Introducing notes in Micro.blog
Today we’re launching a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Micro.blog notes are a new way to save content in Micro.blog when you don’t want to use a blog post or draft. Notes are private by default, end-to-end encrypted across all platforms, with a special companion app named Strata for iOS. (Android coming soon.)
Notes are great for:
- Jotting down ideas or brainstorming future blog posts. Notes use Markdown, so it’s easy to move the text into a blog post draft later.
- Sharing content with a smaller group of friends or family, without that content being linked on your blog. When a note is shared, it is given a unique, random-looking URL on your blog that you can send to others.
- Journaling within Micro.blog, so you can use the same platform whether you’re writing something just for yourself or sharing it with the world in a blog post.
From the launch of the platform, Micro.blog has been about public blog posts. We want to make the web a little better with thousands of new blogs, where the user owns their identity and content. Some people want private posts too, but we’ve delayed adding that because it doesn’t fit perfectly into the public web. With the wrong implementation, it would turn Micro.blog into more of a closed silo, with some features only available when you’re signed in.
Notes will be Micro.blog’s initial solution to private posts, a foundation we can build on. By default, notes really are private. They are encrypted and we can’t see them. But any note can be shared with others. When sharing a note, it’s decrypted and published to a corner of your blog, accessible only by direct URL.
This level of encryption adds a new wrinkle to how Micro.blog usually stores data. We’ve tried to keep it simple, but honestly it can be confusing, and we expect a few bumps along the road. We will continue to make it as seamless as possible. There are options to download a copy of the “secret key” used in Micro.blog, as well as saving a copy to iCloud. I recommend both.
In the future, notes will make their way into more Micro.blog features. For example, you can imagine attaching notes to bookmarks, web page highlights, or a book you’re reading. We are very excited about the potential for this in Micro.blog.
Here’s a screenshot from the web. Enjoy!
