Bit off a little more than I could chew today, so I’m scrambling. Not a great feeling.

@manton all ok?

@manton The YouTube video looks nice 😊

@pratik Thanks! That is mostly what I rushed through, so glad to hear it.

@j4ck Yes, just technical hoops to jump through! Nothing actually serious.

@manton Sorry to hear that 😕
I’m confused re. micro.one Can I upgrade from my existing unpaid micro.blog account or do I have to create a brand new account at micro.one?

@thisness I just did the same. The sign in link on micro.one redirects you to micro.blog/signin but you can go to micro.one/signin directly. Then you can log in with your micro.blog email and sign up for micro.one with your existing account :)

@cooperbike Thank you!

@thisness no problem! I hope you enjoy your new paid subscription :) This came at a perfect time for me because my trial ended yesterday haha

@cooperbike Perfect indeed!

@manton One advantage I believe I can see for having a Micro.one account is having another timeline. I am running two blogs currently, but only have a timeline for one account. I could see the advantage of running Blog2 on Micro.one for the separate timeline. Is that an accurate observation?

@apoorplayer That’s a cool idea. I hadn’t thought about that exactly but it’s kind of why I wanted to do this, it may open up other ways to use it.

@manton You need a vacation. Thanks for all the cool stuff. Happy New Year.

@thisness If you have an unpaid account you should be able to sign in at Micro.one and upgrade. If that doesn’t work, let me know. Thanks!

@manton Thank you! Sorted now but, forgive me, I’m very confused.

I can’t seem to post to my timeline, only my blog.

When people follow me they only see my @replies to other people and not my posts which only seem to appear on my blog and not the timeline.

@manton My bud Dustin setup a Micro.one account and got it all set up and everything, but gets a spinning circle when trying to post. He asked me to inquire about it :) he’s at nisbet-jones.ca/. Thanks!

@thisness Can you send me an email and I’ll help sort it out? Sounds like the feeds aren’t set up anymore for your account.

@manton will do. Email help@micro.blog?

@manton Still think you’re giving too much for $1. Custom domain is fine but you take out customizing your theme. Let free plugins allow for some flexibility. Also, cuts back on customer support for design.

@dnisbetjones @tylerknowsnothing Ah, interesting. Maybe we can work around that if Wipr is blocking the JavaScript for posting.

@manton correct me if I misunderstood:
The main difference is micro.one is lacking crossposting.

If that’s true, $12/yr is a steal and I wonder if that’s a sustainable price since images are still allowed.

For me, not to come off harsh, I could not care less about social features. And at $12 a year I can live with shortcomings of the UX. Even can live with the email sign in , although I hate it.
Someone else hosts the site, takes on responsibility to secure it, and on top of it all hosts my images.

So what I’m leading up to voice is a concern that 6 months from now there can be a price increase and that will leave a bad taste.

Any thoughts on allowing to prepay for years in advance?

@valera Your understanding is right. Cross-posting is the key difference, although there may be other differences later. The price will not increase. It’s going to be limited to 3000 total customers so we don’t get overwhelmed offering something too affordable. 🙂

@pratik @manton yeah… this is frankly way too much for way too little. I think Manton said somewhere people would tell him not to do it… and boy I would have told him for sure not to do it.

I would have said something like:

• No custom themes, just these 8 that Manton already maintains
• No audio posting
• No bookmarks
• No fediverse following, just an ActivityPub address that has an inbox for mentions you can reply to/commenting basically.
• No timeline, just replies.

@jsonbecker Not that Manton’s asking for my opinion, but I mostly agree with you. I’d have made Micro.one the barebones blogger with no Timeline/Fediverse/replies — just the built-in themes and custom CSS box without full theme customization. Kinda like M.b’s “answer” to Pika.

And then if you want the social aspects, more customization, or podcasts, you bump up to the standard tier. That’d make three solid but separate reasons a person might want to upgrade. And it’d allow a lot of M.b’s complexity to be hidden from someone who just wants a place to blog. I’m not sold on the new branding and confusion it’ll bring, although the domain is quite good.

All that being said, I hope it’s a roaring success and brings a bunch new people to blogging generally and Micro.blog specifically!

@jarrod yup— my main thinking was basically “Disable every thing anyone ever has trouble with on the forums, whether for technical reasons or confusion about how it works.”

If it’s going to be $12 a year, make it have 0 support burden.

@jsonbecker Haha, that’s a smart guiding principle.

@manton I signed up for Micro.one (kudos for the launch, it’s a great deal). Facing a couple of issues though

- I cannot login to the new account as I was already logged into micro.blog with my old one.
- I cannot logout either -- always get thrown at the timeline.

@manton I can understand that! Best of luck to you 🙂

@amit It appears the sign out is indeed broken in some cases, a new problem today. Which web browser are you using? Until I have a solution, you will probably need to use your browser’s settings to delete the cookies for micro.one and micro.blog.

@manton @amit Ditto.

@manton I am using Firefox. I have done that. But just thought I will let you know of the issue so that you can sort them out.

Also, a side-note. The branding in welcome emails is all Micro.blog -- may be you want to see how you can establish this during signup given who the target audience of this service is. Any ambiguity is better avoided.

@jsonbecker @manton I said something similar in my next reply (drop features that need more customer support). I had only mentioned no custom themes. Perhaps no audio also makes sense. Bookmarks seems like a light lift at Manton’s end. The timeline may be fine coz it may encourage (tempt?) people to upgrade to the $5 plans after reading about what other people are doing on their blogs.

@amit Agreed, I updated a bunch of emails to use the appropriate branding but it’s still a little muddled. I’ll improve that.

@pratik @jsonbecker The only reason audio hosting and podcasting made it down below the Micro.blog Premium level is I wanted anyone to be able to add audio narration to blog posts. Maybe in the future we can differentiate this from “real” podcasts.

@manton I can understand it being part of the $5 but not the $1. Not coz they shouldn’t have it, but it adds more complexity. I mean, value-wise, Micro.one seems great for the consumer, but I hope it doesn’t add to your support woes @jsonbecker

@pratik @jsonbecker I’m going to sleep on this. I may change my mind, but let’s see how it plays out.

@manton Quick heads up that in the Help doc, it mentions there is no trial period for Micro.one, but the registration page shows a 7-day free trial (and cross-posting, which I don’t think is included).

@manton @pratik @jsonbecker @jarrod Whilst it feels weird to effectively dilute customer support with a paywall, I assume this can be changed in the theoretical future in which the team has at least one additional person handling support.

It could even be part of the “story”. Like, “When we introduced Micro.one, support was limited. Now, thanks to your support we can improve Micro.one in [X WAYS].”

@jarrod Oops, thank you. Will fix they shortly, the sidebar text is wrong.

@SimonWoods @manton @jsonbecker @jarrod It’s fine to be realistic. Hiring even a support person can get expensive and take away resources from development work. Think Manton is now considering removing custom themes from Micro.one. “It’s a great value/deal” shouldn’t be the salient feature of a service. 

@pratik @SimonWoods @jsonbecker One of the reasons I realized the custom themes were a mistake to include in Micro.one is it really adds a lot of complexity to the Design page. Striping that out is consistent with streamlining several confusing parts of the UI.

@manton 👍

@manton I think this was a good call. I’m glad you shipped, and glad you were open to feedback and reconsidering. I think this will both add some differentiation and protect against Micro.one being a burden versus a great tool to get more folks excited about blogging.

@jsonbecker Really appreciate the feedback. It’s true about support — helping people with custom themes is really tricky. (I still need to ship the AI “smart pages” feature… That’ll be Micro.blog only for sure.)