I’m supporting Micro.blog 1/9/17

Manton Reece, a prominent developer and podcaster in the Apple community, has a Kickstarter project up for a new venture called Micro.blog. The idea is pretty simple, it’s a distributed version of Twitter. Instead of your content being stuck on Twitter’s servers, you have the opportunity to own and host your own posts.

In Reece’s own words, from the Kickstarter page:

I want to encourage more independent writing. To do that, we need better tools that embrace microblogs and the advantages of the open web. We need to learn from the success and user experience of social networking, but applied to the full scope of the web.

I first set out to build a new service just for microblogs. It has a timeline experience like a social network, with replies and favorites, but it’s based on RSS, with the main posts pulled from independent sites.

If you don’t have a microblog yet, there’s a full publishing interface with Markdown support and a native iPhone app.

With services like Medium and Twitter falling on tough times, it’s becoming clear that our writing should be ours and not in danger of disappearing if a company has a bad year financially. That’s why I’ve backed Micro.blog and I look forward to seeing how it evolves in the months ahead.