It is a about three months since I started using the miro.blog app it has been really interesting, to me, to use this blog in a slightly different way. I’ve certainly not come to any earth shattering conclusions but am enjoying using the ‘service’ thinking about all sorts of associated things.
I’ve categorised 132 posts as micro here, compared to a handful of standard posts. These posts would have been things I posted to Twitter or Instagram in the past. Now they go to micro.blog/johnjohnston and Twitter.
twitter replacement
Not quite. I’ve posted more things straight to twitter. I’ve enjoyed the 280 character limit on micro.blog but still have used Twitter directly for posting education related things, joining in the #30daytdc ds106 tweetfest in July and replying to tweets. The stuff I’ve sent through micro.blog has been more general internet stuff and thoughts about microblogging/indieweb. I didn’t think about this too much just went with what felt right.
Instagram replacement
The Micro.blog app is a nice simple photo sharer. The fact that the image is posted on your own blog first gives a nice warm indieweb feeling. I’ve still posted the odd picture to instagram mainly for the other nice warm feeling that comes from likes. I get a lot more likes on Instagram than I do on photos posted here and to twitter even though I’ve a much bigger following on Twitter than Instagram. I flirted briefly with Youowngram and a WordPress plugin before that but I’ve not settled on some way of incorporating Instagram into a workflow.
micro.blog community
I’ve enjoyed a bit of interaction on micro.blog itself and the associated slack channel. It is fascinating watching quite a small group of folk figuring out how this new service, or perhaps layer on existing services works for them.
indieweb
I’ve dabbled in indieweb principles for a while on this blog. The theme I use is build for it and I’ve a bunch of plugins that help connect this blog with other services. Using micro.blog has brought me into contact with a lot more indieweb folk and helped my understanding of how things could work. Again it is nice to see others exploring and thinking this out loud.
A useful resource I’ve found is Chris Aldrich’s Opml list of indieweb RSS feeds. I’ve subscribed to this in Inoreader and added as a tab on my River5 setup not only have I seen some familiar faces from the ds106 universe I am getting to read lots of great content about this stuff.
Colin Walker’s blog Social Thoughts is another great resource (part of the indieweb opml too). Colin has been narrating in great detail both technical and philosophical ideas surrounding microblogging and he has a great Microcast too.
I am beginning to see how conversations can cross domains and belong to participants rather than the silos they take place in.
Still tweekin’
I am still trying to more fully understand how this all works and how best to organise things here. I do think it is still fairly complicated to set up a blog following all of the indieweb principles. It also looks like it is getting simpler all the time. The indieweb WordPress plugins are getting regularly updated and the future looks bright.
The whole microblogging experience is leading me to re-thinking my approach to social media, podcasting and blogging and I am really enjoying the process.
I’ve also enjoyed the minor geeky things I’ve been playing with, posting to microblog from drafts on iOS using the workflow app and using AppleScript from a mac. Not big or interesting to many other folk but it is how I get my fun.

The featured image on this post is of a conversation from this morning that took place on microblog and reflected in the comments here.

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