Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days. Especially given that this project is what HN is supposed to be about - done by a lone hacker with help from volunteers, trying to create a different and hopefully better social media. Sure, it may or may not work, it has all sorts of pros and cons, but I’d vote for being open-minded and constructive rather than cynical from the get go.
For what it’s worth, I played with it literally a couple of days ago. I found the set up very easy, the themes limited but decent, the functionality around creating posts and pages very fast and clean. It also has cross-posting to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Medium built-in. I also found that $5/mo is perfectly acceptable - many blogs charge more. I absolutely loved that you could enable a GitHub Pages integration, de facto backing up your website for free.
On the con side, there are things you can’t customize (eg their default footer that says to follow the user, or their archive page), search is only present in some themes and also can’t be customized, and there is very limited information about the project overall. The lack of ability to add an option for email subscription also is a significant issue in my opinion.
I was investigating the project from a blogging point of view and concluded it is trying to be Twitter first and foremost so not a good fit. Still, it was a pleasure to discover something new, interesting, and reasonably clean and functional.
You don't have to be a member to take advantage of this. I syndicate my RSS feed to my micro.blog account (no membership) and have had quite a few useful conversations through there. I didn't see any point at first, but I'm sold now - it's a small community where you get to know people, which is rather rare at the moment.
I would want to know if my product did not address any demands, especially since they’re charging money. This is not a run-it-yourself Show HN link to a github repo, and honest critique is the whole reason to post here.
Personally, I’m struggling to see the value over any of the many static blog generators out there, considering the recurring(!) cost.
> Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days.
Well, people are not bullish about this website, so they're expressing their views (which happen to be negative). Check out the 'Show HN' posts, there's a ton of positive feedback on many projects.
Maybe HN crew can somtimes be aggressive and opinionated, especially when it touches the economy and politics, but Show HNs and product reviews in general are the most honest you'll get on the net. This part works pretty damn well.
> Especially given that this project is what HN is supposed to be about - done by a lone hacker with help from volunteers, trying to create a different and hopefully better social media.
I've emailed the author of micro.blog once over some small technical issue with their bot and they were very responsive solving the issue within days. That's one of the best support experiences I've ever had. Usually big companies ignore or consider user reported problems as a non-issue.
> Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days
As a long time HN user I disagree. Tech nerds, hackers by their nature cut to the point, and communicate quite directly.
You are essentially saying in your last sentence that you don't like it, but adding a full preamble to make sure your message sounds positive enough. That's not the norm of communication in this place.
And perhaps it should be, and will be. But from where I'm sitting, that is new. HN wasn't a safe space, or a beacon of positive communication in the past. It was a place for sharing ideas, and shooting down bad ones without too much fluff around it.
> Today's social networks are broken. Hate and harassment are too common. Fake news spreads unchecked.
How will micro.blog be different? Apps start small and friendly, but if you invite everyone in you'll have the same issues unless you have a technology or policy strategy that differs from the current social networks.
Would love to see this succeed, but need more details before I buy in.
One thing I know they do is that they have a full time community manager and after more than a year participating I can say that the community is very civilized, see also https://monday.micro.blog/
Also interested to see how this solves the 'hate and harassment' problem. Will the USD 5.00 fees cover things like background checks for extreme viewpoints, handle verifying real identities to check against blacklists, and pay for moderators to review posts for harassing content, monitor user complaints, and adjudicate between parties that feel they have been wronged or unfairly treated. Then there's fake news - they could use ML algorithms or pay for human fact checkers to verify posts, but the problem of dealing with mistakes and false positives is still there.
Like the previous comment states, this might be easy to handle when the users are a small group of like-minded friends, and maybe simple ad hoc processes will do for a while after that. The problem is, these sites are only useful when they have a much larger user base, but scale will also bring exactly the same expensive and difficult problems as FB, Twitter etc.
Something to bear in mind as well is that online hate and harassment is not new. Pretty much immediately after the first electronic forums or message systems were created and made available to end users, the problems started. The issue is with people, not the technology, so technological solutions are not the answer...
Would really love to hear how they plan to contain the hate and harassment, to stop the fake news. And then how they will scale that solution when the number of users start to increase.
Human community managers are great but their numbers will also have to increase as amount of users increases as well.
This is why I have so much respect for @dang and his colleagues for managing HN.
This is really interesting as a tech project, but I do think this is going to be hard to make money from. App.net tried almost exactly the same thing, to the same audience (the twitter/fb diaspora), and as you can see from the comments below most developers are not going to pay good money to broadcast their thoughts, which they rightly see as worth very little.
