro.blog—IndieWeb interoperability does not fully support the nice picture you’re painting. I registered with Micro.blog in June 2019 after unsuccessful attempts to reply via webmention to a post syndicated there from a WordPress site that had no webmentions support. If the post mentioned by Ryan is to be trusted, the person I was replying to should have seen my reply in their Micro.blog interface somehow. They confirmed later that it wasn’t the case, and only after I linked my site to a Micro.blog account were they able to see my replies. Maybe this was some bug that has since been fixed (I must admit I’m too lazy to set up another IndieWeb site without a linked Micro.blog account to thoroughly test all this), but even today Micro.blog’s own help pages still link to an earlier post that seems to confirm the silo nature of Micro.blog.

The same post Ryan mentions seems to suggest I must have received several webmentions from this conversation, but I haven’t received a single one, and that conversation only took place a week ago, when all the newest updates regarding webmention support were supposedly already implemented.

The two posts Aaron mentioned seem to imply that it all should work on hosted Micro.blogs, and that a hosted Micro.blog is indeed a first-class IndieWeb citizen. I have no experience with hosted Micro.blogs, other than the abovementioned conversation that didn’t work out to full IndieWeb extent either. From the side of a mere user like myself (as with almost all closed-source projects) it’s really hard to tell which Micro.blog shortcomings are bugs, which are the not-yet-implemented features, and which are design choices. I suppose Ryan is right invoking the Hanlon’s razor, but all my experience with silos still pulls me to more of a careful-paranoid approach.

I wholeheartedly agree that

We also desperately need fully hosted indieweb options like micro.blog as accessible hosting options for less technical people, and we haven’t have any others since hosted Known disappeared.

This is definitely a huge issue in the current state of IndieWeb, and I would really love to have an answer to my non-technical friends’ questions about getting a simple IndieWeb experience. Your replies might have just resurrected my hope in “a hosted Micro.blog” becoming a valid answer at some point in the future, but my current experience with non-hosted Micro.blog doesn’t really let me join Aaron in thinking it’s a valid answer currently. Still, you’re probably right:

We should definitely keep working with him and micro.blog as long as they’re willing!

I wish it was open source… Then again, maybe it’s a good thing it is not. Being open-source didn’t really help Known much, did it?

You’re right, and yet this is probably the one thing that frustrates me about micro.blog the most: micro.blog does everything it can to drag you in. You can’t reply to a micro.blog post from your own site without being registered at micro.blog. You don’t receive webmentions on your site from the conversations you participate in on micro.blog. Instead of being a good IndieWeb citizen, micro.blog actively tries to be the center, the single point to concentrate your social interactions, and, admittedly, is quite good at it.