Micro.blog is an excellent service and I think Manton Reece is doing great things with it — it has a very bright future. But I’ve made the decision to deprecate my personal Micro.blog account and the Initial Charge account. This is partly because I’ve shifted all of my social networking efforts to Mastodon and partly because the service has added top-tier support for ActivityPub.

I haven’t posted anything unique to Micro.blog since I migrated to Mastodon last year, but I kept the app around in case I received any replies from there. I think it’s time for me to let the service go, though. The two accounts that I have there will continue to publish updates using Micro.blog’s built-in cross-posting, but they will no longer be monitored and will likely stop receiving updates in the future.

The good news is, because of Micro.blog’s ActivityPub support, you can already follow Initial Charge and my personal Mastodon account from there. ActivityPub support is enabled by default for all new Micro.blog accounts, but if you have an older account and haven’t enabled it yet, you can do so by clicking on the “Set Mastodon-compatible Username” button in the Accounts tab.

Once you have a Mastodon-compatible username setup for your account, you can enter @mike@libertynode.net and/or @initialcharge@libertynode.net into the search bar within Micro.blog’s Discover tab to follow one or both of the accounts.

If you’re looking for more information about Micro.blog’s ActivityPub implementation/Mastodon compatibility, Manton has published an overview on YouTube. There is also some superb documentation that might be worth a look. It includes details about what does and doesn’t work — most notably content warnings, boosts, and direct messages.

Chris Hannah has been searching for the best place to publish short-form, informal, personal thoughts on the web. It looks like he’s going to give Micro.blog a try for now.

I went through this same process over the past year. I started out trying Micro.blog as my primary social network, using a self-hosted WordPress site for the actual publishing mechanism. It was then syndicated to Twitter and Mastodon using Micro.blog’s built-in cross-posting feature.

Although I loved having everything live on my own site and pulling in replies as comments with Webmentions, the tools to set it all up and manage everything just weren’t quite there. No matter how hard I tried to refine the workflows, I frequently ran into issues that didn’t seem to have a solution.

I eventually decided to just use Mastodon. I setup my own instance, invited my wife and sister-in-law to join, and haven’t looked back since. I get to own all of the content I publish, I have full control over the experience in terms of what instances I do and don’t federate with, and I get to use all of the nifty tools built for Mastodon and ActivityPub.

➝ Source: chrishannah.me

Chris Hannah:

We can all see the distinction between what happens in real life and what appears on social media.

I think that is where Micro.blog has felt different to platforms like Twitter for me. In a sense, it feels slower, but at the same time, it feels like you are connecting with real people. Whereas when I use Twitter, most of the time it feels like I’m interacting with an online account rather than the person behind it.

I’ve definitely fallen into the trap before, where I’ve used Twitter as a place to share perfect photos, links to my blog posts, and anything else that can bring external validation. But I think I’m going to try and just use it like a normal person for a while, and see how it goes.

This matches my experiences perfectly and is part of the reason I mostly left Twitter. Everyone’s vying for attention and thinking too much about metrics rather than having genuine interactions with real people. That’s why everyone has the same opinion — if you don’t agree, you’re not part of the club, and therefore will lose followers.

I moved to Micro.blog earlier this year and while it’s a fantastic community, the tools around it weren’t quite to my liking. Everything felt almost good enough. I still pay attention to several folks on Micro.blog and check my mentions regularly, but I’m on Mastodon these days. It’s still syndicated to Twitter and Micro.blog for folks that would rather follow me there, but I post to Mastodon first.

Although I fall into the trap of sharing almost exclusively the best photos on Instagram and Pixelfed, I try to be a bit more real on Mastodon. That’s the place where I can just share my thoughts — whether it’s complaining about software updates, posting links to music I’m listening to, or anything in between.

➝ Source: chrishannah.me

Greg Morris:

I’ve just worked out why I like micro.blog so much. Despite it’s lack of “everyone” being here, it feels like old school Twitter.

I love that Micro.blog really leans in to open web technologies — Webmention, RSS, Micropub, Mastodon. And that’s what drew me back to the service earlier this year. But what kept me there was the old school Twitter-like feel.

Everyone on Micro.blog seems deeply interested in making the service successful. Not from a financial standpoint, but from a healthy and happy community standpoint. Micro.blog is filled with welcoming and kind individuals.

If you ask a question, you’ll almost always get an answer. And without any of the snide remarks that seem all too common on present-day Twitter. It doesn’t even really seems to matter how many people are even following you — you can’t tell anyway — the community is so strong that relatively new users are still able to strike up conversations and receive thoughtful responses from strangers about whatever topic is being discussed.

Micro.blog has all of the best aspects of old school Twitter’s community paired with open web technologies that empower its users to really own everything they publish and the resulting conversations.

➝ Source: gr36.micro.blog

Greg Morris:

One of the reasons I love micro.blog is because it is so slow. It is based around stopping, thinking, and writing a response properly. Taking a breather before you tweet is an important lesson, but one very rarely taken. So Twitter sometimes feels like a whole network built on “this is why you’re wrong” when in reality it is just the fast paced nature of the platform.

Seriously, Micro.blog is so good.

➝ Source: gr36.com

Andrew Doran:

You don’t actually need to host your content on micro.blog. I’ve had my own blog for many years, and have recently started to take my content off of other platforms such as Instagram and Goodreads and host it myself — I want my content on my own platform, not somebody else’s. If you have an existing blog like I do, you can create an account and link it to your existing website via an RSS feed. Any post you write on your own blog then gets posted to your micro.blog account, and syndicated to wherever you want it to go.

Micro.blog is an absolute joy. And I love how much the service encourages you to own your presence on the web. Letting you publish on your own site first and syndicate to Micro.blog, offering cross-posting functionality, supporting Webmentions — it essentially facilitates all of the most important feedback and consumption features from traditional social networks, but it does so by building on top of independent publishing.

I want more tools, services, and apps to be built in this spirit.

➝ Source: andrewdoran.uk

I’ve been toying around with this on mike.rockwell.mx using the WordPress plugin and Semantic-Linkbacks. I don’t know how often it will come up when linking to other sites or other sites linking to me — since Webmention doesn’t have widespread usage. But Micro.blog — my preferred social network — supports the technology.

So anyone that replies to a Micro.blog post that originated on mike.rockwell.mx will be sent to my site as a Webmention. It works well and it’s really rad.

Implementing Webmention on Initial Charge is on my to do list. I’ve always accepted and sent pingbacks, but don’t have the received notifications visible anywhere on the live site. It’s likely that Webmentions will be implemented in a similar manor. But this is the type of technology that I’d like to see adopted more broadly. It would allow for more social features in the open web and could be encourage some to spend less time in the walled gardens.

➝ Source: indieweb.org

As I continue to move my focus away from the centralized web, I’ve been exploring Micro.blog a bit. I’m still trying to really wrap my head around it, but it offers much of the social features you’d want to bridge independent weblogs together. And it’s delightful compared to Twitter.

A good client was a necessity, though. After testing just about everything available, I believe Gluon is the best. It’s still lacking in a few areas — line length is rough on the iPad and the app doesn’t appear to support publishing to a self-hosted site. But it excels in all the right ways.

➝ Source: gluon.app