There is a two sided market for microblogs like twitter:
* Broadcasters - An org or a prominent person who wishes to broadcast to a group of followers
* Consumers - people who want to read the latest about x (where x is a hobby, a professional interest, a person, or a group of people)
Making money from consumer blogs is incredibly hard, unless you're free and infested with ads, which has its own downsides. I don't think you'd be able to build a sustainable business from that.
However those who do find it a useful medium for broadcasting to followers and actually use it professionally would be willing to pay (far more than $5 a month), if the service was tailored to their needs and had better curation controls etc, giving users control over their own feed and followers. This kind of service can forgo ads but it needs to find a market that wants to buy a broadcasting service, not attempt to market to normal consumers, who simply won't pay any amount for a blogging service. There are plenty of people using twitter to broadcast and research (for example journalists, businesses, ) - those are the people to target.
> There's a better way: a network of independent microblogs. Short posts like tweets but on your own web site that you control.
I have this. I have a website and domain that I control and that I can post anything to I like. Could be long posts too.
If independent, why need a fee not a protocol?
> Includes a free 10-day trial. Cross-posting to Twitter, a custom domain name, themes, pages, an iOS app, Mac app, and more. Just $5/month. (You can also use Micro.blog for free with an existing blog.)
There's Mastodon. There's also email. I like email for social networking too.
$5 is also the cost of my hosting my own site, VPN, Wiki, and anything I'd care to add. My app is Firefox.
As a, at this point not very but potentially still a potential user, I'm concerned in particular that there is no Terms of Service on registration, none at all. While XX.X% of people may click through a ToS, there simply isn't one there and you propose hosting, or linking, or providing a social identity, or receiving funds, not clear, with no contract of service?
> There's a better way: a network of independent microblogs. Short posts like tweets but on your own web site that you control.
Either I don't get it, or their service is not what they advertise. After reading that line, I would expect a somewhat federated blogging platform where you can set up your own server, and it joins the 'network of independent microblogs'. But I can't find any instructions on how to do that?!?
So I am wondering if 'on your own web site' rather means something like you can buy a custom domain for your profile page on that service?
Why not Federation (diaspora, friendica, hubzilla) or Fediverse (mastodon, pleroma)?
This seems like an rss feed subscription rather than social network attempt.
Personally I love diaspora as it's designed around discoverability - following tags, people define themselves with tags etc.
While Fediverse, activity pub etc. are great they are full of holes when it comes to discovery an actual social content. Comments are difficult and non native and navigating tags is nigh on impossible.
Mastodon is perfectly usable for microblogging, and, moreover, it's currently the best usecase for the tool. You can't find partners for conversation as easily as with established platforms with network effects, but you can use it to publish.
With Mastodon, you can quickly create account you can send notes, links or images into. This account lives on the open web without registration required. You get Atom feed you can use to re-display the content in any way you want at other sites, or to share the content with people who don't use ActivityPub yet. You get "comments" for free for users willing to get ActivityPub account.
My guess is that they are trying to prevent a spammer from registering lots of accounts from a single email address. (And yeah I know there is the fee to dissuade that, but who knows what the future may hold...)
I actually find it a problem (for myself at least but there probably are many people who feel the same) that we only seem to have Medium-like big-article blogging and Twitter-like SMS-y single-sentence microblogging platforms. I really want a hybrid, something in between, something for short posts but without twitterish post length limits, with markdown and media embedding support, letting you to edit your posts whenever you want and leveraging a HN-like first-class comments feature (instead of a Twitter-like response model). Google+ was the most close to this of what I've seen so far.
IMHO, one of the biggest issue with social media is with the "micro" story. Tweets'140 characters limit encouraged people to post more because they didn't have to think much about what they had to say. Re-tweets was just a convenient way of copy pasting.
I don't see any of it disappear with micro.blog.
Why not making macro.blog which forces you to write at least 300 words?
The short format also encouraged better structuring of arguments and discouraged long, hard to process paragraphs. Together with threading it's often using to fairly significant success.
I don't think a person who can't be bothered to structure their writing for twitter would do much better on a blog. There is a significant difference in legibility, but it's not a clear win; I know both people who process well-written Twitter threads better than the usual article, and people who have struggle with its visual layout.
In the end, I don't think a sweeping dismissal of the format is justified. The website's problems stem far more from excessively bad moderation, not the character limit.
