I don’t mind flying under the radar. There are benefits for a product to start small and grow slowly. But I’m still kind of puzzled why Micro.blog is rarely mentioned when articles talk about platforms that support the fediverse. We first added ActivityPub in 2018. Must be doing something wrong.
@manton maye because you're positioned as a micro blogging platform and not a social network? Dunno.
@manton I suspect it has something to do with the fact that there’s no free posting option here. I know we can add any RSS feed as a source but that’s pretty complicated and also hidden for users are large.
@manton I always assumed you wanted to start and stay small enough to earn a decent livelihood and do what you loved doing. If those priorities have changed then you can change strategy accordingly.
@pratik Yeah, that's always been the strategy. Of course "small" is relative, and we can still grow a lot without coming anywhere close to too big.
@manton I feel like it’s still ahead of its time, as crazy as that sounds. Consciousness of “oh, I need MY OWN WEBSITE” is still dawning. Fediverse as social media replacement is a transitional period. Training wheels.
@ablaze Thanks! It's so funny because when we launched Micro.blog, I really thought someone else would copy it. Nope, people are doing their own thing, and maybe we'll meet in the middle later.
@manton I suggest you brainstorm with your team to decide how big you want to be. And as @moonmehta said, get the people who want free on board and convert some of them to paying members. BTW, some sites may create a buzz or be mentioned often but may not have as many or even better users. They just know the tech writers who are often lazy enough to not venture beyond what they know now.
@manton The "hub" nature of MB is undervalued, not always fully understood. Nothing that you do wrong here but MB is so much more than just a blog hosting service.
@manton I'm sure there's an element of "if we put x amount of $ into marketing, what would happen?" but it's also nice to see the organic growth of a platform like Micro.blog.
@manton - Micro dot blog definitely deserves more visiblity - as the 7th most popular ActivtyPub platform today. And many of your choices on how to integrate are being followed by later entries.
@manton I don't have the answer to that question and I try to always mention it when I talk about the #Fediverse. I'm even planing a vido about it.
But one thing I can say is that you have a very niche product there. The decision to not have engagement features makes Micro.Blog pretty isolated from the rest of the Fediverse.
Despite loving all the amazing the work you've done there, I left Micro.Blog 😞 because engagement is very important to organic community growth.
@manton PS.: Early today, I was thinking about the possibility of going back to Micro.blog, and I even logged in to check if you had added "likes" and "re-posts" 😊
@manton As someone who appreciates simplicity, gentleness and slowness I love the vibe of micro.blog. But it's a sharp contrast to the larger internet. Even though you've made great efforts to embrace the open web and federation micro.blog has the vibe of a cul-de-sac.
I often see threads and thoughts here, and again, a vibe, that oh, we don't need or want the stuff other networks have. A rejection of certain kinds of engagement and discovery. Those are things that many people want, that help make a network sticky.
On a daily basis I bounce back and forth between micro.blog and Mastodon. To compare...
Mastodon: - Many clients to choose from. Generally they have more features and are fun to use. Whimsy. - Boosts, likes are things people want and use often. - Diversity. More people, more stickiness. It feels more interesting.
Micro.blog: - Fewer clients. Very simple, dare I say, plain. - No boosting or way to quickly like/appreciate a post. You and many here prefer that. That's fine but many want those features. - A much smaller community here that feels cliquish. While inviting, it still feels small and closed in some ways.
I generally prefer the vibe of Mastodon because it feels more social, more lively, more interesting.
I don't know what you do, if anything to advertise or otherwise promote micro.blog. I don't know how often folks here share about micro.blog in other social media. But given so many seem to be content with the quiet, under the radar aspects of micro.blog it's not surprising that it there's no "buzz".
Calm and quiet might also be construed as plain or boring. Many people use social media because they seek "engagement" but again, that is sort of looked down upon here. Sometimes feels like: Oh, we're above that. We don't need those shallow forms of easy dopamine hits here.
You've built a service that is full of features and works very well and yet it does not seem to generate much excitement. It's laid back in every way. And so journalists don't think about it. If they know about it they forget about it because it's not being talked about.
@manton Some folks, like me, might just be finding it hard to wrap their heads around MB. I'm relatively tech-savvy, but MB feels distinct from others in the space (in good ways) and therefore confusing (in mostly good ways :). MB feels ahead of its time!
@Denny I’m nodding along here. I am fine with it being like this, mostly. I’m in both places too, which means I can choose the “picket fenced country side” or the “bustling city” to use a caricatured analogy.
@manton It’s awareness. The lack of awareness among the media is why they don’t write about micro.blog or mention it.
In terms of brand power if it doesn’t float around in people’s minds when they think about social media, blogging, or ActivityPub, then there’s some work to be done.
I hardly ever see Pleroma, PeerTube, or even Misskey mentioned casually in tech articles from the bigger media brands, let alone micro.blog, and they’re all higher on the ladder.
You need to push your product harder to the tech media one way or another otherwise they’re less likely to think about it and when they don’t think about it they don’t include it in their stories. Developing a relationship with them can help.
