delete micro.blog

I deleted my micro.blog account. There was no value there for me.

A few months after I wrote to Manton about my frustrations and I complained to Jean about the challenge of discovery, I deleted my micro.blog account. There was no value for me.

Updated to add links to the other early users who have left.

Belle B. Cooper on Why I'm leaving Micro.blog.

It feels to me like we're all at a party at Manton's house. Unlike a public, community-run event, where you can have a say if you think things could be done better, if you don't like how a host runs their house party, you just leave. And those who agree with how the host does things, or like the rest of the people at the party enough to put up with it, stay.

Greg Morris on Bye Micro.blog

There is also a real echo chamber on the platform; it is predominantly US-centric. I am not sure of the location of registered accounts, but the feeds and noise always appear very skewed towards American issues. However, this could be linked to discoverability, as it’s impossible to find people to follow without putting in real work – but enough about the negatives.

Numeric Citizen.

But, who’s on micro. blog these days? Why is it so hard to discover new people to follow? (Read link post by Matt Birchler on this subject). It is impossible to see who’s popular and attracting a lot of people. I don’t even know how many people are following me. Why this obscured view? I think these design decisions are part of the problem on this platform. It makes it look like a communist party. Don’t get me wrong, the comparison stops there. It looks like they want to promote some form of apparent user equality which may be a good idea on paper but in reality, it isn’t, for me at least.

Beardy Guy.

The community is, er, intimate? From what I can tell, it’s very small. TINY. I pop in every so often and near as I can tell, it seems like the same 30 users on my discover feed. It feels like a club or a big Slack channel. That’s not a bad thing but it feels like the opposite of the “open web”. The upside is that it always feels very polite, positive and affirming. There’s little to no snark. I love that. The overall result is that it feels like good, interesting, healthy sharing but really limited in diversity and because it’s such a small pool of people it doesn’t feel real. It feels too curated, controlled. Again, it feels the opposite of the open web.

Author: Khürt Williams

A human who works in information security and enjoys photography, Formula 1 and craft ale. #nobridge

6 thoughts on “delete micro.blog”

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  3. I was looking for your no-beer link (I'm lazy. I thought I added it to my RSS reader but hadn't) on micro today when I realized that I can no longer see your posts. I went looking and yeah, your account is missing.

    So I browsed through your blog to find this post.

    Sucks to see you go. It was a good and easy place for conversation. One doesn't have to keep paying to have conversations or to post preconfigured RSS feeds. I haven't paid for micro since the original funding.

    But it's your personal decision. One less place of noise for you. Cheers to that!

    p.s. May I please have that no-beer link? Sorry I didn't use it when I had the chance!

    1. Hi Nitin,

      I think this will give you a feed without beer.

      https://islandinthenet.com/?cat=-5672&feed=rss2

      I wrote an open letter to Manton Reese -- which was an update of an earlier post -- explaining my decision to leave. From my perspective, micro.blog is just another siloed communication platform like Twitter, Facebook, Google+.

      I already have a blog which has been around for 15 years. I didn't need the micro.blog blogging platform. I was already part of a set of communities on Twitter none of which I could easily find on micro.blog. Manton intentionally left hashtags off of micro.blog and there was/is no way to search for people with similar interests to mine.

      Micro.blog feels too much like developers talking to developers and some of the criticisms of the micro.blog were ones I had issues with as well.

      What you may not know is that I was a backer of the Kickstarter to create micro.blog and that was how I learned about the IndieWeb. I thought long and hard about keeping my account. It was several months after emailing Manton about my decision to leave before I actually deleted my account.

      That reminds me, I need to login to Kickstarter and ask Manton about the status of the book. Technically Manton has not completed fulfilment of the Kickstarter. The book is very late.

      NOTE: PhoneBoy has an extensive blog post on the things he tried with micro.blog and his existing blog: https://phoneboy.com/2018/01/13/a-self-hosted-wordpress-blog-with-micro-blog.

      I enjoyed the Was This Worth Doing? section.

      While I have no intention of violating the community guidelines, the way "abuse" gets treated is very much the same way Twitter and Facebook handle it:

      I highlight this because while you may be escaping the toxicness that exists on Facebook and Twitter by using micro.blog, you are not escaping oversight of your communications. You are merely changing who is performing that oversight.

      1. Ah! Thank you so much for the link! Also, theme change! Nice!!!

        It's the backers who are getting disillusioned right now, but that's mainly because Manton is one person with finite time and a list of priorities in his head. I don't know how much of that list he shares or modified based on people's inputs. And the book... I doubt he's got much of it written right now, let alone finish it.

        I saw that PhoneBoy is leaving. Yeah, another one finds out micro is just a strange beast with its own quirks.

        At least we have RSS 🙂

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