my experience with micro.one

06 Jan, 2025

Seeing micro.one mentioned on Bearblog made me curious. I even watched the video. I wasn’t too clear on what it all entails yet, but making an account and looking inside is free. So I thought, why not try it out. To be clear, I don’t think anything could pull me away from Bearblog, this would just be to post links to my posts, have a nicer image upload, and possibly give people the option to reply.

So I did that. Kept getting hounded by the site that my requested username had invalid characters but wouldn’t tell me which ones are allowed or not. Would be helpful, but no big issue, I guess.

I go into my settings. I’m a little horrified about how Fedi it really is; not that it wasn’t obvious in hindsight, but I guess it truly hits me there. Who even sees my posts? Only people on that platform? Anyone/anything using ActivityPub? I don’t really know, because I didn’t have to worry about that before.

I try to upload an icon. They use Gravatar by default, it says. I only heard about that once and don’t really get what it is. What consequence does that have for me as a user now? Does that mean it’s on Gravatar servers or micro.one’s? What does Gravatar do with the image? What info do they submit to Gravatar? Do I have to agree somewhere to Gravatar’s TOS? I don’t know, it’s not really made clear to me at first. Only by digging into the Privacy Policy I get that they check for Gravatar first to see if I already have one and then import one if I don’t upload my own. Fine with me, I wish it was more obvious though.

In my settings, I immediately disable the AI bullshit that is, by default, enabled. I start asking myself if I even want to be on a platform that loves to autogenerate summaries¹and auto-opts you into it upon account creation.

I see I allegedly have two blogs. The one I signed up for, and a separate preview version. I don’t know what that’s for and why it’s listed separately. I delete it, but it reappears, so I guess it’s important and mandatory.

I also apparently already follow one account. It’s their news account. Not a big fan of auto-follows, but that’s fine I guess. I unfollow.

I’m informed that I can unlock pins by achieving milestones on Micro.blog. I can’t find an explanation what pins are. This by itself of course isn’t bad, but gamification and milestones encouraged by platforms always evoke a certain… feeling in me. Bad connotations, I guess.

I click on the Help Center link. Instead of getting directly to the docs, I’m just in the Discourse forum. From there, I need to click to get to the docs. This is just a matter of personal taste, but I don’t think documentation can be done well on a Discourse forum. It reads like a messy Subreddit sidebar. I would prefer dedicated documentation services or hosting your own in a better style.

Also, obviously, they’re the Micro.blog Help Docs. If you sign up for Micro.one without knowing or using the other, it can be confusing. I obviously heard of and saw Micro.blog before, but I signed up via Micro.one, and it would be nice if the difference or overlaps would be better explained. If it’s just a payment tier, why is it advertised like a more separate product with its own URL, and if it isn’t, why is some of it treating it like just a payment tier? Especially because accessing the Help Center while being in Micro.one will just give me everything about Micro.blog. What of all this applies to my account if it’s a Micro.one kind of account? Difficult for a new user to know.

For me right now, it’s a meh experience, but could be right up someone else’s alley. I’m feeling a bit dreadful about it. I’m still giving it a chance for now, but the onboarding is a little messy for me. Maybe I’m just not built for this stuff anymore; seems like anything close to social media and feeds and AI and gamification makes my alarm bells ring.

Maybe this experience report is helpful to someone that’s also curious. Hell, maybe the view of a newbie helps working on some of this stuff, because I completely get becoming blind to certain things when you spend months or years developing something.

Update: Ended up deleting my account again. Not for me. And congrats on hitting my personal pet peeve too: making account deletion difficult to find and not including it in the Account page. Once you find it in the docs (of course, faaar far down and away from all categories it should be under) they’re making people log in again and then you’re on the feed again and not the deletion page, so you have to fiddle around with that until you can finally delete. I don’t trust when services obfuscate account deletion.

Edit from end of January: Also check out this and this

Published 06 Jan, 2025

#2025 #social media