It’s fairly common for the local businesses I follow on Instagram to post there news of sales, or unusual opening hours, or special events. Thanks to Instagram’s refusal to enable a simple chronological feed, its insistence on inscrutable algorithmic presentations, I almost never see these until it’s too late. Sometimes I have shown up at a local food truck only to find it closed — something I would have known about in advance if my Instagram feed were chronological.
Similarly, when I was in London last week, I discovered that some dear friends of mine were also there — but only the day before we were returning to the States, when it was impossible to find time to meet. If their photos had showed up in my feed when they were posted, I would’ve known in plenty of time for us to get together.
I only follow about 150 Instagram accounts, so the algorithm has to work pretty hard to hide such news from me. But it manages. It’s rather astonishing – as is the determination on the part of Instagram (or, I suppose, its parent company Facebook) to make their service as unfriendly to its users as possible. Why in the world would I devote time and energy to a service that doesn’t allow me to see the posts I have explicitly signed up to see? (Yes, you can navigate to each person you follow, one by one, to see if they’ve posted anything lately, but come on.)
Twitter is similarly brain-dead in its preferred user experience, but it has had the advantage of a vibrant network of third-party clients who bring the appearance of Twitter closer to what it ought to be. That’s about to end. Thanks, Twitter!
So I am considering two alternatives. One is to post everything directly to my own turf, which has advantages that I have outlined here on several occasions. However, my blog runs on WordPress, and WordPress is not really designed for the kind of quick, frictionless posting that Instagram and Twitter are both designed for – and while I am a committed believer in blogging as an engine of thinking, I also believe that there’s a real place for the quicker stuff, the daily-diary stuff. So I also have acquired a micro.blog site. Manton Reece has done a fantastic job with micro.blog, whose origins he describes here – it’s very much part of the open-web movement that I have also celebrated here.
So far I have enjoyed micro.blog very much: it has some features Twitter lacks (it supports Markdown, for instance) and anything I post there I can also seamlessly cross-post to Twitter or to my own site – most of my recent tweets have originated as micro.blog posts, though you can’t tell that on Twitter. I am also quite interested in the new support for micro-podcasts.
So while I like the simplicity of keeping everything on my own turf, micro.blog offers other kinds of simplicity that are also very attractive. So I think that’s the way I’ll go. Micro.blog isn’t free – Manton won’t run ads, and hosting costs money. But my posts and photos belong to me, and I can export them to WordPress any time I want; and people are unlikely to pay for the privilege of trolling, especially when they can do that for free on Twitter. So I would encourage you thoughtful people to consider signing up for a micro.blog account.
I signed up just to check it out. Wondering if you anticipated interaction with the micro-blog and how that would work. Or ist just a way to get a glimpse into your micro-thoughts so to speak?
Kevin, I’m certainly open to interaction there, just as I am here — and just the way I used to be on Twitter before it became overrun by hatemongers of all political persuasions. However, micro-blogs are best suited for images and micro-thoughts, and I'm a little concerned that people will try to debate large and complex issues on micro.blog just the way they do on Twitter, and I'm not going to do that under any circumstances.
so is the micro blog going to be a single place where everything you write, publish, muse, etc. will be? So just RSS and sit back?