Micro.blog survey results

This week we posted a short survey for Micro.blog customers to provide feedback about the service. I was particularly interested in some of our extra features like bookmarks, bookshelves, and notes. These aren’t necessarily well-known and I’ve been thinking about how to better position them within the Micro.blog platform and companion apps.

We’ve gotten about 250 responses so far and they are still coming in. That’s enough to see some trends. I’m including notes after each chart.

Which operating systems do you use Micro.blog from?

No surprise here that Mac and iOS are the majority considering my roots in the Apple developer community. I’m happy that Windows and Linux are starting to poke into the stats, though. That’s a good indication that we should continue to prioritize the web platform as the most complete, primary interface for Micro.blog.

What plan are you subscribed to?

I included Micro.blog Teams as an option but we don’t even have a link to subscribe to that plan anymore, so no surprise effectively no one uses it. We have actual subscription data in Stripe, but I wanted to include this question because it tilts the data more to active users.

This price is:

I’m happy with this. 97% think the price is just right or a great value. I wonder if some of the 3% who think it’s too expensive are from countries where their local currency doesn’t go quite as far against the US dollar, because I do hear from those folks. I wish I had thought to ask where people are located.

Do you use any of these companion mobile apps?

Our customers love books. Strata is still iOS-only but we have the Android version ready to release. We also have an update to Sunlit almost ready, with the new icon and some fixes.

What are you favorite services to cross-post to?

There were a few “none” answers here too that I edited out of the chart, and one Farcaster, which I’m keeping an eye on. These charts are from Google Forms, but I cleaned them up in Acorn to be more readable.

Twitter X is probably never going to die. Also, don’t read too much into Bluesky being more popular than Threads. Our automatic Threads cross-posting is still in beta, so not available to everyone yet.

What should be our most important priorities? Pick 2!

The chart was a mess for this because there was an “other” choice with lots of suggestions for what we should work on, so I’m not including it. The top responses were performance and stability, the text editor, finding new people to follow, blog themes, and timeline position sync.

How would you feel if the advanced bookmark features like highlights, tags, and archiving were split off into our app Strata?

I asked this question because these features are great and I use them every day, but they tend to get lost in the blog-focused interface we have today. I always worry about clutter in the UI. I think moving them into a separate “product” could help with both marketing and user experience. If we do this, there would be a bundle to subscribe to everything, and no prices would change for existing users.

For anyone worried about us always adding new features instead of making what we already have better, I consider Micro.blog feature complete now. Almost everything we do from here will be refining what we have. There will always be improvements, but I don’t think there will be huge new core features at the scale of photos, podcasting, bookmarks, notes, and bookshelves.

Any other feedback about Micro.blog? Features you like or things we can improve.

This freeform question was at the end for general feedback. Those responses were incredibly useful. I’m not going to share them publicly because they feel private-ish, but I’m reading all of them. There are some common themes such as not getting stretched too thin, making sure the service is robust, and improving the UI.

We’ll continue to keep the survey open for another week in case there are some late responses. Thank you, everyone!

Nick

I think I would actually use Strata and the bookmarking features more if they were moved into one app. I need a reason to use it over Obsidian lol

Evan K. Stone

@manton Those are some interesting statistics! Thanks for sharing! 👍🏻🔥🚀

I have a dormant free account, but I've been thinking a lot about using micro.blog as the hub for my social network posts, especially since there are so many platforms to choose from. It's getting ridiculous and overwhelming to try to post to everything manually, so I just don't do it. 🤣

Manton Reece

@evankstone Thanks! Yes, personally I would be lost without the automatic cross-posting in Micro.blog. 90% of the time I just set it to automatically copy elsewhere and don't think about it.

Pratik

Thanks for sharing. Nearly 250 responses is impressive, and I'm glad to see most are paying subscribers. Responses may be skewed toward active users and may suffer from recency bias, so I'm not surprised "performance and stability" was the top priority given the recent issues.

Personally, I didn't see how highlights, tags, and archiving would fit with the Strata app so you may need to clarify what you mean there.

I consider Micro.blog feature complete now. Almost everything we do from here will be refining what we have.

I consider this as the best news in your post 😊

Numeric Citizen

super cool to see those results available to the community.

Dustan Ingenthron

Thanks for sharing the results and your thoughts on them.

samjc

Interesting on the hard numbers of how prevelant Apple users are on here. Coming from the Linuxy side of Mastodon (I am the 9.6%) to micro.blog was a bit of a culture shock. "Micro.blog?? More like Mac-ro.blog!"

Art Kavanagh

So it seems there are some people who are using the automatic crossposting to BlueSky. I wonder why it’s not working for me ☹️

Manton Reece

@artkavanagh It is working for me. I haven't figured out why it's not working yet for your account, but going to look closer at it.

Manton Reece

@samjc 🙂 Thanks for being here. The good news is all of our web-based improvements should help Linux and all platforms.

Art Kavanagh

Thanks, Manton. I did wonder if it might have something to do with the fact that my JSON feed appears twice?

Screenshot showing the same JSON feed twice

Manton Reece

@artkavanagh Oh, that could definitely cause a problem. We should probably prevent that. You should click on Edit Sources and delete the extra one.

Art Kavanagh

Thanks, I’ve done that now. I could have sworn that I had tried to delete the duplicate before and that I hadn’t been able to, but I must have been confused about what I was doing. Thanks again.

Tiago de Lima

Interesting results, thanks for sharing with us.

Art Kavanagh

I can confirm that crossposting is working now. Thanks again, Manton.

Manton Reece @manton
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