Not gonna lie, I’m enjoying it.
It’s somewhat janky behind the scenes (as expected, it’s a small team of developers after all), but it works pretty great in syndicating posts (or cross-posting) to other networks without requiring plugins or manual modifications. More than that, it exports the whole blog as Markdown (ready to be used with Hugo if you want to) or in HTML (great for archival purposes). I’m seriously thinking about moving my blog here just because of that, as despite really liking the WordPress CMS for blogging, it effectively locks you within its system with an export that seems pretty hard to clean up and use elsewhere, and the IndieWeb plugins don’t make up for it, even if they work great.
(I won’t even touch the whole shenanigans involving the CEO but, suffice it to say, I don’t feel comfortable using a self-hosted open-source project where one person has absolute control and can cut, whenever he wants, people using the .org version from accessing automatic updates and such. This kinda defeats the purpose of the project being open-source to me, to be honest. I prefer to use a private-owned platform with good exports as “escape options” in that case.)
Anyway, I messed around with the default theme here a bit and was able to do almost everything I wanted to, which is way more than what I was able to when trying to use Ghost (before WordPress). Let me be clear, though: Ghost is an awesome platform, but the lack of blog-focused themes (especially ones that didn’t break if the post lacked an image), and the fact they only export a .json file that apparently is also hard to wrangle, kinda pushed me away. I (a non-coder) tried messing around with Ghost’s theming for a while and had a moderate amount of success, but was still pretty unhappy with the result. Here, it was way easier.
I also tried Bear Blog and, to be honest, was having a hard time deciding between it and micro.blog. However, Bear Blog only exports a .csv that, despite still being more useful than Ghost’s .json and WordPress’s .xml, is still not a markdown export, you know. The lack of comments and syndication is also a negative for me. Not that I expect tons of comments or anything, but I had blogs in the past where every once in a while someone commented and it was pretty awesome, especially when they brought new information to the topic at hand.
So, yeah, despite micro.blog not being open-source and being kinda janky, I like the options it gives me (and I also don’t have to spend time maintaining a website or fixing broken stuff in it). This post should show up on Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky, and comments made under it should show up here (not sure this works with Tumblr, though), which is awesome because it puts me in touch with almost all of my friends scattered through different networks.
There were some issues with the WordPress import, so I’ll bring my older posts here manually, little by little. If I like the way stuff looks, I’ll move my “official domain” here. If I don’t, I might try that ClassicPress thing, or finally give up and force myself to learn to code so I can better use a static site generator.