Manton Reece, the founder of Micro.blog, (a microblogging and non-micro-blogging platform) has had two recent posts in which he gently laments how misunderstood his platform is.
This post was first (so short I'll include it all
Odd dream last night. I wrote an April Fool’s press release for Micro.blog announcing full-length blog posts, note taking, audio transcripts, newsletters, reading goals, and bookmarks… Everyone was like “Ha, would be funny if Micro.blog did all of that” and I was like “No, it does, that’s the joke.”
— Manton Reece, 2024-10-08
He followed this up with a longer post, Microblogging, a fable about people misunderstanding Micro.blog. This includes:
… it points to how misunderstood Micro.blog is. The point is not to replace Twitter, but to have a space that is rooted in the open web, with just the right balance between blogging at your own domain name and being social with others. Everything we do is to encourage both microblogging and long-form writing to be interwoven, so you can move between different formats without losing the good parts about having your own blog.
— Manton Reece, Microblogging, a fable
I've followed Manton for years, and listened to his podcast, Core Intuition, with his cohost Daniel "Punkass" Jalkut, a Mac and iOS app developer (Red Sweater) with apps like MarsEdit (a cross-platform blog editor on Mac), Black Ink (a crossword app) and others. Manton is strongly committed to the Indie Web, and to the Fediverse (of which Micro.blog is a part) and has thought very deeply about how to build a vibrant, non-toxic online community, as laid out in his available-but-as-yet-not-quite-published book Indie Microblogging (which can be read for free online). Although he's a software developer, his thinking around the web and his curation of a community are probably at least as noteworthy as his software. Possibly more-so.
Here's why I think Micro.blog is misunderstood, and specifically, that people think it just another Twitter-like service, akin to Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, and only supports short posts.
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The name. Microblogging is generally used to mean posting Twitter-like short posts ("status updates"). Here's the Wikipedia entry (which I have contributed to, but have not subverted).
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The interface. Manton's company produces iOS, Mac and Android clients for micro.blog. They all look very much like Twitter and Mastodon clients. You would not guess, glancing at them, that they support long-form posts.
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Manton is fairly well known for (historically) writing software and services for Twitter (e.g. TweetMarker) and for quitting Twitter over a decade ago to work on Micro.blog as a Twitter alternative.
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Micro.blog is also fairly well known for being part of the Fediverse. Although the fediverse can and does support long-form blog posts, and both Tumblr and Wordpress have talked about rolling out support for it, the first and best known member of the Fediverse is Mastodon, a conventional "microblogging" (short post) service. The next two that came along were Bluesky (a microblogging / short post service) and Threads (a microblogging / short post service from Facebook).
It may be that I'm unusually stupid and unusually influence by names, but despite following and Manton, listening to his podcast, and using Micro.blog's APIs to post to it directly from Python, I still didn't really understand that Micro.blog supports full blogging until I asked him directly and he confirmed that it did. Although the front page of Micro.blog today does focus fairly strongly on non-micro-blogging, I think the name, combined with the other factors above, make it quite hard for people to realise that it is a full blogging platform as well as a short-posting service.
So what should Manton do? #
In the past, I thought Manton should rename Micro.blog, not because the name is bad—it's a great name for a *micro-*blogging service—but because its a terrible name for a service that doesn't really want to be thought of as (and really isn't) just a microblogging service. (Ironically, I very rarely think companies should rebrand except when the brand is so severely tarnished that it can't be retrieved.)
But none of this matters because Manton is not going to rename it, and at this point, he probably shouldn't.
So what should Manton do? #
I think Manton should create a second brand---a long-form blogging brand. The service and pricing it offers could be identical to Micro.blog, and even the landing page could be almost the same. The only things that would absolutely have to change would be the name, the symbol and the URL. It also wouldn't need to disguise the fact that it's just a different brand. It could say somewhere reasonably prominent that it's a version of Micro.blog that emphasizes its long-form blogging capabilities. But to work, it would need to be more than just a redirect. It would need to provide this alternative branding at least somewhat consistently for users who sign up to it, and it would need to be marketed as its own thing. There are no shortcuts.
This strategy is not uncommon, but it is mostly used by large, dominant companies trying to expand their market share to people who have defined themselves against the original brand. Unilever and their ilk know that they can achieve higher market dominance by doing the work of creating multiple brands so people can feel they are making a different choice even when they really are not. But that wouldn't be the purpose here. The purpose would just be to get people into Micro.blog who would otherwise mistakenly assume that Micro.blog was for, you know, microblogging (only)
The name could be almost anything that doesn't include "micro" or anything else suggesting "small" or microblogging. LongFormBlog (longform.blog?) or VenusBlog or WeblogsЯUs or IndieBlogs or even Macro.blog (surely not?) might be OK. Manton could do it himself, or get someone else to do it on some suitable terms. (Maybe Daniel would like a blog hosting service for long-form blogs. How does MarsBlog sound? Or indeed, BlackInkBlog. Or BlogInk? Or BlogInk Inc?)
It's always expensive to launch a new brand, but creating a new brand on top of working software and hosting is significantly less work than building everything from scratch, as Manton has already done.
Here endeth the unsolicited advice.