> Today's social networks are broken. Ads are everywhere. Hate and harassment are too common. Fake news spreads unchecked.
This is a downside of "social" part of "social media". To avoid this you have to impose regulations and it will break the "social" part, making it a regular media. The perfect solution is yet to be found.
Is there some sort of mechanism or architecture that would facilitate more organic, non-hateful communication? It seems most platforms are geared toward dropping you into an echo chamber, which is probably closely tied to user retention. Is there a way to change those alignments, so that retention is high but without an echo chamber? Or is that just baked into human nature?
I was very pleased to see how easy and quickly I could set up an account and attach the feed from my actual site. (I note that this is all free, which is nice).
I find the $5 fee for someone to set up their own site to be perhaps reasonable on the face of it, but I fear that this won't work. I think those who care about decentralization and the decline of walled gardens are also technologically literate enough to know that they could host their own microblog for $5/month and have complete control. On the other hand, people who don't care probably wouldn't want to pay $5/month.
I would be very happy if it turns out that there are a large number of people willing to pay, and if RSS-based models flourished. Overall, I like the idea, it was easy to jump in, and good luck.
If microblog people are reading this, I have a few other comments. I'd like to emphasize that it's a very clean UI and experience.
1. I wish it were more obvious that I could check out a variety of microblogs at micro.blog/discover --- giving essentially a twitter feed. I somehow missed this entirely on my first go-through, initial setup, and checking of the site.
2. I associated the RSS feed to my own site to microblog. And I expected these posts to show up on davidlowryduda.micro.blog. They don't, it turns out --- those posts are just the ones I made on microblog. They do appear on micro.blog/davidlowryduda. This behavior surprised me.
3. While looking at micro.blog/discover, I replied to a comment. After clicking, poof, the UI didn't give me any sort of feedback that I'd affected the world. I think it should both be more gratifying to reply (if this is a functionality that microblog is encouraging) and that it should be more visually obvious that there are replies to a micropost. Right now, I only see that there does or doesn't exist a "conversation" link --- I wish it were more obviously distinguished.
A common thread I see in the discussion is how the details should be a bit more prominent on the home page/registration page than it is currently. I think the information, though not linked clearly, is available under the detailed help section - http://help.micro.blog/.
I look at micro.blog as a blogging platform with a social layer -- if you already have a blog or a site, you can get involved only in the social aspect of the platform.
It's "federated" in that it runs on simple web standards and protocols. You can use almost any CMS or platform out there and pipe your RSS,ATOM,JSON, or other feeds into it. If your site supports the Webmention protocol, then any comments made by other micro.blog users will come back to your original post where you can choose to display them (or not). https://indieweb.org/Micro.blog may give you some additional ideas/help.
Well, I know I want something like this, so I applaud the efforts! I've been thinking about keeping my Facebook account in order to maintain contacts and event notifications, but stop all posting of original content and instead just link to blog entries. It will be important to have a good place to blog, but I'm leaning toward self-hosting a static blog.
I hope more people do this. By having everyone post content on their own domains, it drastically increases SEO for them instead of piling it on to FB and other platforms. These social platforms are nothing more than SEO aggregators, they are essentially stealing profit from people.
Neat thing. Question: Why not have it publically open and free, but pay to post? Or at least have some of it open, like a limit number of post visible or something like that - for free. Because right now, as a visitor, I'm far from sure I want to use this at all, I know too little about what it's like to actually use it.
[+] [-] deyan|7 years ago|reply
For what it’s worth, I played with it literally a couple of days ago. I found the set up very easy, the themes limited but decent, the functionality around creating posts and pages very fast and clean. It also has cross-posting to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Medium built-in. I also found that $5/mo is perfectly acceptable - many blogs charge more. I absolutely loved that you could enable a GitHub Pages integration, de facto backing up your website for free.
On the con side, there are things you can’t customize (eg their default footer that says to follow the user, or their archive page), search is only present in some themes and also can’t be customized, and there is very limited information about the project overall. The lack of ability to add an option for email subscription also is a significant issue in my opinion.
I was investigating the project from a blogging point of view and concluded it is trying to be Twitter first and foremost so not a good fit. Still, it was a pleasure to discover something new, interesting, and reasonably clean and functional.
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
> Today's social networks are broken. Ads are everywhere. Hate and harassment are too common. Fake news spreads unchecked.
-- the author has set themselves up for high and lofty expectations. Especially for a paid service.
