Vladimir Campos

Before I start, here’s some context:

• This is not a criticism. I really appreciate what Manton is building, but, more often than not, I feel like something is missing.
• This post is about social integration. I have no complaints about the “blog part” of Micro.blog.
• I’m using Mastodon as my main social media platform, though I would prefer to be using Micro.blog instead.
• I’m not looking for online fame or anything like that, but there are some engagement features that can be genuinely useful. And that’s the main reason I do not use Micro.blog as my primary social media tool.

With the above said, please read this post as a conversation starter. Maybe you have solutions to some of the issues I’m facing, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Micro.blog Paradox

There’s a lot that I love in Micro.blog, starting with the all-in-one solution. It’s a simple blogging platform with a cool photos page and probably the best social media integrations out there, just to mention a few.

Then there’s the mindful approach: no infinite scrolling and other almost unnoticed small details that make a big difference. However, some of these design choices also create side-effects which, to be honest, constantly annoy me. So, I ended up giving them a name: The Micro.blog Paradox.

Likes & Reposts (or the lack thereof)

I completely understand the reason behind the lack of “reposts” and “likes”. However, as I said before, there are side-effects and missing benefits that have nothing to do with SEO or the social media equivalent of it.

Because Micro.blog is part of the Fediverse, people can still use the “like” or similar buttons when reading our posts from other platforms. However, as a reader using the Micro.blog feed, I’ll never see that signal coming from the Fediverse.

On Mastodon, when people “like” my posts, I go check their accounts because there’s a good chance we share similar interests. More often than not, that’s the case, and I start following that person.

Then there’s the fact that people from outside Micro.blog are not aware of this hidden “like” design choice. I know it was built this way to stimulate conversations, but, again, outsiders have no clue.

I don’t have access to internal data, but I imagine it creates a variation of an echo chamber — meaning most conversations are happen internally because Micro.blog users are the only ones who understand why those features are missing.

There’s also what I call the “kind like”. What I mean by that is showing appreciation and love for a post without necessarily having anything specific to say.

The lack of “reposts” comes with similar side-effects. If a person I’m following reposts something I shared, that triggers my desire to check who they are and, eventually, start following them. The same is true if someone I follow reposts something; I’d like to see it because they are probably sharing content that I care about.

Even Manton’s posts about great new features being added to Micro.blog would benefit from this. Many times, I myself repost his updates, upgrades, and iconic posts — like the one below — on Mastodon. By the way, the screenshot shows that people are actually reposting it on Mastodon. It is a post that deserves to be shared to help spread the news about the great work he is doing.

In a way, the lack of both features is isolating Micro.blog users. Manton himself has complained many times that articles about the Fediverse frequently ignore the existence of Micro.blog. I agree with him; it’s not fair. He’s doing a great job. So, maybe they and potential new users genuinely don’t know about it because it is a more closed community by design.

Again, I don’t have internal numbers; I’m just assuming this is the case based on the Fediverse statistics. As you can see here and in the image above, Micro.blog has a considerable community with 256.6K accounts and 7.1K MAU. So, maybe journalists and bloggers really don’t know about it despite its community size.

I also miss…

I honestly don’t care about the number of followers I have, but many times I’ve needed that information for technical reasons. One instance that comes to mind was when I migrated my Micro.blog followers to Mastodon. There was no way to know if the migration fully worked because I didn’t know how many followers I had to begin with.

Then, after moving to Mastodon, I would like to know if new people are following me on Micro.blog so I can keep a closer eye on my mentions. Since Mastodon became my primary social media platform, I rarely check Micro.blog, and the “Mentions” tab is constantly forgotten about. The same applies to Direct Messages.

Can you see the mess this situation creates? I moved away from Micro.blog because of the lack of certain features, and that decision, in turn, created other problems.

Anyway, speaking of followers, here’s a missing feature that isn’t an intentional design choice, but something I constantly wish Micro.blog had.

On Mastodon and Bluesky, one can follow hashtags, and that’s something I constantly do when I’m learning something new. Again, I ended up discovering so many great people to follow just because I was tracking a specific tag.

On a similar note, another detail I miss is a simple way to share my Fediverse handle so people can easily follow me. I know there’s a page for that, but people arriving at https://micro.blog/vladcampos have to click on my Fediverse address and then enter their own username to start following me.

For those who have been using the Fediverse for a while, that’s not a problem at all. But I see these steps adding a lot of friction for someone just starting out.

Maybe a short explanation and a “copy handle” button — similar to what Mastodon has done — would be a better way to help people new to the ActivityPub universe understand what to do.

Closed by Design?

As I was writing this post, I started noticing a pattern: how these missing features really seem to make discovering new people to follow outside the Micro.blog ecosystem much harder.

And I say that from experience. I started my Fediverse journey on Mastodon from scratch back in 2022 after leaving Twitter. That’s how I discovered the first accounts to follow, only to feel isolated from the Fediverse when I later migrated to Micro.blog.

There, I had a really hard time finding interesting people to follow, and that led me back to Mastodon. Which, by the way, also has a few problems of its own. Starting with not allowing us to use a custom domain as a handle.

Ideas

Regarding likes and reposts, maybe add a switch to turn those interactions on per account. Only those who choose to would see them. As for the follower count, that could simply be hidden from the public and placed on the admin page. Or, again, be an optional configuration toggled by the user.

Alternatively, to avoid temptation, maybe there could be two types of accounts: one with social interactions turned on, and another just like what we have today.

What about you?

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. There are many honest reasons why I’d like to have access to those metrics, and none of them have anything to do with the ridiculous “influencer state of mind” that has been degrading traditional social media for a long time now.

I would love to hear your thoughts and possible fixes or workarounds to the issues I described above.