While this I somewhat true, I think this underestimates the challenge of onboarding as a new member into the community that interest-based mechanisms for aggregation/search/browsing really helps with. It’s already more complex than it should be to get up and running for people (or so I’ve heard reported). The fact that you also have to bootstrap a community with few means to find someone else makes it really hard to value the community elements of micro.blog.
2 Likes
Numbers will never explode, or even grow significantly, if the discovery is poor. I imported my follows from mastodon when I signed up here, that’s literally the only reason I get any engagement. Had I not done that, I’d be shouting into the void and probably left.
If a “close knit community” is so close knit that it needs to rely on other services to bootstrap discovery, then it’s a silo.
I thought Micro.blog was all about breaking down silos?
3 Likes
To be clear, I think Micro.blog is about hosting a blog on your own site that’s as easy to post to as social media and making it as easy as feasible for people who want to read your blog to do so. I don’t think it’s about breaking down silos from a community stand point, it’s about breaking your content out from proprietary silos making sure you own it and it’s on the free and open web.
1 Like
I agree about the challenge of onboarding people and making it smoother. I was commenting on the discovery aspects around interests. I’m sure if Micro.blog focused on growth at the expense of other elements. There will be enough people to create communities, but how would it affect the overall experience and brand of Micro.blog?
Maybe numbers are never meant to explode, and growing rapidly is not on @manton’s list of priorities. I respect that. Not every movie is made to appeal to all audiences. Also, if you are going to shout into the void and not make an effort to engage with people already in the community, it will not go well.
In my early days of blogging, I wrote in my little corner but spent most of my time reading and commenting on other blogs. Eventually, the people who liked what I said came to my blog to read. If they, too, liked what I wrote, they commented, and so on and so forth. If the intention is to go viral, then maybe Micro.blog is not for you. Plenty of niche sites/forums cater to particular interests. We’ve been “spoiled” by Twitter to expect everyone to be in one place. They don’t have to be.
My intention is definitely not to go viral. I’m very happy with the numbers my site gets. Well, actually, I don’t know what numbers my site gets as I removed analytics a couple years ago. 
Better to say I’m happy with the engagement my site gets.
My focus isn’t on numbers, and it’s great that Manton’s isn’t too. That’s why M.b appealed to me.
You mention engaging with, and building, a community around a blog, but that’s exponentially more difficult if one can’t find like minded folk to engage with.
Instead, you end up having to shout into the void and hope some hears.
Anyway, we’re just saying the same thing over and over in different ways now; I don’t think it’s productive, so I’m gonna bow out of this conversation. 
1 Like
@pratik this proposal has nothing to do with going viral. Let’s not paint as radical simple differing points of view. This is about tools to find people to converse with.
Particularly for this community Pratik which - I agree is fairly close knit if you find yourself in it - I think that some discovery tools provide value for both existing users like me (who is still wondering after a few years if there are people into data or economics, which are not necessarily that niche of topics) and to facilitate newcomers to find - not just an audience, but a micro conversation group. People to follow and to start reading.
Of course there are those who use this as a generalised microblog experience, writing about all our mainstream interests and being interested with the response from those who already follow us. I am also sometimes one of these. It’s a great way to get a peek into what others find interesting. I like it.
But there are also people who want to/also want to talk about specific topics and possibly to discuss them with interested parties. I don’t know some of the people I would be finding with a directory. And yet I want to find more microbloggers interested in same topics as me. I can go and find them on specialised forums, of course, on subreddits, maybe, but I’d like the chance to find each other here. Isn’t this part of building community?
1 Like
I’m not dissing this aspect. I’m simply saying it may not be as quick as some people expect. That’s probably a function of the size of the Micro.blog community. We just may have to blog about those interests first and comment on other people’s interests. Other people may have those interests and may not have yet expressed (blogged about) them.
Again, it comes back to how large Manton envisions this community. This is a small team; if they don’t want to scale up to millions of users, that’s fine. In proportionate terms, I’m sure you will find more people interested in stoicism, fountain pens, and woodworking on Micro.blog than you would on Twitter. You do want to build a community, but it’s fine to emphasize a certain kind of community.
Another thing I wanted to throw in here: we’ve talked about whether it should be easier to discover Mastodon users too, now that you can follow them. We’re taking a small step with that by including Mastodon posts in this month’s photo challenge. I expect Discover will stay primarily focused on the Micro.blog community, but it’s nice to be able to reach other folks too without having to switch platforms or juggle multiple accounts.
What I find important is that users have to do intelligent work to find like-minded users, and not get it delivered to them on a plate (so to speak). The latter can lead to unwanted profiling and social graphing, though that’s still possible through scraping.
