Micro.blog has been discussed on HN before and people were, well, skeptical, in part because we've seen App.Net fail at this before -- but also because I think a lot of folks don't quite understand what Micro.blog is doing. (To be fair, I don't think they're particularly good at explaining what they're doing.)
In short form:
Micro.blog is built on IndieWeb principles. You can pay to have your blog hosted on the service (in which case you're paying for a full-featured Hugo-backed blog with themes, pages, full posts, themes, etc., not just a $5/month Twitter clone), but you don't have to -- if you have an existing blog which can meet Micro.blog's requirements (an RSS/Atom/JSON feed, webmentions, etc.), you can connect it up for free and get a Twitter-like timeline. There are no advertisers. Micro.blog doesn't have "better tools for managing readers," per se, but for the time being they're just not about the model of "celebrity tweeter with a million followers."
Micro.blog supports comments and follows, but favorites are private (i.e., mostly just bookmarks) and does not support quotes or reposts. This is by design. In theory IndieWeb principles would allow some or all of this to be added down the road, though.
Because this is, again, really a set of individual blogs doing traditional bloggy things woven together with bloggy standards, there's no way to do locked accounts or private posts.
Micro.blog has a full-time community moderator. No, that's not going to be enough to scale if it gets huge, but for the time being that's not a big deal.
Micro.blog has an API and has mobile clients available for both iOS and Android.
And, last but not least: yes, Micro.blog does support ActivityPub and Mastodon. You can follow Mastodon users on Micro.blog and they can follow you from Mastodon, and replies Just Work (tm).
That looks really nice - thanks for trying to fix this. I really like your straightforward home page.
In case this is useful my concerns would be on seeing your home page - Is this going to go out of business in 2 years and lose my stuff? Do I want to pay to post drivel about my life, and retweet the odd thing?
I don't really use twitter for personal blogging, and don't think I'd pay for it, but it's really interesting to see that there are probably several different audiences using twitter for such different things and your service is aimed at a different segment.
The value in twitter for me is the posts from prominent people in various industries who expose what they're really thinking, their foibles, interests and links to interesting research they've just read. I put up with all the drama, nazis and ads for that alone. I use several accounts to follow/promote different interests, and for some businesses, but wouldn't pay for personal use.
Personally I'm really skeptical of a federated network, it's a solution to a problem I don't have, which introduces other problems, but it's not a blocker, I just think it's a distraction to the real problems of social media.
To clarify, this isn't my service. I'm an early adopter, but it's created by Manton Reece. (Long ago he created a web service called "Tweet Marker" that a lot of third-party Twitter clients used to sync reading positions.)
So I have no idea if it's going to go out of business in two years, although I guess I wouldn't really know that even if it was mine. :) Those are always the big questions -- is the service viable, and are you going to use it enough to make it worth it? (And those two questions are connected, since enough people have to say "yes" to the second question to make a "yes" to the first question possible.)
I still use Twitter, and I use Mastodon, too, although I'm less sanguine about Mastodon than most of its proponents seem to be.
Micro.blog has been discussed on HN before and people were, well, skeptical, in part because we've seen App.Net fail at this before -- but also because I think a lot of folks don't quite understand what Micro.blog is doing. (To be fair, I don't think they're particularly good at explaining what they're doing.)
In short form:
Micro.blog is built on IndieWeb principles. You can pay to have your blog hosted on the service (in which case you're paying for a full-featured Hugo-backed blog with themes, pages, full posts, themes, etc., not just a $5/month Twitter clone), but you don't have to -- if you have an existing blog which can meet Micro.blog's requirements (an RSS/Atom/JSON feed, webmentions, etc.), you can connect it up for free and get a Twitter-like timeline. There are no advertisers. Micro.blog doesn't have "better tools for managing readers," per se, but for the time being they're just not about the model of "celebrity tweeter with a million followers."
Micro.blog supports comments and follows, but favorites are private (i.e., mostly just bookmarks) and does not support quotes or reposts. This is by design. In theory IndieWeb principles would allow some or all of this to be added down the road, though.
Because this is, again, really a set of individual blogs doing traditional bloggy things woven together with bloggy standards, there's no way to do locked accounts or private posts.
Micro.blog has a full-time community moderator. No, that's not going to be enough to scale if it gets huge, but for the time being that's not a big deal.
Micro.blog has an API and has mobile clients available for both iOS and Android.
And, last but not least: yes, Micro.blog does support ActivityPub and Mastodon. You can follow Mastodon users on Micro.blog and they can follow you from Mastodon, and replies Just Work (tm).