Thanks to Kev Quirk for the kind words about migrating his Mastodon account to Micro.blog. Micro.blog is always a work in progress, and our fediverse support will continue to improve, but it’s gratifying to read that our approach is resonating with him:
Thinking of it in this way has really cleared the Micro.blog fog in my mind. People can visit the front-end of the site to see my microblog posts (you can also see them on the notes section here), but if I want to interact with the other blogs on Micro.blog, or accounts on the fedi, I need to use the back-end CMS for that. It’s pretty obvious, really and works in a similar way to Ghost’s ActivityPub implementation - website at the front, “social feed” at the back in the CMS.
Blogs as the foundation for a new kind of platform has been our north star since the beginning. Social media can be a mess — there’s no single fix for that — and yet we can chip away at the edges of the problem, hopefully encouraging a quieter, less exhausting timeline.
More from Kev:
I also like that there’s no in-your-face notifications. There’s a place where I can check where I’ve been mentioned, but there’s no bubbles when I login, so I do it when I want to, rather than when the software wants me to.
Micro.blog must be the only social platform that doesn’t have any unread badges for notifications. That bothers some people, because they miss replies until later. That’s okay. Very few things on the web are actually urgent. The blog posts and mentions will be here when you get back.
(We have talked recently about an opt-in email summary once a week for replies you might have missed. Assuming we can do that in the least-Facebook-y way possible.)
In the end, Kev’s post is also a testament to the work the Mastodon team has done on account portability. You can easily imagine a future where it will be fairly normal to switch between Micro.blog, Mastodon, Ghost, and WordPress, with your identity and content intact. And that means each platform can lean into what makes it unique.
