On Micro.blog, you control your own content.
Tweeting is one form of microblogging. But when you use Twitter, your content stays at Twitter. At Micro.blog, you can write short posts that appear in the Micro.blog timeline, as well as on your own blog that you control.
That’s the most important thing to understand about Micro.blog. It is a bit like Twitter, in that you can share short thoughts, links, and photos with those who follow you, but it also offers tools and hosting similar to WordPress.
(Note: Micro.blog makes it easy to post and share short content, but you can also use it for longer blog posts.)
Micro.blog is serious about preventing abuse and harassment.
The next most important thing to understand about Micro.blog is that the platform was designed, from the beginning, to prevent abuse and harassment. Your microblog is your own, where you are free to write about whatever you want, but we protect the timeline, where you can @-reply others, through a variety of tools and curation. We have community guidelines that are enforced.
You can cross-post from Micro.blog to Twitter.
You can choose to have all your Micro.blog posts appear in your Twitter timeline via cross-posting, or you can selectively post only some of them.
Micro.blog is not an attempt to duplicate or replace Twitter.
Because our focus is on supporting thoughtful content and avoiding the pitfalls of social networks, we don’t have features you are familiar with from Twitter.
- We don’t reveal followers or follower counts. We do reveal who you are following. It helps other microbloggers find new people to follow.
- We don’t have the equivalent of retweets or likes. If you like something and want the author to know it, you can reply. We believe this encourages more thoughtful sharing, and puts the focus on the writing, not whether someone or something is popular.
- We don’t have #hashtag support. We do have several topics, such as books, music, podcasts, and hobbies that can be followed through emoji tags in the Discover section.
As Micro.blog evolves, we may add features like these. We consider new features very carefully, and we err on the side of not adding them until we are confident they won’t have an unintended undesirable effect on the community.
Micro.blog doesn’t have a tool for automatically following people you already follow on Twitter. We do have a Discover tab, which is a curated version of the general timeline, so you can find new people to follow. You can search for users by name and handle. You can also view the lists of people that other microbloggers are following. Once a week, we have Micro Monday (our answer to Follow Friday), where users recommend one person to follow.
If you want to hear more about Micro.blog and get an idea of how it’s working, check out the Micro Monday microcast, a short weekly interview with members of the Micro.blog community. We’ve heard from many users that Micro.blog reminds them of the early days of Twitter, with its atmosphere of thoughtfully sharing stories, recommendations, news, links and ideas among people. (We share a lot of photos too: pets, children, landscapes, and, of course, food.)