@manton I mean, do you want/need it to get more buzz or be mentioned more regularly in the discourse about this kind of stuff in order for it to be sustainable? If yes, then you'll likely need to think about adding some of the stuff that @Denny and others are talking about here. If you don't—if it's sustainable as is—then it's really a question of what sort of network/platform/community you want to have.
@manton Exactly what I wrote in reply to Viticci's post about Flipboard joining the fediverse.
At the same time, I do not think it is a problem that M.b is under the radar. There have already been issues with server overload. Imagine if there were suddenly an unprecedented spike in signups, or a wave of spam messages, as happened recently on some Mastodon instances. Such events would be difficult for the small M.b team to digest.
I am already satisfied when M.b's infrastructure manages to handle the to be expected increase in downloads from followed posts (next year we can follow everyone on Threads and Flipboard!) without failures.
@vladcampos Glad you were thinking about Micro.blog again! Still no plans for likes or re-posts, though. 🙂
@manton I feel like this is part of the discovery challenge of decentralized systems. Even if you are deep into one part of the fediverse, how do you discover other platforms that contribute to it? Maybe it's something that's lacking from the ActivityPub protocol or Mastodon?
I'm curious if you've seen more of an organic bump as people with accounts on M.b federate out their posts and folks already on Mastodon (or other platforms) consume them and learn about M.b?
@dfj I think a lot of Mastodon users have no idea that I'm not using Mastodon when they see my posts. In a way, that's a good thing because it means the experience is fairly seamless. There's probably some discovery when someone does occasionally click on a profile.
@manton I do think there's a basic values conflict at work here. One of the things I like about micro.blog and the Indie Web in general is that it hearkens back to the egalitarian values of the early Web, giving everyone an equal voice and chance to be heard. But most people -- and definitely most journalists -- do not share those values. Instead they are more interested in who's building the biggest pyramid, and who will end up first and biggest in a mad scramble to the top. (P.S.: I fnd my little Mac app Notenik has a similar problem, flying under the radar of apps like Obsidian.) But then I think it's probably also true that some of us are better and more interested in continuing to make a better product than in spending time promoting our achievements to the press.
@dfj @manton No discovery in terms of finding micro.blog posts when searching from Mastodon. As far as I can tell it's ZERO. I have a separate mastodon account at social.coop and when I do searches from that account for things I'm interested in and that I consistently write about I have never seen any of my micro.blog posts show up. For example I write often about climate change and the iPad and have saved searches for those topics. I regularly see results from a variety of mastodon servers but have never observed a post from micro.blog in those searches.
@manton I have a Micro.blog account (@laura) and I haven’t been able to make it work as well as a “regular” fediverse account, unfortunately. I understand that I can follow any fediverse account there, but when I do, it doesn’t show reposted posts, and there are no filters available. This means my Mb timeline misses things I do want to read and doesn’t filter out things I don’t want to read. Or am I missing some setting/functionality in Mb that would make these work?
@mitten I don't think you're missing anything. We don't show boosts like Mastodon, but filters sounds like something we should improve. There is some basic muting but it's not as full-featured as it should be. Thanks!
@manton
I read the other comments before I wrote this. It looks like your biggest issues are awareness and people not knowing why they would want it. I would suggest posting stories from or about happy users and how MB made their lives better/easier. Likewise, stories about someone who has a problem that MB could have/could still solve. That will increase both awareness and understanding.
@tchambers @manton I agree. Early on I tried to help in whatever way I could. Even interviewing Manton multiple times to help the community understand M.b and what was coming next. But for some reason that ended. And M.b does zero marketing. I wish I could help. I’m still willing. I even wanted to help curate Discover!
@tchambers @manton I'm now going back and looking at my interviews with Manton. Insightful answers from him, of course.
2018: https://cdevroe.com/2018/01/19/interview-manton
2019: https://cdevroe.com/2019/02/05/manton-interview-2019
And, for good measure, my first mention of Micro.blog was prior to its release: https://cdevroe.com/2016/12/01/micro-blog
@cdevroe @tchambers I'm reading through the 2019 interview and it's fascinating. Happy to continue this interview series if you ever want to pick it back up.
@manton I wonder what the typical click through rates are to someone's M.b site for title posts/truncated posts that are seen on Mastodon? Having a full website behind your ActivityPub posts seems like it would be the biggest value add of M.b for someone who's already on Mastodon. (Certainly, it is for me!) Maybe there's organic discovery that can happen more through profile pages or clicking through to long form posts?
@dfj Another thing that matters to me a lot, is that my posts are tied to my own domain and that is my identity, even on ActivityPub/Mastodon. This makes me feel like I'm truly owning my content and my identity on the web. This is something you don't get with Mastodon and many other ActivityPub services (that I've encountered).
I'm not sure how to advertise this though? Or how much it's valued at large.
@dfj Good question. We don't track any of that since the link goes directly to your web site, but certainly there's some amount of discovery happening there.
