ℹ️ Why Micro.blog was created

by Manton Reece, creator of Micro.blog

A short story of the history of the web.

Many of you remember the earlier days of the web. If you wanted to write on the internet, you created a web site. You could publish essays, post photos, start weblogs. Because web sites were independent, often with their own personal domain name, there was no one company who could tell authors what to post or which tools to use. If a hosting provider went out of business, or changed their prices or policies, you could simply move your site to another host. It was your content and you owned it.

Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of popular social networking sites. These sites became popular because they made it so easy to connect with friends and start publishing, and because they provided a timeline user experience that made everything easy and fast.

But this simplicity comes at a cost: it’s impossible to move content between these platform silos, ads are everywhere, and if a company goes out of business, all the writing hosted there vanishes from the internet.

I believe that even these short-form posts, no matter if they seem unimportant and fleeting at the time, still have an important place on the open web. That’s why I created Micro.blog.

Instead of yet another social network, Micro.blog is designed to work with the open web. It’s built on RSS and independent microblogs. It’s about pulling together short posts and making them more useful and easier to interact with. It prioritizes both a safe community of microblogs as well as the freedom to post to your own site.

Micro.blog encourages publishing at your own domain name, where you can control your own content, but it still integrates posts into a familiar timeline user interface, with centralized replies, bookmarks, and an open API based on JSON Feed and IndieWeb standards.

You can register for free, bring your own weblog, or let Micro.blog host a microblog for you with a simple paid subscription. Map a custom domain to your site and get your content out whenever you want. I hope you like it.


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