title: Micro.blog + Mastodon
url: https://www.manton.org/2018/11/07/microblog-mastodon.html
hash_url: ea9495ea06
For some time, we have been considering how we could open up compatibility between Micro.blog and Mastodon. Any feature that could be disruptive needs to be approached carefully. In this post I want to talk about how Micro.blog supports Mastodon, why I think it’s useful, and anticipate some questions that we’ll get about this feature.
We’re launching 2 major features today:
These 2 features are separate and either can be enabled if you want. I have tried to be very deliberate in how ActivityPub is implemented. It is off by default, and to keep the focus on blogging and content ownership, it only works with custom domain names.
One of the most important goals for Micro.blog is to encourage more people to blog. I wrote last year that it’s a success if more people blog. Based on the feedback we’ve received from the Micro.blog community, we are making great progress toward that goal.
We have a lot of things we want to help solve with Micro.blog, but blogging is a core part of the foundation. It’s not about being the most popular social network. It’s not about competing with every platform that launches. It’s much better for the mission of Micro.blog for us to embrace other platforms (as we’ve always done with the IndieWeb) rather than put up walls between APIs.
I recently published a post with 4 parts to how we get out of the current mess with today’s big social networks. I mentioned Mastodon in that post because while I don’t think Mastodon tackles all 4 parts of fixing this, I do think it has a role to play.
More compatibility with Mastodon lets us support the good things that Mastodon has accomplished, while still carrying forward what I think are the unique strengths of Micro.blog. It also opens up the Micro.blog community to interact with a much larger user base.
Sometimes in the Mastodon world your identity can get fragmented across multiple instances. You might start on mastodon.social but then move to another instance, effectively breaking the link between your readers and your posts each time you move, with no way to migrate posts between instances. By supporting Mastodon and ActivityPub in Micro.blog, you can consolidate your identity and posts back to your own blog at your own domain name.
As I wrote earlier this year, content ownership on the web is about domain names:
When you write and post photos at your own domain name, your content can outlive any one blogging platform. This month marked the 16th anniversary of blogging at manton.org, and in that time I’ve switched blogging platforms and hosting providers a few times. The posts and URLs can all be preserved through those changes because it’s my own domain name.
If you already have your blog on Micro.blog at yourdomain.com, we can build on that to allow @you@yourdomain.com or @whatever@micro.domain.com. This focus on domain names will continue to guide new features in Micro.blog.
Let me answer some questions:
This is a really big feature. I hope you enjoy it! This is just the baseline. I’ll be working on bug fixes and improvements to make this integration work as smoothly as possible. If you have any feedback, let me know at help@micro.blog.