I would say that’s accurate, without stepping too much over Manton’s toes. The idea of Micro.blog’s apps, and in part the service, is to make blogging as easy and casual as posting on social media. The idea being that it’s better to post to your own blog than to centralized platforms. Social media succeeds in part because it makes it easy to post quick, casual content from anywhere and get it out there. That’s the microblogging focus and why micro is in the name.
That said, blogs can do a lot more, and Micro.blog hosted blogs can expand to do very complex stuff blogging on par with that on other platforms. But this problem, “How do I create/write rich, complex long form posts?” is largely supported by another part of the MB ethos-- we should use webstandards and APIs to allow for there to be many different client experiences to work with your own content. This allows Micro.blog the apps to keep its product focus on a missing part of the market-- fast, casual, social style posting. Micro.blog the hosting service and API platform has the focus of “being the place for all your personal blog content”. Apps other than the micro.blog apps can solve the problem of “great long form writing experience” because of the API.
Given that the team is Manton (over all apps and services), Jean (community), and now Vince (part time, little bit of everything technical) there has to be a place to draw the boundaries. The MB choice was that the boundary on the official apps were “great short form posting”, for the API"an uncompromised experience for clients of our official API to expand on what you can do on MB", and for the service, “a fast, powerful, flexible blogging platform with crossposting and replies”.
I write posts like the one you link to occasionally. I use MarsEdit for that personally. Sometimes iAWriter If most of my content was like that and I did not want to use third party native apps, I wouldn’t choose micro.blog as my host because that’s decidedly very far from Micro anything.
Thanks @jsonbecker, that’s a good summary. @khurtwilliams: I would say that Micro.blog’s default apps are optimized for short posts. Posts with a single photo are just much more common in my experience. We want that to be fast and easy.
I love multi-photo posts too, though, and that’s why we built Sunlit for iOS. Sunlit’s posting interface is all about photos + text interspersed. I created this post on my blog in Sunlit and then could tweak it after the basic layout and photos were all there.
It’s difficult to have a single UI that is good at both Twitter/Instagram-style posts and complex blog posts. It’s better to have a variety of apps that are good at what they do. WordPress’s block editor leans toward complex posts. Micro.blog leans to short posts.
Understood. My image editing workflows starts and ends on a Mac (Adobe Lightroom Classic). My writing workflow starts and ends on a Mac. I tend to write photos essays. Lots of text with images in between. I think that would be tedious on micro.blog and is the reason I gave up on the idea of moving entirely to micro.blog.
I wrote this post on my Mac and copied it to micro.blog, then uploaded the images and then edited the draft and painstaking copy/pasted each image link to the right spot. Friction.
I cannot speak highly enough of MarsEdit for writing and posting blog posts on a Mac. It handles both WordPress and Micro.Blog (and probably others), multiple accounts. You can write in HTML or (I think rich text or markdown, I really only write in HTML), upload images via ME, placing them where you like within the text. I’ve been using it for longer than I can remember (15+ years at a guess). Its creator is on Micro.Blog and incredibly responsive to bug reports (if you can find a bug), feature requests etc. I use it currently for one WordPress blog for my local community, my own Micro.Blog and for the @custom Micro.Blog.