Do I really need Mastodon?

Getting started
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I’m a little confused about Micro.Blog + (maybe) Mastodon.

I’m striving for simplicity and it strikes me that perhaps I don’t need Mastodon. As I understand it, I can follow Mastodon users and their posts appear on my timeline, and they can follow me using my micro.blog fediverse address. I think Mastodon user’s replies will show up in micro.blog, and my replies to them will work correctly (i.e. the Mastodon users will see them and an reply there, extending the conversation on micro.blog too)?

So what are the advantages of having a Mastodon account too, other than perhaps discoverability (both finding me, but more importantly my ability to discover others)?

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You don’t. Especially if you want to keep away from typical social media “features” like follower/likes counts, quote/re-tweeting, etc. But yes, discoverability is a big challenge here. But if you follow enough Mastodon people and interact with them, they’ll follow your fediverse-compatible Micro.blog account.

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For me, the chief advantages to using Masto in addition to micro.blog are that with Masto, you can see other users’ boosts, boost other people’s posts, and like other people’s posts.

On Masto, you can also see when other people boost and like your posts, which you can’t do on micro.blog.

One day I hope to be able to slim down to one account, combining Masto and micro.blog, but today is not that day.

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Micro.blog can be used without a Mastodon account if your desire for “Mastodon” is:

  1. People can follow your blog on Mastodon.
  2. People can reply to your blog on Mastodon.
  3. You can reply to those people from Micro.blog
  4. You can follow people’s Mastodon accounts.
  5. You can reply to people who are on Mastodon.

If the feature set of Micro.blog as a social platform matches how you want to interact with social platforms, then the ActivityPub interoperability covered by Micro.blog is all you need.

If you want to have a fully native experience of the Mastodon service, you’re better off using a Mastodon account and cross posting (in addition to making your feed available, IMO).

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