You could say, but it’s voluntary, opt-in, so what’s the deal? Peer pressure.
1 Like
I started writing a new post about Discover but then took another look into this one.
It seems like the point I’m raising could fit here - though it should be noted I don’t want to talk about hashtags and search, I feel like these are technical issues that have been addressed here enough. Instead, I want to talk about the “discoverability” of Discover:
I realized something important: Discover on MB is made by humans…! Mention mentions the Discover feature on MB in his latest video, and I was tilting my head to the side and squint with a “really…?” Well, yes, really.
The reason I’m posting this “discovery” here is because I just realized that. I don’t feel there’s enough understanding (at least for me) in terms of how Discover works. Yes, I read the main help topic on it again, and the “How is the Discover timeline curated” does help, but overall it still feels like a mystical phenomenon dealt by the Micro Blog wizards.
How are these decisions made, and how often? Who is on the “wizard council” for Discovery? Why these emojis (categories), and how often are there changes? Why is there a “combo” of featured emojis on the main page but no option to connect some in search (at least as far as I know)?
There are various explanations in various places from various people - and that’s all fine and good! This is a human community where organic decisions are made, not some algorithm with some coded MB secret sauce. Makes sense.
At the same time, Discover is the core of this community, yet it doesn’t feel like it’s sitting in the right place. It’s kind of like having a shopping window into MB, only that shopping window is a bit off to the side, and there’s a curtain covering a portion of it. I see people asking how to “find” people and interests on MB, and the Discover feature is usually mentioned with a generic virtual head nod like the one you get when you ask for directions when you’re lost.
I hope to open this more as a discussion than asking a specific question but asking can be helpful. How can Discover be made more “clear,” and should it be? Do you share similar feelings, or maybe I just need to pay more attention (hey, that’s fine, happens to me all the time)?
1 Like
I’m no expert, but I believe the Discover tab is meant to start conversations, which might help you to discover through dialogue (comments) who you want to follow. Since there isn’t a “social graph” in micro∙blog, the only benefit of following someone is in the content they share. This is why, perhaps, you’d like to know them a little better, what they write about and why.
The person who maintains the Discover tab is @jean and she does it at her own discretion, to improve user interaction and the make user experience as useful as possible. At least, that’s what I’ve understood from what she has written about it.
These are great questions. Thanks y’all.
As we grow, it’s also worth pointing out that we’ve talked a lot about how the current approach to Discover will not scale forever. Eventually I imagine a small group of community folks who help maintain Discover. And as there are many more posts, the community might need to adjust what is included in Discover, and we’ll need better tools.
Discover was meant to be a “snapshot” of what is going on in Micro.blog. Not everything, but a good place to find new people to follow or see a range of topics that people are posting about.
Also: the emoji topics are different. If a post includes an emoji, it’s added to that emoji topic by default. If a post does not belong or is spammy, it can be removed. So as Micro.blog grows, the emoji topics may grow more than the main Discover, and I think that’s fine.
1 Like
Thanks for sharing these thoughts. We are evolving this all the time, though slowly as we do most things, and I appreciate this heads-up that Discover could be better featured and promoted. It’s been a long time since I wrote that post about how we curate Discover, and I’ve had it on my list of things to update, because there are definitely things that have changed since 2019. I’ll move that up on my to-do list. 
2 Likes
@jean I hope this doesn’t come across as too negative. Perhaps there’s something I can do to help? You know I enjoy writing documentations, I can also explain the Discover section better (once I get it myself). Let me know 
Nope, I didn’t read it as negative. It’s a helpful observation. After Micro Camp, I will get to this. I have been rewriting in my head for a while, so it will be nice to get it on “paper”.
Something that gets neglected in the ‘Discover’ debate is probably the size of Micro.blog. Rough estimates done by others put the numbers at below 10K people, and most are active at varying degrees. I rather we not use the DAU and MAU metrics, but it may inform why discovery on Micro.blog is difficult. Perhaps, there aren’t that many people to discover. Also, the community is largely homogenous (in terms of interests).
I’ll return to my original thesis that perhaps trying to find many people based on your existing interests may not work well on Micro.blog, but if you are willing to explore other interests, you may find many people and join their community. But that doesn’t stop you from talking about your existing interests coz you never know who may be out there who hasn’t expressed that interest in the feat that there’s no one out there to talk about it.
1 Like
I didn’t see your reply earlier. This helps putting things in perspective, thanks!
And homogenous in other ways as well.
What evidence/research do you have that proves this to be true?