Feature suggestion: Add "Follow button" on the profile view for logged out users!

The profile view of a micro.blog user doesn’t show the “Follow” button for users who don’t have an account or aren’t logged in! Without that, it’s not apparent to people that they need to sign up on micro.blog to follow the user. Adding a follow button which leads to the sign up page would be intuitive. I believe this is just an oversight and hope it’s fixed soon!

Thanks for the feedback! That’s a good point.

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Glad you liked it! Further, is it possible that the way “Follow” button works on micro.blog/username also works on the hosted micro.blog directly i.e. the user doesn’t need to click “Follow on micro.blog” to go to the profile page and then click Follow again. I suppose this would be convenient for both signed in and signed out users.

We could do that, although I try to limit the places that a blog connects to Micro.blog so that the blog remains mostly standalone without dependencies on the rest of the Micro.blog platform. Maybe it’s an option, though.

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A related issue is this section of micro.blog’s Marfa and I think pretty much every theme in some form. To a typical non-techie person, visiting a hosted micro.blog microblog for the first time, these 3 options in the footer don’t make much sense. JSON is jargon to them, so is RSS, and so is micro.blog. Even if they do click said links, JSON and RSS would do nothing on their system. So what we need is something much more apparent, like a “Follow”, which could, say, display these options but with some words attached to them like “Subscribe via RSS”

Yeah, this is the age-old problem with RSS and something I’d love to improve. One thing we’ve done on our podcast is create a separate “Subscribe” page that can spell things out a little more, although that’s easier because some apps support direct subscribe links: Micro Monday - Subscribe

Hi Manton, any plans to fix this? Most people I shared my microblog with are confused about how to follow. Most people who don’t have a micro.blog account, which are a majority, aren’t able to understand that they need to click “Sign in” on a profile page to start following. Here’s one example of a friend asking just today:

Considering that a micro.blog profile page is a big entry point for people who aren’t on the platform yet, making it intuitive to sign up would help a lot. Conversely, it not being obvious to sign up is deterring people away IMO.

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this is probably the single UX change M.b could make to increase signups whilst still preserving their values

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