Why Micro.Blog

Before I settled on Micro.Blog, here is what I considered:

Writing my Own - many developers build to-do list apps. I build blogging apps. There is a flow and experience I would like to get to. I may revisit the idea if I can get myself back into consistently writing. However, there are plenty of other things I want to build. The features I would like to be different in Micro.Blog are not my obstacle.

**blogstatic **- Looks promising but a bit overly simple for my goals. The inability to write posts without titles and no markdown support were dealbreakers. Built-in newsletters are great, and it does have a very clean interface. If you like WYSIWYG writing, you may want to check it out. The other gotcha is the $19/year price point. It feels a bit unsustainable.

WordPress - never the answer for me.

Static sites generator - Choose your favorite (mine is Eleventy , and I want to spend some time with Bridgetown. For longer-form writing with lots of images/charts/etc, this is where I would go. However, for short, consistent writing, it has become an obstacle.

Tumblr - I thought this was where I was going to go. From afar, it has the features I want, but it feels like a hot mess these days, and the ads are too in your face. I am OK paying to remove the ads, but as far as I can tell, I can only stop myself from seeing ads and only some people visiting my site. If you need a sizeable built-in community to keep you writing, check them out.

Mastodon is certainly more friendly today than Twitter, but it still suffers from your content being completely siloed in someone else’s content world. I am also concerned about the long time viability of each community. Twitter has a lousy business model today. Thousands of mini-Twitters are not going to do any better. Syncing content to Mastodon feels like the better long term answer than just writing there.

Post.news looks interesting, but I do not see how this is any different long term than Twitter/etc.

On to why Micro.Blog

1. You can write short or long pieces. Titles are optional, and posts can be syndicated to Twitter and Mastodon. Even better, they look like Tweets if they are small enough.

2. Clean and straightforward interface with native tools for both iOS and OS X. Full markdown support, my URL, and more.

3. If, for some reason, Micro.Blog goes away; it looks like with some minor tinkering, I could be up and running on Hugo

4. It is not free but not overly expensive. I went with the $ 10-a-month plan. I doubt I need much from podcasting or videos, but it is nice to have them and be able to support the tools I plan on using.