Decentered S1E7: The Joy of Micro.Blog with Manton Reece
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Thanks for joining us on another episode of Decentered! This week, we sat down with Manton Reece creator of Micro.Blog!
Manton’s journey to the Fediverse starts out more on the IndieWeb side of things, which has informed a lot of his ideas, tech stack, and design fundamentals in building Micro.Blog. We also reflect both on the nature of websites, personal blogs, and the uniformity of traditional social networks and how their design can limit expression.
Show Notes
- Manton started his software development journey writing applications for the Macintosh in the 1990’s.
- Ran a Kickstarter campaign for micro.blog in 2017, and ended up raising $86,000 on a $10,000 goal.
- Co-Authored JSON Feeds, which was miles easier to deal with compared to XML
- “If I build a product, I want to support as many open APIs and formats as possible.”
- Mastodon and Micro.blog developed ActivityPub implementations kind of in parallel, with the former releasing 6 months earlier.
- “Our first version (of the protocol implementation) wasn’t great…it worked with Mastodon, but when Mastodon really started taking off…I was able to go improve a whole bunch more, got pretty good feedback from people. So now, it’s pretty seamless…A lot of people think I’m just using Mastodon.”
- Supported some of the IndieWeb protocols in the beginning, such as MicroPub and WebMention
- “I’m not going to compete with everything; I’m going to work to be compatible with them.”
- Micro.Blog supports cross-posting to a lot of different networks, which is a big part of the POSSE concept from IndieWeb.
- Thinking about supporting the AT Protocol by Bluesky. It’s a lot of work, though.
- As a platform, Micro.Blog really only supports hand-curation and a chronological-sort algorithm for timelines.
- Manton’s mentality: your blog or website is where all of your stuff can incorporate together. You can build your space, shape your experience, use the apps and tools you want to shape your experience. It’s your home on the Web, and your source of truth.
- As a company, Micro.blog is small, and only employs a small crew. While it would be nice to have more of a support team, operations are pretty cozy overall.
- Book Plug: Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece.
