Why I'm leaving Micro.blog | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm leaving Micro.blog

blog.bellebcooper.com

I've never heard of micro.blog before now, but after reading the article, I'm still not sure what the "problem" is.

I read three major points: Ownership, curation, and diversity. As the latter two, I feel, require hands-on experience, I'll focus on the first.

For Ownership, the author / OP appear to suggest that content ownership is about where the content is hosted. From the article (again, never heard of the service before now), it seems that preserving redirects and letting you create whatever URIs you want, and therefore move / control content, would suffice. Am I just missing something?

I also didn't know anything about micro.blog before now, but based on the article I assumed from the features offered that "creators own the content" actually means "creators own the relationship with the user" which seems pretty important. Worst case you could copy-and-paste your content to a different service, as long as you own the domain.

Same here, never heard of micro.blog but the concept and business model seem sound.

Owning the things you post and having to host them yourself are two different things. The content is yours, the domains is yours, you pay for someone serving it for you. Hosting is not free and maintaining it is always a hassle a lot of savvy people will pay for a service in order to avoid.

Micro.blog seems to be open source, if at some point you don't want to pay any more, you can always get your data out, setup a server or a rpi, and restore your data. Nothing lost other than some quality time with some readmes.

While I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, micro.blog is not open source.

The model is exactly as you say. The whole idea is to be sort of like Wordpress.com. Pay for hosting if you want it, but if you just want to participate in a social layer on top of your own RSS feed, all of the social features are free and you just import an RSS feed.

If you leave micro.blog hosting, you can just submit your new RSS feed wherever you're hosting the same content and it'll be pretty seamless, I think.

Curation and diversity, in this post, feel like expressing the same problem in some ways-- too few people with insufficient diversity are currently using the service. Curation _may_ fail at scale the way they are doing it, but we don't know that. And if the diversity isn't there to curate, I'm not surprised curation hasn't surfaced diversity. But micro.blog is super young. Maybe it'll be a useful social place, maybe not. For me, it's a pretty good blog host right now.

If you're really interested in owning your own content, it's never been easier to spin up a site. What all these Twitter clones appear to actually be is political statements against the social media machine that miss the point entirely. I can talk to myself anywhere I want for free, what I really want to own is my audience. And that's a much harder problem to solve.

Again, I haven't heard of this place before, but from the article, it appears like they offer that through control of domain names?

Certainly there's an argument about the manually-curated feed, but don't know if that's what you're talking about?

The first point rings very true and it's not the first time this hypocrisy has been pointed out. "People should own their content, but also host on a closed-source site under a subdomain" - yes, I think you can use your own domain but IMHO owning your content without controlling the (hopefully long-living) url is kinda pointless, it's just a bit better than making a copy/paste backup of everything you post on Twitter or Facebook.

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