Sticking to the mission statement

“I won’t look too far ahead
It’s too much for me to take
But break it down to this next breath
This next step
This next choice is one that I can make.” — The Next Right Thing

When someone new joins Micro.blog, they have a bunch of ideas for making it better. Not everyone agrees on which ideas are the ones to add first, because everyone naturally has different priorities. We could easily get distracted trying to solve many problems, implement all the features, and it would dilute everything that this book has been about.

We could get lost in the weeds of feature requests, forgetting why we built Micro.blog. We could get pulled down a rabbit hole with the wrong optimizations, not knowing which next bug fix moves us closer to our goal.

Micro.blog’s goal is to encourage more people to post to their own blogs instead of only on big social media sites, and to have a great community where conversations can happen from those posts. The goal is not to completely replace any specific social network, but instead to help the future be a little more decentralized, with more variety and independence in the web. Important changes are possible if we don’t concentrate so much of the web’s content only on Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve been happy to see so many people who have found that Micro.blog does supplement existing social media so well that they can spend more time blogging, browsing the Micro.blog timeline, and participating in conversations. Other folks will jump in to Micro.blog from time to time, but might have most of their attention elsewhere, and that’s fine too.

Facebook’s mission is different. They want to connect everyone in the world. Billions of people writing posts and sharing photos on a single domain name. Mark Zuckerburg talks about this often, and it’s his goal for Threads as well. Sure, some great things can happen when you do that, to bring people closer together, but also terrible things. The trade-off is not worth it.

Micro.blog leaves certain features out on purpose because adding those features risks changing our mission from what it is to what someone else’s mission is. We do want the community on Micro.blog to keep growing so that it’s more diverse and valuable to people, and for many more people to start new blogs that we can host on our platform. We can do that while staying true to our original goals and not falling for the trap of trying to become the next Facebook or Twitter.

Every new feature should be judged based on whether it makes blogging easier. Does it move us a little closer to independence from the massive platforms, helping smaller blogs flourish? That is indie microblogging.