All bloggers eventually want to build their own blog software. All feed reader developers want their own sync platform. All blog hosts want a feed reader.
In 2026, I predict approximately thousands of niche open web apps, each with a small number of users who wouldn’t want to use anything else.
@manton Fortunately for micro.blog’s financial health, I have absolutely NO desire to build my own blog software.
@ffmike Thanks! The thing I left out is that building your own blog software is almost always a mistake. 🙂 It’s fun at first, until you realize you need all the features and don’t actually want to manage servers.
@manton To be fair, when I started blogging it included buying a server & colocating it at my ISP, hand-crafting HTML, and selling ads to pay for it all. I am IMMENSELY glad to no longer be dealing with any of that! (So thanks again for keeping micro.blog easy & affordable).
@manton Welllll, I see what you’re doing there but if you get away for a moment from the techies I think most bloggers are happy with blog software made by someone else. For example, I’m more techy than almost all my friends and I don’t want to make my own blog software. The few of my friends who are also bloggers don’t want to roll their own.
@manton this is very true. On the blog side I don’t want much to do with trying to build that out 🤣. However, on the feed reader side I could see benefits there as if someone has the technical knowledge everyone likes to read things their own way 🤷♂️.
@Miraz I might’ve exaggerated slightly for effect. 🙂 I’m glad to hear it, though. I want to keep making blog software for as many people as possible.
@manton Yep. This was me:
2020: I’m writing my own CMS!
2021: This is painful to write.
2023: This is painful to maintain.
2024: Screw it, Wordpress or something idk
2026: I’m writing my own CMS!
@manton I also think a lot of those tools will be single user even. My feed reader e.g. is (although it uses freshrss under the hood to poll feeds, the interface is uniquely geared to me and can blog, bookmark, annotate, post to Mastodon and create local notes from within the reader flow), and I see people around me making their own little tools and cancelling subscription services because of it.
@manton AI makes building it easy, but probably makes the network effect worse. Federated networks should help a lot here. Go ahead, build your own thing, and then use it to jump in with everyone else!
