| Type | Social news |
|---|---|
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | micro |
Micro.blog is a microblogging and social networking service created by Manton Reece. [1] It is the first large multi-user social media service to support the Webmention and Micropub standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium, [2] and is part of the Fediverse, supporting ActivityPub.
Micro.blog has features similar to Twitter or Instagram, [3] and provides for posting status updates, articles, photos, short podcasts, and video. [4] [5] Micro.blog also supports long-form blogging. [6] [7]
It was launched on April 24, 2017, after a Kickstarter campaign that reached its funding target within one day. [8] [9] The service was built using Jekyll, but later transitioned to Hugo. [10] Users can post using hosted accounts or import RSS feeds from other self-hosted blogs to syndicate them into the network from other websites they run. Users can also import their posts from Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, and the defunct microblogging service App.net. Some of the Kickstarter Campaign rewards involved access to a book on Indie Microblogging that Reece committed to writing. A full draft of this now exists [11] (as of 2022-12-22) and is publicly available.
The web hosting service DreamHost supported Micro.blog's Kickstarter campaign, [12] and announced their intent to help customers create independent microblogs hosted at DreamHost that are compatible with Micro.blog. [13]
Micro.blog encourages users to publish under their own domain as part of its support for the IndieWeb [14] "POSSE" principles [15] —Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This publishing model involves the end user posting content to their own domain name based site first, then using web standards to syndicate to multiple other social networks and platforms. [16]
Micro.blog supports syndication to Facebook Pages, as well as to Twitter, Facebook, Medium, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Tumblr accounts. [17] [18] It also supports importing from data exported from WordPress, [19] and supports cross-posting from Instagram to micro.blog. [20]
Micro.blog eschews many of the common features of Twitter and other microblogging platforms. For example, Micro.blog does not show follower counts, [21] [14] does not have hashtags, [22] [23] [5] [24] public likes [21] [14] or trending topics, [23] does not have equivalents of retweeting [21] [23] [25] [14] or quote tweeting, does not algorithmically recommend users and like Mastodon, and does not have full-text search as part of the service [24] or client apps. Reece says in his book: "It mirrors a philosophy we have with Micro.blog to launch without follower counts or public likes." [21]
Unusually, for a social network, Micro.blog's first full time employee was a Community Manager, Jean Macdonald, [1] who—among other things—produces a hand-curated "Discover" section on Micro.blog.
Reece explains some of this in his book, saying: "I think more social networks should do things that don’t scale, prioritizing safety over profit. For example, in Micro.blog the featured posts in Discover are curated by humans instead of algorithms." [25]
He also writes:
Micro.blog doesn't make it particularly easy to discover new users, and posts don't spread virally. While some might view this as a weakness, and it does mean we grow more slowly than other social networks, this is by design. No retweets, no trending hashtags, no unlimited global search, and no algorithmic recommended users.
Micro.blog limits search and avoids public likes and reposts so that the snowball starts small and stays small. Instead of going viral and becoming a major problem, fake accounts can be spotted early and shut down if necessary. [25]
Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, founded a month before the latter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year. It was purchased by Google on October 9, 2007.
HCL Connections is a Web 2.0 enterprise social software application developed originally by IBM and acquired by HCL Technologies in July 2019. Connections is an enterprise-collaboration platform which aims to helps teams work more efficiently. Connections is part of HCL collaboration suite which also includes Notes / Domino, Sametime, Portal and Connections.
Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, Koo, and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
Twitterrific was a macOS and iOS client for the social networking site Twitter created by The Iconfactory and was the first Twitter desktop client to come to macOS. It lets users view "tweets" or micro-blog posts on the Twitter website in real time as well as publish their own. Twitterrific is closed source software.
GNU social is a free and open source software microblogging server written in PHP that implements the OStatus standard for interoperation between installations. While offering functionality similar to Twitter, GNU social seeks to provide the potential for open, inter-service, and distributed communications between microblogging communities. Enterprises and individuals can install and control their own services and data.
Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates through short messages or links, which can be up to 360 text characters in length.
The tables below compare general and technical information for some notable active microblogging services, and also social network services that have status updates.
Tencent Weibo was a Chinese microblogging (weibo) website launched by Tencent in April 2010, and was shut down on September 28, 2020. Users could broadcast a message including 140 Chinese characters at most through the web, SMS or smartphone.
Diaspora is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. It consists of a group of independently owned nodes which interoperate to form the network. The social network is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it from being subject to corporate take-overs or advertising. According to its developer, "our distributed design means no big corporation will ever control Diaspora."
Reblogging is the mechanism in blogging which allows users to repost the content of another user's post with an indication that the source of the post is another user.
OStatus is an open standard for federated microblogging, allowing users on one website to send and receive status updates with users on another website. The standard describes how a suite of open protocols, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to route status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.
A brand page, in online social networking parlance, is a profile on a social networking website which is considered distinct from an actual user profile in that it is created and managed by at least one other registered user as a representation of a non-personal online identity. This feature is most used to represent the brands of organizations associated with, properties owned by, or general interests favored by a user of the hosting network.
Friendica is a free and open-source software distributed social network. It forms one part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers.
Twister is a decentralised, experimental peer-to-peer microblogging program. The system uses end-to-end encryption to safeguard communications. It is based on both BitTorrent- and Bitcoin-like protocols and has been likened to a distributed version of Twitter.
IndieWeb is a community of people building software to enable personal, independently hosted websites to independently maintain their social data on their own web domains rather than on large, centralized social networking services. First developed at a series of conferences known as IndieWebCamp by Tantek Çelik, Amber Case, Aaron Parecki, Crystal Beasley and Kevin Marks, it uses a suite of tools including Webmention and microformats in order to decentralize social communication and distribution of content.
Mastodon is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
The fediverse is an ensemble of social networks, which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. ActivityPub, a W3C standard, is the most widely used protocol that powers the fediverse. Users on different websites can send and receive updates from others across the network. Noted fediverse platforms include Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, and Pixelfed.
ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content.
IndieAuth is an open standard decentralized authentication protocol that uses OAuth 2.0 and enables services to verify the identity of a user represented by a URL, as well as to obtain an access token, that can be used to access resources under the control of the user.
JSON Feed is a Web feed file format for Web syndication in JSON instead of XML as used by RSS and Atom.
In 2017, Manton Reece, an IndieWeb developer based in Austin, Texas, launched a Kickstarter for a service called Micro.blog. On its surface, Micro.blog looks a lot like Twitter or Instagram; you can follow users and see their posts sorted into a time line, and, if you like a post, you can send a reply that everyone can see. When I checked Micro.blog's public time line recently, the top post was a picture of a blooming dogwood tree, with the caption "Spring is coming!" Even as it offers a familiar interface, though, everyone posting to Micro.blog does so on his or her own domain hosted on Micro.blog's server or on their own personal server. Reece's software acts as an aggregator, facilitating a sense of community and gathering users' content so that it can be seen on a single screen. Users own what they write and can do whatever they want with it—including post it, simultaneously, to other competing aggregators. IndieWeb developers argue that this system—which they call posse, for "publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere"—encourages competition and innovation while allowing users to vote with their feet. If Reece were to begin aggressively harvesting user data, or if another service were to start offering richer features, users could shift their attention from one aggregator to another with little effort. They wouldn't be trapped on a platform that owns everything they've written and is doing everything it can to exploit their data and attention.