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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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There's very little information on the site at all, about any aspects of the service, and yet they want you to pay to use it.

Nothing about how it works, who runs it, privacy policy, where the data is stored... nothing.

How much does it cost?

$5 per month.

Yet another "$5/month" actually adds up quite quickly.

It's free if you just want to reserve a username and add an RSS feed from your own website - which can be either full articles (which will appear in Micro.Blog as a title & link), or short 280 char posts. You can reply to posts with a free account too.

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EDIT: Probably easier if for the other plans I just post the site's own info:

New Microblog — $5/month

We'll create and host a microblog for you at username.micro.blog or your own domain name. Includes cross-posting, pages, themes, and publishing from the web, iOS, and Mac.

New Blog + Microcast — $10/month

All the features of a hosted microblog plus audio hosting. Upload MP3s via the web or use the companion iPhone app Wavelength to record and edit your own microcast. We'll create a podcast feed for your site.

Enable Cross-posting — $2/month

Already have your own microblog? Add Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and Facebook cross-posting via Micro.blog. Works with any RSS feed.

Give Micro.blog

Invite someone to Micro.blog or pay for their first year of blog hosting.

Doesn't adding an rss feed from own website still cost 2$ pm?

Nope, the $2 is just if you also want it to cross post your RSS out to Twitter, Medium et al. If you only want it to go into Micro.Blog, that's free. The pricing page makes it a bit clearer:

http://help.micro.blog/2018/pricing/

Basics: free

* Your own Micro.blog username.

* Replies to other posts, stored on Micro.blog.

* Add an external blog such as WordPress for posting.

* Use the iOS and Mac apps to browse the timeline or post to supported external blogs.

* No Micro.blog-hosted blog.

* No page at username.micro.blog.

That seems very expensive for what is a very simple site with very low costs. Why not $5/year?

The developer is trying to make it a financially viable project with what is, presumably, a pretty small customer base.

It doesn’t have “likes” or “retweets” and it’s a paid site.

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/

Every social network out there has community managers. The point is, after a certain point, scale outpaces manual moderation. It's easy to keep a small community moderated, scaling that up is the challenge every single website faces.

Yeah. But this is not yet another social network isn't? Very few people would be willing to pay $5 a month compared to the number of people using Facebook or Twitter. Moderating this website is definitely a doable task.

Just the one? Do they sleep? They will need automated systems for continuous spam and abuse monitoring and removal.

There's no global timeline, no likes, no hashtags & no global search (the global Discover feed is human curated about 4x a day), so the only way to see spam posts is if you deliberately follow a spam account.

Spam replies might become an issue, but it hasn't happened yet, and there are already ways to mute or report an account if it does happen.

It’s not really, is it? I think the concept is great, but what’s really needed is ownership and self hosted blogs made easier than they are now.

+ a popular index.

I mean, a centralized blogging service that lets you customise your style sheet a little is basically just MySpace.

Completely agree. The 'indie web' folks have this right.

Perhaps I'm missing some context in the thread, but it seems like many are missing the fact that Micro.blog is actually trying to solve just this--you own your own domain and the data! It is one of the first paid IndieWeb platforms out there that is trying to make it simple for the non-technical user to jump in with both feet. While it may not have _everything_ yet, for a relatively inexpensive hosting fee you've got your own website for long posts, short notes, photos, etc. that is part of an integrated community. If you want to pull up stakes, you can export your data and move your domain and site somewhere else.

It also seems like a major bonus that it also supports new specs like webmention, micropub, microsub, etc.

But you can't run your own server, right?

Owning the data is a very good start, but I don't see that it qualifies as proper indie web, if you're kinda-sorta tied to their service.

All of this is quite aside from the points others have made, that it offers no real solution to Hate and harassment are too common.

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.

I never trust any site that says it wants to eliminate hate and harassment. I've seen this time and time again on forums, social media, BBSes back in the day, etc. It always devolves into French Revolution-style groupthink and the elimination of any person who expresses or supports a contrarian viewpoint.

No thanks, micro.blog. I'm looking for an IPFS-style, uncensorable free speech platform.

Unless it is a P2P distributed network of posts this will have same faith as any other social network.

Maybe you missed some of these details: http://help.micro.blog/2018/twitter-differences/

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