Maybe I misjudged Micro.blog

Thank you for your replies to my recent post! I must admit I’m rather flattered by the attention you gave it, and your input prompted me to re-visit my thoughts on Micro.blog. You are two of the few people whose authority and expertise in the IndieWeb field can hardly be questioned.

You both speak highly of Manton Reece, and having no personal experience communicating with him I gladly take your word on his good intentions. I may have been unnecessarily harsh and over-suspicious in my post, and I’m ready to apologize if he or anyone on the Micro.blog team took offence.

Still, I must point out that my own experience with Micro.blog—IndieWeb interoperability does not fully support the nice picture you’re painting. I registered with Micro.blog in June 2019 after unsuccessful attempts to reply via webmention to a post syndicated there from a WordPress site that had no webmentions support. If the post mentioned by Ryan is to be trusted, the person I was replying to should have seen my reply in their Micro.blog interface somehow. They confirmed later that it wasn’t the case, and only after I linked my site to a Micro.blog account were they able to see my replies. Maybe this was some bug that has since been fixed (I must admit I’m too lazy to set up another IndieWeb site without a linked Micro.blog account to thoroughly test all this), but even today Micro.blog’s own help pages still link to an earlier post that seems to confirm the silo nature of Micro.blog.

The same post Ryan mentions seems to suggest I must have received several webmentions from this conversation, but I haven’t received a single one, and that conversation only took place a week ago, when all the newest updates regarding webmention support were supposedly already implemented.

The two posts Aaron mentioned seem to imply that it all should work on hosted Micro.blogs, and that a hosted Micro.blog is indeed a first-class IndieWeb citizen. I have no experience with hosted Micro.blogs, other than the abovementioned conversation that didn’t work out to full IndieWeb extent either. From the side of a mere user like myself (as with almost all closed-source projects) it’s really hard to tell which Micro.blog shortcomings are bugs, which are the not-yet-implemented features, and which are design choices. I suppose Ryan is right invoking the Hanlon’s razor, but all my experience with silos still pulls me to more of a careful-paranoid approach.

I wholeheartedly agree that

We also desperately need fully hosted indieweb options like micro.blog as accessible hosting options for less technical people, and we haven’t have any others since hosted Known disappeared.

This is definitely a huge issue in the current state of IndieWeb, and I would really love to have an answer to my non-technical friends’ questions about getting a simple IndieWeb experience. Your replies might have just resurrected my hope in “a hosted Micro.blog” becoming a valid answer at some point in the future, but my current experience with non-hosted Micro.blog doesn’t really let me join Aaron in thinking it’s a valid answer currently. Still, you’re probably right:

We should definitely keep working with him and micro.blog as long as they’re willing!

I wish it was open source… Then again, maybe it’s a good thing it is not. Being open-source didn’t really help Known much, did it?