(And, the only thing that is a bit sad here in this case is losing the comments in the micro.blog archive. But maybe that’s a different issue and could be solved in a different way. Not sure here.)
Micro.blog I think lets you turn it off. I don’t agree it only makes sense if you turn that off. Give people options.
Just speaking for my particular use case here of course - in this situation, having crossposting to some Mastodon account and the blog itself available via Mastodon seems to make things even worse, because (at least personal experience) especially people new to the show tend to get lost in the amount of Fediverse accounts of some. Knowing these two systems expose different behaviour doesn’t make it much better. Too many accounts with duplicate content, and little options to hide “duplicate” posts (as, with crossposting, Mastodon clients aren’t even able easily to figure out a post is a duplicate as far as I learnt.)
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“If you want to follow my site, you can subscribe to this account. Think of it like a bot that just posts what I have here. If you want to follow me, follow this account. I’ll also post things from my blog there, but that account is me as a participant.”
Even I had issues following through that description, and I’ve been into that kind of tech for ages. Was thinking about “bot” account analogy too, but at least the micro.blog implementation isn’t really one because at least responses are transported. What I found extremely annoying in my Fediverse usage is people having a bunch of different accounts, and at some point you end up following each of them and subsequently end up seeing your timeline flooded with the same content several times because the way it is “copied” or “cloned” between the various platforms isn’t the way ActivityPub systems would require to consider them “duplicates” and hide copies (and not even that does work reliably on all platforms). Plus, in my case: For posting stuff from a long-form blog as part of a stream of short status updates this feels more “common” than for an endless sequence of posts more or less “short”, but maybe (or maybe not) extending Mastodons (500) or Twitters (280 chars) limit. And maybe I’m also preoccupied by my platform of choice - in both Friendica and Hubzilla I can easily follow RSS feeds so “just” having a bot account for content but not responses doesn’t add benefits here.
(Again and always, FWIW. Just my $0.02 on that. I’d generally love to shrink the amount of accounts used on various platforms to a limited handful of tools, and having micro.blog in a place where it would suffice as a fully-fledged Fediverse/Mastodon client definitely would be cool from that perspective. No obligation or “demand” whatsoever, though…)
For me, the purpose of having a an ActivityPub compatible name is to let people who just use Mastodon subscribe to my blog that way, full stop. Lots of people don’t use RSS. Lots of people don’t use Micro.blog. Some of those people use Mastodon. So if you want to follow my site, you can. That’s quite similar to how many autoposting bots (like say an at DaringFireball or at SixColors) on Twitter works. Folks can subscribe to all posts that way if they want.
Having a Mastodon account for myself is more about me participating. That’s where I personally write my replies to Mastodon posts etc from.
I see replies to my micro.blog posts from Mastodon users, so that’s not an issue here.
I may be misunderstanding your point.
I feel this pain. I’ve been active on social media since 2007 and for most of that time I’ve been a promiscuous early adopter of new platforms. That leads me to post my original writing, photos and linkblogging here on micro.blog, and do a lot of reposting and resharing on Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, and in my Mailchimp newsletter. People who only follow me here on micro.blog won’t see that reposted/reshared content, which frustrates me a bit. But I do it that way because that’s how it makes sense to me.
At some point, Tumblr may follow through on its intent to add ActivityPub support, and fix its broken RSS feeds, and then I’ll want to rethink my posting and cross-posting strategy again.
Also: WordPress activated its official ActivityPlug plugin this week. What happens to the Fediverse if and when a site like CNN (which runs WordPress VIP) becomes a full citizen of the Fediverse–posting on the Fediverse rather than to Mastodon?
What happens if and when Threads activates ActivityPub support?
That was my initial instigation for starting this topic. I’m starting to see the wisdom of @jsonbecker and @pratik 's perspective, however.
For a while, I did not cross-post to Mastodon—instead I boosted posts from my micro.blog with my Mastodon account. If this could be automated, I might still be doing that, but the extra step of manually boosting (tiny though that step was) was starting to be a pain in the neck.
Also, and more significantly, I didn’t like that the micro.blog ActivityPub post truncated at 300 characters, while the Mastodon cross-post extended to the full 500 characters of mastodon. On this point, I may add to the feature requests topic.
Thanks for your considerations on that, greatly appreciated. (Trying to re-post the same response right now as apparently I posted this to the wrong end of the thread…?)
I see replies to my micro.blog posts from Mastodon users, so that’s not an issue here.
I may be misunderstanding your point.
Yes, I see that too. That’s why I’m cautious with this comparison for micro.blog, though my point remains: I can do interactions with these posts without knowing the “other end” will technically not receive them.
