I’m giving it a try.
I am: http://tjluoma.micro.blog
That is currently my RhymesWithDiploma.com site, but I apparently move that every 6-8 months when I want to try a new hosting company, so we’ll see if it sticks.
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Me, @agilelisa, but I admit to having been quiet for a couple of months. It’s on my summer list to start writing there again.
I don’t know what you mean by echo chamber in this context. I’ve been on for a day and I like the community so far.
I have noticed this as well.
For some, the $5/mo cost is a non-starter and prohibitive, especially for folks with not a lot of disposable cash.
I found I like the community, as a black, financially stable woman. But it is very homogenous for the most part.
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I suspect most pioneering social media groups started as
or from that social strata anyway. Drop one descriptor as you like.
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I agree that $5/mo is a significant barrier to many. But the hardware is dirt cheap. All you need is a $100 android phone or anything that runs a web browser.
Also, I think micro.blog is free if you self host. But then you do have technical barriers.
I’m enjoying it but it’s far from the only place I post.
I do see some prominent women there and I don’t know the race of people who choose not to disclose.
I quite agree that micro.blog will never be a successor to Twitter. I’m not looking for that.
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There are free options for hosting sites that are great, for example with the combination of Hugo, Netlify, and Github you can get a fully functional site up and running for free fairly easily. I use this for one of my sites.
That said, I love Micro.blog and pay for the yearly plan to support it: @joshsullivan
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I had thought about getting on micro.blog but paying $5 a month to waste time I don’t really need to waste was enough to turn me away.
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Wolfie, your insights are valuable here. Indeed, if I ever have a chance to interview or talk with Manton Reece, or just talk to him, I will raise these very points with him.
I find the same problems with the whole IndieWeb movement, of which micro.blog is a part. I get the idea of providing an open source, federated alternative to the big social stacks – particularly Facebook and Twitter. However, they do require a significant investment of time and effort.
And every time I browse indieweb.org I come away confused. I have no idea what they’re talking about, for about 30% of their content. And I’m more technical than 99% of the people in the world. indieweb.org quickly gets into a dense thicket of jargon understandable only to people who have been immersed in the indieweb movement. If indieweb wants to go beyond a small, niche movement catering to nerds – and I believe that is their goal – they need to fix that. They need to make setting up an indieweb service as easy as signing on to Facebook or Twitter.
Micro.blog is better for understandability, but it is still somewhat confusing. Micro.blog combines elements of a social network, independent blogging platform, and RSS reader. You can be part of the micro.blog community by publishing on their hosting service, or by simply pointing the RSS feed from your existing blog to the micro.blog service. That’s confusing.
HOWEVER, nobody here is arguing that micro.blog will replace Twitter. So to that extent you’re raising a straw man argument.
Also, I started this thread as a means for micro.blog users on MPU to find each other. I like that we’re having a discussion of the merits of micro.blog, but now where will we do that other thing?
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Hey all, newcomer to the MPU forum, but a longtime Micro.blog user, it has really helped get back into the habit of regular blogging. You can find me at https://thoughts.alanralph.co.uk/
How hard was it to get it working with Hugo? I like the idea of a static site but I haven’t seen much written on how integrate one effectively.
micro.blog both extrudes and consumes RSS feeds. Your micro.blog posts can be syndicated from another site using RSS – in that respect, micro.blog is like an RSS reader – or you can host your blog on micro.blog’s servers and then produce an RSS feed that can be syndicated elsewhere.
I literally just had to Google the word Hugo now to find out what the heck it is – I’d never heard of it before your post. However, if Hugo can consume or produce RSS feeds – and I expect it can – it should be micro.blog compatible.
I hope that helps!
I used to have a micro.blog, I did the free trial run for like a month or whatever it offered.
I couldn’t understand it’s use (maybe I was too literal in my understanding)
Was it supposed to replace my personal blog?
Is it an extension?
To the earlier comments, @Wolfie it did seem odd that the same functionality (free) on Twitter or Mastodon or any of those apps, would cost $5 at micro.blog
I also couldn’t figure out how do you connect with people? How do you build us followers, how do you follow others? It doesn’t seem intuitive to me (unless they updated since the last time I used it). To address the question of @MitchWagner , it seems that you can only find out who’s on micro.blog by connecting outside of it. Like I said, it’s been a while since my last use, maybe things changed
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When I messed around with Micro.Blog there were several points of confusion and mismatches.
I set-up the free version to pump posts from my blog. It worked sorta… I wanted to build a raised bed veggie garden thread on Micro. But my personal blogs is the opposite of niche. My blog topics are based on whatever has got my momentary attention. Not a steady stream of food growing posts. Micro did not seem to be a good match for me.
Aside from the social aspect inside the micro.blogosphere I never saw any advantages to it over microblogging with a Wordpress blog, with hosting starting free at wordpress.com (or roll your own, with your own hosting and plugins and management via wordpress.org downloads). Especially for microblogging a free Wordpress.com site does what most people need, and you can just point your own domain to whatever free blog you like. That’s what I did for a few text blogs, while I pointed some photoblogs to some free Tumblr accounts (just because I liked a specific photoblog template they’d had).
I’m using their hosted blog service. I have never had a blog and at this point I am really enjoying the community. Manton Reece was interviewed by MPU some time ago and I liked his mission. You can find me @poetalegre.