Let’s consider where the open web has the greatest opportunity over the next decade, starting with these rough numbers:
- Blogs: 600 million total blogs
- X: 550 million monthly users
- Threads: 500 million monthly users
- Bluesky: 44 million total users
- Mastodon: 10 million total users
The comparison is a little bit apples and oranges because the ad-supported platforms only care about monthly active users. There are other obvious caveats such as how many blogs get more than one post every year. That’s okay for the purposes of this post.
Blogging is the backbone of the open web. It’s not a throwaway stat. Blogs in total are already comparable in scale to the biggest networks.
Dave Winer posted yesterday: “I use twitter these days because it’s where the people are”. Some people would say the same thing about Threads. Both of those platforms are dead-ends for openness, but still useful for many people.
If I were thinking about where to invest my time to make the web a little better — and I am, every day — then there are two paths implied by these numbers:
- Make blogs easier to use for short posts. This brings the convenience of social media to the open web.
- Make it appealing for X and Threads users to move to Bluesky. AT Proto is an open foundation that already supports blogging apps like Leaflet and Pckt.
I told someone privately this week that I’ve become disillusioned with Mastodon. For all the great work that fediverse developers are doing, and the fact that the fediverse is built on open standards, my concern is that Mastodon is a permanent niche. It’s going to take a monumental effort to change this.
Where does Micro.blog fit in all of this? It’s a tiny slice of the “600 million total blogs” number. You post to Micro.blog and it’s a blog post first. Connect to other platforms if you want to. I believe this is the way things should be.