I feel this pain. I’ve been active on social media since 2007 and for most of that time I’ve been a promiscuous early adopter of new platforms. That leads me to post my original writing, photos and linkblogging here on micro.blog, and do a lot of reposting and resharing on Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, and in my Mailchimp newsletter. People who only follow me here on micro.blog won’t see that reposted/reshared content, which frustrates me a bit. But I do it that way because that’s how it makes sense to me.
I have in the meantime been mostly on other siloed media channels, at least after 2012, and “just” rediscovered right this approach of using things in 2018 when Mastodon gained speed for me - not merely because Mastodon and identity because, at the very least with the unfolding issues (at least talking privacy and all) around Facebook, Twitter, …, it felt more comfortable to have stuff written by “me” in platforms that don’t depend on those entities - even know most of my contacts are somewhere in there. And this is what I currently also (and mainly) use micro.blog for - collecting my own RSS feed and distributing stuff around. Maybe at some point I will shut down my own blog altogether but I’m not there yet for several reasons… . If Tumblr actually does right that and become a full participant in the Fediverse, this could be a game changer at least to me though, and maybe it could, too, break the Fediverse technically, but that’s a different kind of thing I guess.
For a while, I did not cross-post to Mastodon—instead I boosted posts from my micro.blog with my Mastodon account. If this could be automated, I might still be doing that, but the extra step of manually boosting (tiny though that step was) was starting to be a pain in the neck.
I actually moved from Mastodon to Friendica rather early in my process of discovering the Fediverse, which (for right this purpose) has the handy feature of marking other accounts as “remote self” which means your instance automatically will reshare all posts coming from there to your audience as native ActivityPub shares which is really neat also for handling Pixelfed (with which I have similar issues, talking too many accounts at all). What keeps me from using posting directly to Mastodon, actually, indeed also is length limitation: Even on Friendica (or other Mastodon compatible platforms) that don’t come with that 500 chars limit, micro.blog at the moment would post a snippet of the original post and a link back to here, which isn’t needed on there and something I’d probably like to turn on/off at least (in example, for posting to Bluesky this is perfect - in there, I dislike threads and rather would make people aware, at least by now, that it’s not my primary platform and all the “longer” content is to be found elsewhere). Guess a lot of this depends.
FWIW, the official, 1.0 ActivityPub plug in for Wordpress seems to work exactly like Micro.blog does (at least from the description).
This feels right to me, and suggests that MB is much closer to the “right” way for blogging systems to interact with ActivityPub and that it’s mode of interaction will become more common if ActivityPub itself as a standard continues to be a meaningful way that systems interact with each other as opposed to ActivityPub becoming a minor implementation detail of Mastodon and Mastodon-alikes.
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I’m curious how the official WordPress ActivityPub plugin handles untitled posts.
One of the reasons I’m on micro.blog rather than WordPress is because untitled posts seem to be unsupported for WordPress. Sure, you can just leave the title blank, but it seems like you’re running a significant risk of breaking something important. Or at least so it seemed to me when I returned to micro.blog nearly a year ago.
WPTavern answers my question: Your ActivityPub post is customizable by the WordPress admin. It can be the title & link, an excerpt, full content or built using custom code.
And ActivityPub support is coming to WordPress.com soon, according to Automattic.
I’m still hoping for AP support in Tumblr, as promised almost a year ago. I suspect the problem is proving tougher than anticipated (I think I may have heard that last point on Manton’s podcast.)
I full agree with this characterisation. But I will add one more issue. I think there is an assumption that since some of us are paying customers that micro.blog is built for us. My position is that micro.blog - the service - is built for Manton.
@MitchWagner I agree with you fully and support your request.
I don’t remember where I did it, but I found some WordPress code that effectively allowed untitled post. The challenge was “how do I find and edit that posts to update them if I discover errors”.
I was excited to use ActivityPub in my main website (WordPress). However it broke the normal cross-posting to micro.blog and may have created [fantom accounts[(Micro.blog - @khurtwilliams@islandinthenet.com).
I don’t know if I can be constructive in this discussion. I have nothing but complaints.
Yes. But the design in micro.blog seems to be “if you have nothing good to say, STFU”.
I get some of the thoughts behind not wanting likes (and especially like counts) - but what’s the deal with being anti-boosts as well?
I like more or less everything about micro.blog better than Mastodon, so would love to be able to ditch the latter. But I also follow several accounts that boosts tons of interesting stuff. In what way is micro.blog a better product by not showing those posts to me?
On Mastodon, at least some clients, you can turn on/off boosts from individual accounts. I feel this implementation, plus support for likes (without showing counts, just letting the person know) would be a good way for micro.blog to get money from people like me. 
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