@marco you are so wrong about Mb. It's not like Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram or WordPress. It's all the above and the significant difference is that you own it all. When you get fed up with Twitter we'll be here. @manton

@kaa curious how MB might be or may not be different than Mastodon. Thoughts?

@Skematica You know what, you've completely thrown me with that :). That's an excellent question because Mastodon certainly seems reasonably mature in ways MB isn't. However, until you mentioned it, I'd never heard of it! Which I guess is the biggest challenge facing MB. Finding it's audience. I guess MB is simpler for me as a user in getting started and then @manton's put enough character to make it fun (challenge stickers come to mind). It's a question of keeping up the great work with more things that make people smile more regularly in their interactions.

@Skematica @kaa There are similarities, but the biggest difference is Micro.blog's focus on personal domain names and content ownership vs. Mastodon's approach of having many networked communities. Plus the more subtle decisions on UI and features.

@PhoneBoy This is a fantastic conversation. Thanks all for joining in and sharing viewpoints. @kaa @manton

@PhoneBoy Excellent point. I've found that putting my trust in dedicated individuals serves me better in the long run (usually). Which is why I support Feedbin, Blot, Pinboard and now Mb @skematica @Manton

@manton Many OStatus/ActivityPub nodes (Mastodon, Pleroma, GNUSocial, etc) are one person or a tiny group, self-hosting. Long fat tail distribution. m.b has one point of failure/control. I feed my blog out to many places now so it'll be seen, but only I own it.

@manton Which makes replies problematic, since they're only hosted on m.b right now. I need a way to have my replies end up on my site, permanently.

@mdhughes I’ve never seen a Mastadon instance that is someone’s actual web site, though. That’s the difference. (And I agree with you about replies.)

@mdhughes have you looked into supporting webmention and microformats? With these I’m able to post replies directly on my blog, and have them post to m.b and ping the user as a reply. Granted, I don’t often actually do it, but I can.

I post my replies on micro.blog from my website! Like this one! https://aaronparecki.com/replies

@manton I wouldn't call a hosted m.b "someone's web site", either. But there's ActivityPub sites like lain's Pleroma - NSFW, also blog, etc. There's only one m.b currently.

@eli It's on my TODO list, got some plugins but haven't set up a workflow to post that way.

@mdhughes Really? There are many people who are using Micro.blog-hosted sites with their primary domain name. It’s based on Jekyll and is a full blog.

@manton Examples? I hadn't seen anyone mention their homepage on it. There's also a bus number problem: If Eugen gets hit by a bus, mastodon.social likely goes down but 90% of ActivityPub goes on. All of m.b's bus number is 1.

While there is only one micro.blog, since like @aaronpk and @eli I host my replies on my website, I enjoy using micro.blog in the short term and if it were to fail, I will still own all my content, like this post

@mdhughes Here are some recent examples: burk.io, aur.as, desparoz.me, and madduxglavinesmoltz.com.

@manton OK, that's something I hadn't seen surfaced before. Not sure how you make that discoverable…

@aaronpk I’m a complete noob. How do I do this???

It works by making a post on your site first, which links to the micro.blog post you're replying to, then sending a Webmention for that link. There's some more info here: https://indieweb.org/Webmention

@aaronpk I added the webmentions plug in on my WP site. Just not exactly sure how to use it. Can you link an example?

That should hopefully work! Try writing a new post in Wordpress and include a link to https://aaronparecki.com/2018/02/18/10/ in the post, then you should see the comment appear there!

If you're having trouble, stop by the wordpress channel in the indieweb chat https://chat.indieweb.org/slack

I post my replies on micro.blog from my website! Like this one! https://aaronparecki.com/replies

@mdhughes kaa.bz is my site (or internet thought space). Everything I'm working through goes through here.

@aaronpk WAAAAAY to much work. @replies should just be an option that gets published on your site somewhere automatically. Feature request.

Depends on your definition of "work". I don't host my site on micro.blog, so it's actually way less work to have micro.blog pull in my reply from the webmention I send. This way I don't have to do anything special to get my replies to micro.blog compared to how I have to do it for Twitter.

@kaa But that is a blog, not what I'd call a site. Like, burk.io is full of non-chronological material, project pages, so that's a "site hosted on m.b" for sure.

@mdhughes I guess if you’re looking to host some pages but not regular updates - although I do struggle to see the value you get from hosting that type of site on Mb? Wouldn’t it be better served from somewhere else or am I missing something?

@manton For me, the biggest difference is Mastodon needs a setup of its own. It might be federated, but it is social network first, so I need to host my own social network to get things working. To make Micro.blog work and participate, all I needed was a feed from my existing blog. Isn't that a big differentiator? @Skematica @kaa

@amit Yes, absolutely. Embracing existing blogs is a big part of it.