Putting together my notes for this week’s podcast about Twitter alternatives and as much as I love this place, I can’t find a concise elevator pitch that actually conveys what Micro.blog is and why you should bother to join. The entire blog aspect complicates things greatly.
Before you can sell them on Micro.blog, you have to sell them on blogs being relevant, and I can't even do that because "blog posts" and "status updates" are two completely distinct things that really shouldn't have anything to do with each other.
I disagree with that; a person’s Twitter is exactly a blog of all very short posts (a microblog); one just writes it on a commercial platform run by a community-hostile owner. And then on top of that there’s a timeline to make reading the “latest” microblog posts from your friends easier.
So lean in to Micro.blog’s primary purpose of short status updates (that the platform can do traditional long-form blog posts all in the same place is just a bonus you don’t need to mention if it’s going to be confusing) and a timeline for ease of following your friends/whatever and interacting, and community guidelines to keep it nice.
I really liked @Starman’s post today, including the quotes from the Micro.blog front page. Maybe you take the quoted paragraph 1 and the first two-thirds of quoted paragraphs 2 and 3 (if the blog/hosting/ownership angles are confusing to people), add in the great community that’s already here, and you have your elevator pitch?
I feel like in some ways Micro.blog is exactly Twitter, just built with different parts (blogs, RSS, open web) under the hood and designed/guided by a different purpose and values. We should just start calling Twitter a commercial microblogging platform, and then Micro.blog would make sense to everyone naturally ;-)