Reading through this great 3-part blog post series from Stephanie Booth about rebooting the blogosphere:

from my “reading interface” (ie, the RSS reader), make it super easy to comment, share, react or link to a publication and start writing something new

A key point in Micro.blog from the beginning was to unify reading, blogging, and replying. A little-understood feature in Micro.blog is you can follow any blog, for example search “climbtothestars.org” to follow Stephanie’s blog. Need to keep improving that.

@manton I love that feature! I always try to follow this way instead of using my RSS reader. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but often it does. I’d love to see this part of MB improve, turning it into more or less a full-blown alternative to an external reader.

@manton It’s kind of surprising that even 12 years after the shutdown of Google Reader, people are still longing backwards to it. Even while it had reasonably good UX for many things, from the performance viewpoint Google Reader was painfully slow because of badly implemented memory management.

@manton I actually had no idea. Thanks!

@birming Next time it doesn’t work, let me know! I want to find and fix all the edge cases where it doesn’t work or doesn’t find the right profile icon.

@manton Currently the Search field in Discover section fails to work if people input full HTTP addresses. They have to manually remove the https etc. from the URL to make it searchable, so that would be likely one of the first things to improve for making it more usable for regular people.

@d2s It is fascinating. Personally, I never used Google Reader, except as a backend for syncing from other RSS apps.

@manton I did not know that!

@d2s Good point, we can fix that.

@manton Yeah, and even when you know you can follow a domain like that I still forget! 🤦‍♂️
Definitely think there’s more to do to make micro.blog’s ‘hidden’ features more visible and intuitive

@thisness I forget too and I built it. 🙂

@manton 😂

@birming @manton I agree. I’d love to consolidate and read all my RSS feeds in MB

@manton I had no idea that that was possible - and how long have I been using Micro.blog?!

@manton I’ve noticed some instances where Micro.blog fails to load the blog - world.hey.com/jason for example. I imagine it’s because of the additional path but was wondering if this is intentional?

@manton Another example of Micro.blog being ahead of the curve!

But I do have a question about this. I use Micro.blog to follow other blogs. In these cases, the followed blog profile includes: “Automatic user profile based on author’s RSS feed”. The posts that show up in my feed have a reply option. What happens to replies I write from within Micro.blog? Will the blog post author ever see them, or is this reply option solely meant for Micro.blog users?

@ivonunes That’s true, currently that’s the limitation: it has to be a domain name or subdomain without a path. The reason was so that you can treat it like a username and @-mention a blog with @example.blog (if the blog supports it), which gets weird with a path. Hope to remove this limitation one day.

@robertbreen If the blog supports Webmention, Micro.blog will send the reply. For example, with WordPress + the Webmention plug-in, Micro.blog replies will show up as WordPress comments! But unfortunately there’s no warning if the blog doesn’t support it, so in that case the reply just stays on Micro.blog.

@manton Thanks a lot for sharing it (and reading it!)
Thoughts on my thoughts most welcome :-)

@manton Oh this is cool, my response on Bluesky found its way here… Maybe I need to play around with micro.blog, specially if it does try to implement reading, writing, replying!

@manton very cool! I’m testing this now with my Wordpress blog.

@manton what?! So I can use Micro.blog like an RSS reader too?? How am I only just learning this?

@kev No one knows about it! It still needs a lot of little improvements, but I think it has potential.

@manton That’s really clever!

@bjhess Thanks!

@kev @manton I had no idea. How do I add an RSS feed to my timeline?

@de @kev It’s not possible yet to add a full RSS feed. You can only add a domain name and it will find the RSS feed for you. So this doesn’t work for websites that have multiple authors.

@manton Thank you. How do I add a domain name?

@de On the web, click Discover and search for the name. Micro.blog will try to look it up and let you follow the website.

@manton Google Reader has basically all of this except publishing your own post. I think that’s part of why it was so popular.

@manton had no idea… interesting. I have a set of feeds in Feedbin that are more personal. Gonna try some of them in micro.blog now.

@manton what??? MB dig the RSS feed from a domain name / website automatically?

@manton this feature is nice, but I have to say I’m fighting the feed discovery way more than it is helping me. I really wish I could just put the URL to the feed and have it go… About 50% of the sites I’m trying I can’t get the same feed items Feedbin is showing me… for whatever reasons.

@jthingelstad I’m pretty sure we’ll add a more specific “just enter the RSS URL” feature later. For now, if you have a minute to send me the websites where Micro.blog isn’t finding the right feed, that will help us fix it.

@manton This is the biggest flaw, imo, of trying to follow blogs via micro.blog. Many, many people seem to host their blogs on a path from their main domain.

@bethanyh Yeah, I think in the long run we need two separate interfaces: a simple way to follow people when their domain name is their blog, and a more traditional feed reader interface for everything else.