I enjoyed reading this post by Apple Annie, a reflection on how she uses Mastodon and her difficulties with Micro.blog:
Micro.blog’s community approach is still a struggle for me. As I built my little communities across Mastodon instances I relied on the Local timelines of many instances to get a feel for their users and core conversations.
Reading this I realized that the micro.blog community timeline is just an overly restricted, locked-down and frustrating alternative to the more open experince of a Mastodon instance. I’ve been struggling for awhile to find “my people” on Micro.blog. The best solution is to stop struggling and follow and interact from my social.coop Mastodon account instead. And I follow most of those folks via RSS as well.
Annie describes this experience very well:
I also relied heavily on perusing follower lists of people I found interesting in order to find other interesting accounts to follow. Neither of those things are easy to accomplish on Micro.blog. There is no Local timeline, there is a hand-curated Discover timeline at the whims of one or more people’s preferences, inherent biases (whether conscious or not), and the rules set out by Micro.blog.
Yep. I’m not going to work around Manton’s choices to make discovery here more difficult. What he calls curation I call hostile.
We can search using the Discover timeline and search by emoji (the equivalent of hashtags) but even I find myself not using these emoji with my own content so I’m not sure others are using it with theirs. Finding my community on Micro.blog has been tedious! I sometimes feel I only go there to talk to myself by way of posting to my blog.
Yep. And sidenote. This morning as I browse my list of micro.blog folk via Mastodon that liking their posts is like pointless. I know that because I’m aware of Manton’s choice to not allow likes to display or even quietly notify users. But it irks me to no end that Mastodon users that might follow micro.blog accounts are unaware that their likes are not communicated in any way. It’s one person trying to offer something to another, just a friendly nod, and they have no way of knowing that it will not be received. It just seems like a hostile action, an interruption of communication. It’s a little thing but it pisses me off.