Ron Guest

Follow @ronguest on Micro.blog.

Why I’m (Still) using Micro.blog

There have been some posts recently from a few respected micro.blog users about leaving the service. The concerns they’ve expressed are certainly valid and I’ve previously raised nearly all of them to Manton myself. I too gave serious consideration to leaving a few months ago so I thought I’d summarize for my own future reference some of the factors that influenced my decision to remain. To be clear this is not a post meant to disagree with anyone. We can see the same issues and come to different conclusions.

  • The number one reason is the excellent ratio of interesting people and posts to noise and hostility [footnote title=...]For this stage in its growth I feel micro.blog has reasonable tools for managing noise and hostility in my timeline and is working to maintain community[/footnote]
  • Early on I switched from using micro.blog hosting to self-hosting Wordpress on my droplet so I solidly own my content [footnote title=...]Partly because I do want to truly own my own content and don't see Github pages as viable and partly because early on the apps lacked sufficient features[/footnote]
  • I am an iOS user so supported apps do actually exist [footnote title=...]I can fall back on Wordpress on the rare occasion that's necessary. I don’t trust the 3rd party apps, so far, because I prefer a settled workflow.[/footnote]
  • The backend service and apps are evolving in a direction that generally feels right to me
  • I hope in some way my presence can help micro.blog evolve and become a useful service for a significant number of people. I’m getting more out of it than I’m putting in. [footnote title=...]I don’t think the service should try to be for everyone or every need. There’s nothing wrong with serving a useful niche at scale.[/footnote]
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