📚 Indie Microblogging

I’ve just finished reading Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece. This book covers a lot of ground, including plenty of detail on the philosophy behind the Micro.blog platform, as well as broader IndieWeb thinking more generally. Reading about these ideas a few years ago, and setting up an account on Micro.blog, helped me get back into a regular blogging habit after a long period lost to posting directly to social media. The book is free, and well worth reading if you are curious about having a place where your thoughts to live in public that is truly your own. If you’re already doing that, there are some good details and links on how the IndieWeb tools can be used to make the web itself one giant social network.

The book has made me think a lot about my relationship with social media. Over the past week, I’ve spent time browsing blog posts directly on sites that I’ve found interesting. It felt so much more rewarding than scrolling through an endless stream of posts on Bluesky or Mastodon. It was more like dipping in and out of a book. There was much less news, but I felt as though I got to know a little bit about the person behind each site. Even using my feed reader, a quieter way to consume information, isn’t the same as reading through the old posts on someone’s site. This is how it used to feel in the early days when blogs first appeared on the Internet. The good news is that it never went away; blogs and websites were just drowned out by the clamour of attention from social media. You can choose to move your attention back to the web.

The Micro.blog platform is both a fully-fledged blog host and a layer of interaction between blogs. It has been put together with such thoughtfulness and care, as Reece outlines in this book. Features that would drive engagement have been ignored when they are considered harmful to users in the long term. Discovery is filled with friction, and there is no popularity contest for likes and reposts. It’s all very deliberate.

When we launched Micro.blog, we got pushback on the lack of likes and reposts and follower lists and trends and global firehose. Eight years later, I’m confident our approach is an important niche on the social web. We do lose customers who drift away because of lack of engagement. So be it. If they want the dopamine hit of notifications and a more active timeline, pulling them back in, there is literally every other platform for that.

This is a worthwhile read if you are even remotely interested in blogging, or trying to step away from publishing your thoughts and posts on other people’s platforms.