Follow this tag's bespoke rss feed or return to the list of all tags.
In a way, it’s a silo—a central info container. Silos make it easy. You go there and dump stuff in. But, here in the Indieweb, we want No Central. We want Decentral. Which is more difficult because all these little sites and blogs out there have to work together—that’s tough!
I’m completely smitten. I’m in love with micro.blog. I’ve been using it for nearly a year and am more or less off of all other social media. I think micro.blog made me a developer. Before micro.blog came around I was a full time product designer and project manager, then micro.blog came along and I started hacking on my own CMS. Now I’m a full time PHP developer!?
What is micro.blog?
At first glance micro.blog is like Twitter — a micro blogging service (clever name, eh?). But that isn’t all.
Micro.blog is both a micro blogging service and a blogging platform. What does this mean?
From a practical standpoint, this means that micro.blog users can post short, tweet-like posts, and longer wordpress-y posts…and photo posts (a la Instagram).
Users can also reply to one another, building threaded conversations starting from some initial post.
Micro.blog is a (micro)blogging service. With it, users can post short, tweet-length posts, photos, and long-form blog posts.
This is where things start to get interesting! Micro.blog is different from most any other service (that I’ve ever encountered) on the internet in that it isn’t a silo.
To use micro.blog you do indeed need to register an account (just an email, no password necessary).
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
After registering you’ve got to make a choice (a choice that you can change up at any time) — where do you want your content to live?
In the world of Facebook and Twitter you don’t choose where your content (posts, photos, comments, replies, etc.) are stored. They’re stored on Facebook/Twitter’s servers. Therefore, they “own” your content. And your content becomes something they can mine.
Micro.blog is different. Your content lives wherever you want it to. As long as your content is accessible via RSS or JSON Feed, micro.blog can work with it.
Granted, there is a discussion to be had about data mining RSS feeds…but that’ll wait for another day.
A micro.blog user-account is really just 1 or more RSS/JSON feeds all streamed through a single spot.
It allows you to aggregate RSS feeds into a single social “feed” that represents you.
SO — back to that choice: where do you want your content to live?
Because it is also a blogging platform, micro.blog can host your blog for you for $5/month.
Alternatively, you can host your content elsewhere (e.g. using wordpress, tumblr, hugo, jekyll, coleslaw, etc.), and just add the RSS/JSON feed from that externally hosted blog to your micro.blog account. BOOM!
Up and running 🏃♀️💨
But how do you post?
Well — if you’ve opted for a micro.blog hosted blog you can post directly through the micro.blog website, or by using the micro.blog iOS or macOS apps, or even by using the dedicated photoblogging app, Sunlit 2.0.
If you’ve opted for a wordpress site, you can also create posts using the micro.blog iOS or macOS apps, and Sunlit 2.0, too! They’re interoperable 🕺
BUT WAIT!!! There’s more! All of the aforementioned apps (micro.blog iOS, macOS and Sunlit 2.0), are also micropub clients, so you can post to absolutely any micropub enabled website using them (that, however, is a longer discussion, so not fully explored in this here post).
…this post ended up being a bad “how-to” guide, and isn’t really all that micro in length 🤷♀️ 🌮
Micro.blog is young and still growing. It is by no means perfect, but @manton, @macgenie and co. are doing an awesome job on both the technical, and (more importantly) the social front. They’re doing a lot of really solid work building the community, striving for inclusivity, and thinking through design choices at these early stages that could have major ramifications down the road.
There can be a bit of a learning curve to get up and running with micro.blog, but, I’ve found the community to be wicked helpful, and they’ve got a great help blog that I imagine/hope will continue to grow, and become the go-to repository for all questions micro.blog.