[+] [-] ckastner|7 years ago|reply
Lot's of objectivity here, I'd say. You admit yourself that "it has all sorts of pros and cons", so why shouldn't the cons be discussed here?
Constructive criticism is something positive.
[+] [-] kickscondor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drb91|7 years ago|reply
Personally, I’m struggling to see the value over any of the many static blog generators out there, considering the recurring(!) cost.
[+] [-] d--b|7 years ago|reply
Well, people are not bullish about this website, so they're expressing their views (which happen to be negative). Check out the 'Show HN' posts, there's a ton of positive feedback on many projects.
Maybe HN crew can somtimes be aggressive and opinionated, especially when it touches the economy and politics, but Show HNs and product reviews in general are the most honest you'll get on the net. This part works pretty damn well.
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Boulth|7 years ago|reply
I've emailed the author of micro.blog once over some small technical issue with their bot and they were very responsive solving the issue within days. That's one of the best support experiences I've ever had. Usually big companies ignore or consider user reported problems as a non-issue.
[+] [-] ramblerman|7 years ago|reply
As a long time HN user I disagree. Tech nerds, hackers by their nature cut to the point, and communicate quite directly.
You are essentially saying in your last sentence that you don't like it, but adding a full preamble to make sure your message sounds positive enough. That's not the norm of communication in this place.
And perhaps it should be, and will be. But from where I'm sitting, that is new. HN wasn't a safe space, or a beacon of positive communication in the past. It was a place for sharing ideas, and shooting down bad ones without too much fluff around it.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] prepend|7 years ago|reply
$5/month is completely unreasonable as a github pages account is free and Dropbox/OneDrive is $8/month.
This would be a really neat oss project. And I’m sure some people will find this useful, but seems like not the solution to social media problems.
The only way I would think this is good is if it donates $4.95/month to some sort of simple 99% charity that builds water or gives cows.
[+] [-] awb|7 years ago|reply
How will micro.blog be different? Apps start small and friendly, but if you invite everyone in you'll have the same issues unless you have a technology or policy strategy that differs from the current social networks.
Would love to see this succeed, but need more details before I buy in.
[+] [-] ObsoleteNerd|7 years ago|reply
Nothing about how it works, who runs it, privacy policy, where the data is stored... nothing.
[+] [-] jeena|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eksemplar|7 years ago|reply
+ a popular index.
I mean, a centralized blogging service that lets you customise your style sheet a little is basically just MySpace.
[+] [-] grkvlt|7 years ago|reply
Like the previous comment states, this might be easy to handle when the users are a small group of like-minded friends, and maybe simple ad hoc processes will do for a while after that. The problem is, these sites are only useful when they have a much larger user base, but scale will also bring exactly the same expensive and difficult problems as FB, Twitter etc.
Something to bear in mind as well is that online hate and harassment is not new. Pretty much immediately after the first electronic forums or message systems were created and made available to end users, the problems started. The issue is with people, not the technology, so technological solutions are not the answer...
[+] [-] yitchelle|7 years ago|reply
Human community managers are great but their numbers will also have to increase as amount of users increases as well.
This is why I have so much respect for @dang and his colleagues for managing HN.
[+] [-] romanovcode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] velcrovan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] grey-area|7 years ago|reply
There is a two sided market for microblogs like twitter:
* Broadcasters - An org or a prominent person who wishes to broadcast to a group of followers * Consumers - people who want to read the latest about x (where x is a hobby, a professional interest, a person, or a group of people)
Making money from consumer blogs is incredibly hard, unless you're free and infested with ads, which has its own downsides. I don't think you'd be able to build a sustainable business from that.
However those who do find it a useful medium for broadcasting to followers and actually use it professionally would be willing to pay (far more than $5 a month), if the service was tailored to their needs and had better curation controls etc, giving users control over their own feed and followers. This kind of service can forgo ads but it needs to find a market that wants to buy a broadcasting service, not attempt to market to normal consumers, who simply won't pay any amount for a blogging service. There are plenty of people using twitter to broadcast and research (for example journalists, businesses, ) - those are the people to target.
[+] [-] jeena|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhte415|7 years ago|reply
I have this. I have a website and domain that I control and that I can post anything to I like. Could be long posts too.
If independent, why need a fee not a protocol?
> Includes a free 10-day trial. Cross-posting to Twitter, a custom domain name, themes, pages, an iOS app, Mac app, and more. Just $5/month. (You can also use Micro.blog for free with an existing blog.)
