Manton Reece’s Micro.blog Kickstarter Project

Manton Reece is writing a book about microblogging, and starting a service called Micro.blog to support it:

Do you remember how the web used to work? How the web was supposed to work?

In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break.

Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of centralized social networking sites, where you can’t move your content, advertisements and fake news are everywhere, and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet. Too many sites have gone away and taken our posts and photos with them.

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.

His Kickstarter project has hit its primary funding goal, but has one week remaining to hit its stretch goals. The big stretch goal is hitting a level where he can hire a community manager to help build a harassment-free community from the get-go. I’m a backer, and strongly encourage you to become one too.

★ Tuesday, 24 January 2017