Manton Reece

I linked briefly to The New Yorker article by Cal Newport over the weekend, but wanted to add a few more thoughts. The article really does a great job of capturing what the IndieWeb movement is about, and Micro.blog’s role in it:

Even as it offers a familiar interface, though, everyone posting to Micro.blog does so on his or her own domain hosted on Micro.blog’s server or on their own personal server. Reece’s software acts as an aggregator, facilitating a sense of community and gathering users’ content so that it can be seen on a single screen. Users own what they write and can do whatever they want with it—including post it, simultaneously, to other competing aggregators. IndieWeb developers argue that this system—which they call posse, for “publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere”—encourages competition and innovation while allowing users to vote with their feet.

As we’ve been consistently chipping away at Micro.blog bugs and features, moving the platform forward, I’ve always thought that eventually Micro.blog will get mentioned in the larger narrative about social networks from the mainstream press. We can’t control when we get noticed. We just have to be ready when it happens.

It’s great to see all the new folks joining Micro.blog! Whenever someone new has feedback, I’m reminded what we can improve so that the experience is better for the next person.

There’s one sentence in Cal Newport’s article that I keep going back to:

The Internet may work better when it’s spread out, as originally designed.

I have no doubt that this is true. It’s okay to have centralized services to make things easier for people, because it’s too much to expect that everyone should run their own server. The web can be “spread out” on multiple layers: a more diverse set of platforms, so that not all the power is concentrated in a couple massive platforms like Facebook; and more personal domain names, so that even if Micro.blog hosts 1000s of blogs, each one has its own identity on the web and can be moved.

Domain names are the key to content ownership. This is a fundamental part of Micro.blog’s architecture, not something that was tacked on as an afterthought. I’ve written more about owning your content here, which is one part of the solution to moving beyond today’s social networks.

Advertisements often make broad claims that their products are the “best” or “easiest” or “most popular”. These statements are impossible to prove, and I think make the marketing weaker because they sound like an exaggeration.

We’ve redesigned the Micro.blog home page for new users, to better explain what Micro.blog actually is. I wanted to emphasize that it is both a blogging platform and also a great community, as well as highlight who our team is.

As a sort of tag line, I wrote that Micro.blog is “the fastest way to blog”. I like describing it in terms of speed because it also implies ease of use. If it’s simple and fast, more people will blog. Micro.blog is the blog you will actually use.

But is it true? I’ve used many blog platforms over the years, and I can’t think of one that is faster to go from idea to starting a post to publishing it. In the native Micro.blog app for macOS:

• ⌘-N to start a new post.
• Type something.
• ⌘-return to publish.

It’s the same basic workflow on iOS and the web. By default, you don’t need to worry about a title field or categories or any other UI getting in the way. This focus on simplifying blogging means there’s no tabbing or clicking around unless you need more advanced features.

There is still a lot we can improve, especially how quickly a post shows up in the timeline after publishing it. I just tweaked that today. By stating up-front that performance matters, it’s a constant reminder to make everything faster. But in terms of the workflow of drafting a new post, I think Micro.blog has a clear advantage.

After launching support for Mastodon on Micro.blog, I blogged about how Micro.blog is evolving to support 3 types of usernames: normal Micro.blog users, Mastodon users, and IndieWeb-friendly domain names. This last type of username is where I think we can bring more social network-like interactions to the full web.

Here’s an example. In a post on Micro.blog, you can @-mention someone’s blog by including @domain.com in the post, using their domain name. If that blogger’s site supports Webmention, Micro.blog will send your mention to their blog, where it could be included as a comment.

I’ve been testing a new feature for this type of username in Micro.blog. You can now follow blogs in the Micro.blog timeline, even if the blogger hasn’t yet registered on Micro.blog. On the web, click Discover, then click the search icon, and enter their domain name. Micro.blog will auto-discover their JSON or RSS feed, letting you follow their blog just as you would follow any Micro.blog user.

This feature is designed for blogs with a custom domain name. It assumes one blog, one user, one domain name, so it doesn’t work to follow specific feed URLs yet. You’ll still want a traditional RSS reader for sites that have multiple feeds.

I’ll continue to improve this based on feedback, and start adding it to the native apps. Micro.blog is already one of the most open platforms of its kind, and I think this has a lot of potential to take it a step further.