From a blog meme to a new theme, my first 24 hours on micro.blog were very pleasant. It’s a quiet part of the Internet in a very good way. Much of the Web has turned into a non-stop Saturday afternoon in the center of a medium-sized city. Where you stumble across bargain hunters, protesters, screaming bachelor parties and obscure market vendors.

Oh my goodness. I have become the old man yelling at the cloud!

old man yelling at the cloud at giphy.gif

I am more at ease in this suburb. Not too well known but just enough to attract interesting neighbourhood people. With stories of their own, without ego, with a balance of listening, talking, asking and giving advice. Meanwhile, it is my umpteenth home on the web in the past 25 years. For 10 years I’ve been active on Digging the Digital, built on WordPress, after a brief courtship with static site generator Jekyll. That site is in need of rebuilding. It squeaks and creaks because of all the little jobs I’ve done myself. I am not a contractor and have two left hands. I can hang a shelf just fine if someone shows me, but don’t make me put in a new dormer or completely renovate an existing room. That’s asking for future problems. Unlike being a homeowner in meatspace, online you can easily move your presence from a to b if you need to. Micro.blog has been around since 2017 and has proven itself to be a well-versed web service. How might I step into this new neighbourhood? Some thoughts…

Fediverse

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and his weekly delusions of how to make this global village square work better, I left. I’ve been inactive since December 2022 and deleted my account in August 2023. I made the move to Mastodon. I am more than happy with indieweb.social which is my home on the Fediverse (What is the Fediverse?). In email exchanges with my friend Oskar van Rijswijk we regularly talk about simplifying. With micro.blog I can just as easily connect to the Fediverse. That does mean I have to move the network I built up over the past 12 months (again?). The steps are well described on micro.blog and it has the added advantage that I can build a Fediverse account on my own domain.

I wrote about Digital Domestic Cozy (translated version) on my Dutch-language blog before, the small(er) networks like micro.blog and omg.lol. I have a paid account on both because I love this online undercurrent. As well as the community on indieweb.social. Yet therein lies the crux now. The community.

Community

I chose my Fediverse account on indieweb.social initially because of the name. Plus the thought of finding a community of like-minded people. There is a community. I just have very little interaction with it. I sometimes follow the local timeline and that’s about it. On omg.lol I started without any prior idea. I just love their service and style. They build a fantastic collection of separate services that connect through visual style and clever domain names. But I have a hard time finding the community, despite access to forum, Mastodon and even IRC. At micro.blog, the community is more palpable. I run into some old acquaintances, I found a group of like-minded people just like on indieweb.social. The barrier to interaction is a bit lower because it feels like it’s more segregated from the larger Fediverse. So you feel more at ease to connect and interact. Micro.blog is built as its own service, while you can easily connect to the outside world through existing protocols. But when I add my network, I follow 750 accounts on Mastodon, I instantly turn my own timeline into a noisy neighborhood party. Do I really want that? On top of that, some 2,000 accounts that follow me on indieweb.social will receive a move notification. Would that go well? Often it does, I think. But I can’t use micro.blog (yet!)to follow hashtags across the Fediverse as easily as I do in Mastodon. I might have to change that to following the RSS-feeds of those hashtags in the fediverse. I just love typing that previous sentence. It shows how open and loosely joined all those protocols are.

Migration WordPress

I can migrate my blog with over 20 years of blog posts from WordPress to micro.blog, to keep the entire archive together. In recent years, I have been referring more and more to older blog posts. Many ideas I have published or linked to before, so it is convenient to keep referring to them. If this is all in one place, I like that. Migration of my WordPress blog is an undertaking in itself. I use the Post Kinds plugin for years with which I have published about 750 posts. Bookmarks, likes and short notes. The problem with that plugin is that of the saved bookmarks and likes, the URL is not in the WordPress post itself, but in a separate table (wp_postmeta). The default import for micro.blog does not include this information. On my WordPress blog I first have to make a conversionscript for this plugin to add everything from wp_postmeta to the default WordPress wp_posts table. This means I have to write separate code. Or have it written, see my earlier job-skills explanation. I do think it’s worth doing that, the archive is very valuable to me after all these years. But it takes time and energy.

Mothership

Everyone needs an online mothership. A domain name and a privately owned space on the web. That’s my firm belief. I’ve been writing about it since 2010. That’s why I want a blog on my own domain. This is no problem on micro.blog. But what domain will I use? If I have trouble getting my current WordPress posts imported I may choose to turn diggingthedigital.com into an archive and continue on frankmeeuwsen.com. People who really (want to) follow me can make that switch just fine in their feedreader or bookmarks. The added benefit of the microblog service is that I can create a fediverse account on my own domain. That’s how I think the Internet should be, everyone’s own piece of land where you can do what you want. With your own address.

Continued

Step one is to phase out the Post Kinds plugin on my current blog and merge the data from that plugin with the standard WordPress posts. Let’s see if that works. After that, I can take the next steps: Create a static archive and host it on a good place, convert the domains and move my Mastodon account.

Really one of those jobs I can do in the intimacy of my own neighbourhood….