There's Mastodon. There's also email. I like email for social networking too.
$5 is also the cost of my hosting my own site, VPN, Wiki, and anything I'd care to add. My app is Firefox.
As a, at this point not very but potentially still a potential user, I'm concerned in particular that there is no Terms of Service on registration, none at all. While XX.X% of people may click through a ToS, there simply isn't one there and you propose hosting, or linking, or providing a social identity, or receiving funds, not clear, with no contract of service?
[+] [-] arendtio|7 years ago|reply
Either I don't get it, or their service is not what they advertise. After reading that line, I would expect a somewhat federated blogging platform where you can set up your own server, and it joins the 'network of independent microblogs'. But I can't find any instructions on how to do that?!?
So I am wondering if 'on your own web site' rather means something like you can buy a custom domain for your profile page on that service?
[+] [-] hylianwarrior|7 years ago|reply
See: http://xss.micro.blog
[+] [-] kabacha|7 years ago|reply
Personally I love diaspora as it's designed around discoverability - following tags, people define themselves with tags etc.
While Fediverse, activity pub etc. are great they are full of holes when it comes to discovery an actual social content. Comments are difficult and non native and navigating tags is nigh on impossible.
[+] [-] lukasLansky|7 years ago|reply
With Mastodon, you can quickly create account you can send notes, links or images into. This account lives on the open web without registration required. You get Atom feed you can use to re-display the content in any way you want at other sites, or to share the content with people who don't use ActivityPub yet. You get "comments" for free for users willing to get ActivityPub account.
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gl0w|7 years ago|reply
Why not? "+" is valid in email addresses.
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ForFreedom|7 years ago|reply
>Short posts like tweets but on your own web site that you control.
Is it not like having your own website, does micro blog link all websites and display the contents on their website?
>Today's social networks are broken. Ads are everywhere. Hate and harassment are too common. Fake news spreads unchecked.
Micro blog doesn't seem to be solving this problem
[+] [-] qwerty456127|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d--b|7 years ago|reply
I don't see any of it disappear with micro.blog.
Why not making macro.blog which forces you to write at least 300 words?
[+] [-] LaGrange|7 years ago|reply
I don't think a person who can't be bothered to structure their writing for twitter would do much better on a blog. There is a significant difference in legibility, but it's not a clear win; I know both people who process well-written Twitter threads better than the usual article, and people who have struggle with its visual layout.
In the end, I don't think a sweeping dismissal of the format is justified. The website's problems stem far more from excessively bad moderation, not the character limit.
[+] [-] dmitripopov|7 years ago|reply
This is a downside of "social" part of "social media". To avoid this you have to impose regulations and it will break the "social" part, making it a regular media. The perfect solution is yet to be found.
[+] [-] theWheez|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuukkah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixedmath|7 years ago|reply
I find the $5 fee for someone to set up their own site to be perhaps reasonable on the face of it, but I fear that this won't work. I think those who care about decentralization and the decline of walled gardens are also technologically literate enough to know that they could host their own microblog for $5/month and have complete control. On the other hand, people who don't care probably wouldn't want to pay $5/month.
I would be very happy if it turns out that there are a large number of people willing to pay, and if RSS-based models flourished. Overall, I like the idea, it was easy to jump in, and good luck.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mixedmath|7 years ago|reply
1. I wish it were more obvious that I could check out a variety of microblogs at micro.blog/discover --- giving essentially a twitter feed. I somehow missed this entirely on my first go-through, initial setup, and checking of the site.
2. I associated the RSS feed to my own site to microblog. And I expected these posts to show up on davidlowryduda.micro.blog. They don't, it turns out --- those posts are just the ones I made on microblog. They do appear on micro.blog/davidlowryduda. This behavior surprised me.
3. While looking at micro.blog/discover, I replied to a comment. After clicking, poof, the UI didn't give me any sort of feedback that I'd affected the world. I think it should both be more gratifying to reply (if this is a functionality that microblog is encouraging) and that it should be more visually obvious that there are replies to a micropost. Right now, I only see that there does or doesn't exist a "conversation" link --- I wish it were more obviously distinguished.
[+] [-] wowamit|7 years ago|reply
I look at micro.blog as a blogging platform with a social layer -- if you already have a blog or a site, you can get involved only in the social aspect of the platform.
[+] [-] pmontra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisaldrich|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aklemm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhacker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericintheloft2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisaldrich|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbb67|7 years ago|reply