Please can the feature bloat stop? Most of them don’t even seem to be documented other than on the Timeline, which I hardly visit. Also, very Mac-centric. I don’t use a Mac, too expensive for my taste. Where is the time of least viable product, where the iPhone was not only the minimum requirement, but also the maximum, to avoid clutter and complexity.
One person’s “featuritis” could be ten other people’s “must have”. Most of the recent additions have been fairly modest tweaks to interface and how parts of Micro.blog work that seem to have largely come from support issues (like a better delete posts setup) and challenges (continued complaints about the difficulty of discovering other users) without really changing much or anything about the hosted blog experience (which seems to be primarily what you’re using it for?).
Also, just scanning the News blog (where there is more of a changelog if you care) doesn’t to support the notion that most changes have been to the Mac app or Mac-centric. In order, the lasts 20 or so items going back 2 ish weeks.
- web
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- iOS
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- Mac
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I suppose so. The impression is, though, that if you aren’t into new features, soon you can’t grasp what you’re supposed to do with the presented user interface. Case in point, there’s no edit button. How am I supposed to know what to do? Yes, I can ask around what to do, but why not just leave it there? It wasn’t hurting anyone. It feels like someone likes bells and whistles, adding as much of them as possible, and those who are into shiny things give big thumbs up, while the “norms” feel this place doesn’t feel like home, too much change, not enough stability.
I would not say that the consensus in support and elsewhere has been that Micro.blog changes too much. If anything, I see tons of feature requests that are ignored. To each his own– there are basically daily requests to always show categories and crossposting options, for example, that Manton has ignored and lost customers over, refusing to even make that a setting.
On balance, I find that my personal experience with the Micro.blog service and app has changed very little in the last few years.
I would caution against defining your personal experience as being the “norm”.
Thanks y’all, I’m definitely mindful of this. Micro.blog does way more than people expect, and being able to balance that while not letting the UI feel bloated is always a challenge. I think for the most part we’ve done okay with that. The more advanced features are hidden away, sometimes so subtle that people never discover them!
As an example, a few days ago someone tried Micro.blog and thought that it could not create long-form blog posts, so they decided it wasn’t for them and looked elsewhere. This is a case where by trying to be less in your face (e.g. “click here to make a long blog post”) it actually backfired.
As for the edit button… I’m open to adding it back. I removed it last week and instead made it so that you can just click anywhere in the post text to edit it, like you’re clicking on the “row” that is the post. This makes it consistent with the Notes list too. Whenever two parts of the platform can be consistent, I think it helps usability overall. Give it a couple days and see if you like it, and if not, let me know.
@manton Well, almost anywhere. 
You’ll have to watch out for hyperlinks in the posts, since clicking them will take you away from Micro.blog.
Not that it’s ever happened to me… I’d never make a mistake like that. 
There are a few web editor improvements that make it more visually accessible but IMO less desirable:
I don’t prefer the removal of the edit button because it 1) makes it less intuitive from an accessibility standpoint 2) makes highlighting text impossible. 3) I use mobile web editor for a bunch, and prefer not to have accidental edit taps when scrolling. 4) I didn’t prefer the notes UI
Other things in the web editor, which I’ve mentioned: the inability to edit where image code goes in a post, when one in the Mac and Mobile apps.
That said, I don’t think there is bloat: I have liked most of the new features. The web editor is probably my least favorite because of the bugs that have shown up over the last year, thankfully mostly resolved (thanks, Manton!)
Most importantly, I do not like AI bloat, so I appreciate the ability given to us to switch it off, which I have.
Maybe we should disable hyperlinks on that page. I can see this being annoying if there are lots of links.
Great point about selecting text, @letters. Thank you.
I think I’m going to add the Edit button back for now. I don’t want this to be frustrating for people. I will remove it again in the future after there has been enough time to make sure text clicking and selection works perfectly.
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