After singing up for Tumblr and being sad that they’re not yet (and might never) federate with Activitypub I started digging around fedidb.org and found out about micro.blog.
It’s very similar to Tumblr but federates with Mastodon allowing you and Mastodon users to follow each other. You show up as, my example, [email protected] to ActivityPub users (I had to reset my profile after switching to a custom domain so if you check it now there won’t be any posts. Before I reset my blog was federating perfecly). If you make a blog post of 300 characters or less it gets tossed right into your federated profile page with no click through necessary. Longer posts will be shown along with the rest on your blog domain proper (I.E https://micro.blog/jezebelley)
The catch? It’s not free. $5 gets you basic membership which allows blogging and photo uploads. Non animated only. $10 gets you premium which allows for video/gif hosting along with podcast features if you’re so inclined.
You’re also allowed to bring your own domain, in my case https://thefrequency.blog, to host directly to your custom corner of the web. It’s very simple to setup. If you want to go the super easy route you can sign up directly for a domain in the micro.blog settings with a major downside being you get no registration privacy meaning your URL is subject to WHOIS indexing. A major nono for privacy. I recommend name.com registration independent of micro.blog as you can pay $5 for their privacy package and then import it.
Anyway thought I’d give you all a heads-up for a great Tumblr style option right here on the fediverse!
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I suspect this is unlikely to take off with Fediverse enthusiasts unless they open source it, or at least have some way people can self-host it and make a micro blogiverse.
It looks like they had plans to do that at one point. Unclear whether they still plan to do it. Tumblr and blogging honestly seem like the most natural fit for federation. More natural even than Twitter or Reddit. It’d be great to see them do that.
More natural even than Twitter or Reddit
I get twitter, but why reddit?
I really enjoy using lemmy, and couldn’t see a more natural fit for federation. I’ve never been much of a blogger though, so maybe I’m missing something?
Because it kinda harkens back to old school blogs, where each person had their own personal blog that they managed themselves, but they would often be part of a community of like-minded blogs which would link through to each other.
@Zagorath You can achieve pretty much this with Friendica. You can change the theme to whatever your admin installed (check out the themes on social.trom.tf if you want to check something more modern), you can have titled posts, or you can just post a photo with nothing else.
You cannot upload videos or audio fwiw, but you can post them from somewhere else if you create a post with the or tags respectively.
In fact, this is why I joined Friendica. I previously created a blog on WordPress where I wrote about topics regarding International Relations and Geopolitics, but I just couldn’t keep up with it. Now it is pretty much abandoned, albeit also followable in the Fediverse (I enabled AP integration just to play around with it). I find it better to just lurk around through the Fediverse, resharing (Friendica lingo for boosting) stuff here and there, liking, commenting and posting to various groups 😁
And yes, I created the theme I have myself and I like to go through my posts sometimes and add them to specific categories.
That’s interesting, because I thought Friendica was basically federated Facebook. I guess if you took away the ads, Pages, and videos, Facebook wouldn’t be too different from Blogger?
@Zagorath Perhaps? But it would still need to support post (and comment) formatting, titled posts or inline media attachments. Stuff like this you can currently do in Friendica.
You basically can use Friendica easily as a Facebook alternative, but it can do a lot more.
Edit: You can even send a post to someone via email, so you can also use this as a sort of rudimentary newsletter.
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Tumblr has been put into a maintenance mode of sorts this past year with its fediverse integration plans brought into question. It’s still a possibility albeit less so than when it was announced over a year ago.
Also the what and how Tumblr plans on integrating is yet to be divulged. To what extent it’ll federate content with the greater AP network isn’t fully understood.
Micro.blog as a platform is awesome, but I was sort of disheartened to see the users treat it like mastodon, lots of short blurbs and random thoughts. I settled into Write.as, it’s a similar activitypub blogging project, but it’s users seem to lean more into long form content.
All that said, the integration you configured with your domain is super cool, what a great way to setup a simple controlled web presence.
Edit: to clarify nothing wrong with users treating it like mastodon, it’s their space! Just wasn’t what I was personally seeking from a “blog” service
Plume is good also to host a blog: https://joinplu.me/
That’s the beauty of it. You can use it for long form or short form content.
A little tweak to the max post length setting and you can do that with Mastodon too. I wish it was that way by default.
The nice thing about blogging is the customization of your website. Lots of theming and plugin options. It feels more expressive!
Is the paid part just for using their server? Like can I setup my own micro.blog instance and have people sign up for accounts for free and be able to post videos?
I don’t think you can self host unfortunately. You can bring your own domain but they host the data.
I’ve been a user for a while and love the service. I also love the bookshelf feature.
Very cool I didn’t even know about this! I downloaded the bookshelf app and it’s pretty neat! It’s called Epilogue on Android.
I gotta say, interactive social bookreading does sound like it could be kinda neat.
As someone who never used tumbler, why did you like it and what benefits does it have?
I use blogging to post long form content such as creative writing. It’s nice to have your own space/domain.
nice, sounds pretty cool :)
Is Micro.Blog actually federated with ActivityPub? The site says it supports cross-posting to Mastodon, which sounds like it’s more of a post mirroring service than an actually federated instance. I couldn’t find much more clarification on their About page.
Yes it’s federated. I’ve tested it. My profile shows up in mastodon. I’m also following lots of mastodon users with my custom domain and their posts show up on my micro.blog timeline.
Cool, thanks for verifying that!
