Micro.blog

Every once in a while, someone new to Micro.blog asks if it is actively developed. What…? We are making improvements to the backend and shipping new apps all the time. Clearly need to communicate this better.

@manton Please do that. Even I had a few questions on sustainability of the platform and on the data portability.

@sks Thanks. I think I often assume everyone reads my blog regularly, which of course is too much to expect. I think we need to use @news more.

@manton even something like “what’s new” in the sidebar would be good. Could link to the news page.

@manton I agree. Even if you do post micro.blog news and updates on your own account, I think they should at least be syndicated to @news as well. Especially all major updates and longform posts, most recent of which were the Android app and email newsletters posts.

And even if we assume that most people do read your blog, someone wanting to get an overview of all updates in the past few months or a year will need to scroll or filter through many other things on your blog. Sorry if I'm being blunt here but I guess that's one thing micro.blog definitely lacks--a proper official blog for updates and everything else related.

@uncertainquark @manton I agree with Jatan. I wrote down my rambling thoughts on this.

@manton I think the biggest opportunity missed, which would probably be the most work, is release notes of some kind related to the platform work. Most of the time the news is about the apps or a big new feature that happens maybe 4 times a year.

@manton I don't have the bird's eye view that you do, but I've always felt that M.b's communications are disjointed. Help and support through a few channels, news through others, etc.

I do think that having a unified channel for all news, like @news, could work. Sorry to compare, but Twitter always had @twitter and their blog.

Coming from a marketing background, I'd be more than happy to hop on a call and spitball some ideas.

@issimonwoods Excellent points, including about the Homepage. I'd also like to add on that note that the Pricing page linked over there doesn't mention the new Newsletters feature.

@manton I would second that the main page probably isnt working as hard as it should be for you. I also think that a monthly roundup of things that you worked on posted to @news would make for excellent reading/motivation at the end of the year. Drip, drip, drip all adds up.

@manton I would love to hear more. It’s pretty lonely out here. Hard to gain readers. At least knowing there’s development happening would be a sign of life.

@manton With the amount of 'pump and dump' apps and services out there I am not surprised this gets asked a lot..

@manton Need that monthly newsletter to shout about things (of the top of my head last year brought Bookshelf, Newsletter, Dark Mode, updates to all iOS and Mac apps and an Android app. Micro.camp? 6 or so episodes of Micro Monday. I want to see how you top it off in 2022 :).

@manton Signing the posts could be cool.

So, @news would post, but at the end it was say "by @manton" or "by @jean" or "by @vincent".

@manton As much as I would like to say I'm a consistent reader of your posts, I don't get to them as I should to know all the neat stuff going on. Maybe I would mend my ways if I practiced looking @news. So, I'll commit to do that and see how it goes.