Replied to Walled gardens in disguise by Felix Pleşoianu (Felix Rambles)

At the end of June, I subscribed to micro.blog with some amount of hope. Nine weeks later, I canceled my account. Yeah, isn't that public timeline gorgeous? All pretty photos and thoughtful posts. Surprise! It's heavily curated. To the point of being suffocating in fact. You'll never going to see th...

Wow! I feel like Felix somehow missed and misunderstands a lot of the value of micro.blog and how it really works. Perhaps they haven’t read the documentation or explored it enough?

This reads like Felix thinks the discover feed is the entire point of the platform and not simply a tangential discovery mechanism for new users. It feels like they didn’t realize they could subscribe to anyone they wanted and that feed is the one that most people find more valuable and use regularly.

It also reads like they weren’t getting any interaction at all in terms of replies/comments. Not sure if they had a paid account (and were just using micro.blog) or if they’re using their own site and just don’t have webmentions which means they have to manually go to find interactions.

On the other hand, micro.blog is doing a tremendous amount compared to simple silos like Twitter, Facebook, and Mastodon, so I’m not surprised that some people can misconstrue what is going on or even why. A lot of how you use it depends on what resources you have when you come to it. If anything though, micro.blog is the last thing out there that’s a walled garden in the social space.