Today I sent the following update to Kickstarter backers. I wanted to give everyone a progress update on writing the book, and a reminder about some of the new stuff in Micro.blog.
When I launched the Kickstarter for Micro.blog, I promised to write a book about independent microblogging. For the last 2 years Micro.blog has needed most of my attention, but as the platform has grown and matured, I’m finding more time to work on the book.
The book is not a simple how-to for creating a microblog. That is part of it, but we already have a help site with tutorials on microblogging. The book is also a history and guide for taking back social networking from massive platforms.
I have been repurposing draft sections of the book to my blog as posts. One of the latest is about open gardens — how we can think about the role of curation in social networks.
There are also interviews in the book. I sat down with IndieWeb co-founders Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki to talk about the first IndieWebCamp conference and new challenges, recording the full conversation. Today I have been working on transcribing it.
If you haven’t kept up with Micro.blog news, we were just covered last month in an article by Cal Newport for The New Yorker. And we’ve added many new features, from video hosting and blog categories to custom themes based on Hugo.
No one said that it would be easy to provide an alternative to Twitter and Facebook based on the open web, encouraging thousands of new bloggers in the process. It has been years of really hard work, with more to do.
If you still believe in the mission of Micro.blog, I would love your support. Fire up the Micro.blog app if it has been a while, dust of your blog, upgrade to a paid subscription, and let us know what we can improve next.
Thanks as always.
