CoThinking
Why Am I Migrating to Micro.blog
Feb 04, 2024
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This is my 7th blog migration now—away from WordPress, Obsidian Publish, Super.so, Ghost, Substack & Hugo.
Admittedly, it’s a form of procrastination. Spending more time messing around with websites means less time producing content.
But I don’t think it’s time wasted. I’ve learned a lot about web hosting and publishing with each content migration, and I believe that Micro.blog is just one part of a long journey ahead.
Motive
- I love sharing, but I dislike social media
Micro.blog is part of the IndieWeb & Fediverse movement, where the key idea is to have content ownership in the hands of users.
By committing to social media platforms, I’ll lock myself into walled gardens where content is difficult to migrate and control.
Moreover, it creates bad incentives—such as paying for exposure, preying on people’s insecurities, and developing addictive time-sink features.
- Pure blogging isn’t right for me either.
The 6 blogging platforms mentioned above have one big challenge— Reach.
Despite hosting content on my own domain, I find myself still sharing them on platforms like LinkedIn & Facebook to get some semblance of visitor traction.
Solutions like RSS feeds & email subscriptions aim to help with that, but the “marketing” aspect of publishing can’t be ignored.
Hence, I find myself maintaining several platforms instead of one, while facing the same aforementioned walled garden problems.
How I Came Across Micro.Blog
I first heard of webmentions while configuring the Anubis Theme for Hugo.
I tend to remove unwanted features from my themes to make my site more efficient. But learning about webmentions led me down a deep rabbit hole of IndieAuth, Micropub, Brid.gy, and a whole ecosystem of IndieWeb tools.
Getting my website “Indiefied” wasn’t difficult, and there are many resources out there that have helped. But I tried hard to make Micropub work on my site, but I can’t seem to get it right.
My site passed many of the micropub.rocks tests, but I can’t connect it to iA writer for easy content publishing.
Not to mention, I dislike how fragile everything was. My site was held up by a ton of providers like GitHub, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Webmentions.io, Brid.gy, IndieAuth…
Knowing how each of these services works with each other is amazing, but they represent points of failure that need to be tackled in the future. I foresee myself spending hours troubleshooting issues rather than learning new things.
Micro.blog was brought up early on during my research into the IndieWeb. I’ve held off making a $5/month subscription because hosting my Hugo was free.
But a deck of cards is the only thing keeping my Hugo website afloat. The idea that Micro.Blog is also powered by Hugo, and it has all the IndieWeb configuration sorted (with a few minor tweaks), plus I don’t need to worry about hosting issues—I think it’s worth a shot.
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