If you’re seeing this on Mastodon, I suggest you follow me at @mitchw@mastodon.social. If you think you’re already following me there, you’re actually probably not. I apologize for the inconvenience. Here’s an explanation.

A couple of days ago, I migrated all my followers on @mitchw@mastodon.social to @MitchW@mitchw.blog. “It’ll be great!” I said to myself. “Finally, I won’t have to cut-and-paste to multiple social media platforms to participate in all of them! Write once, read anywhere! Yippee!1”

Here’s what I soon learned:

  1. While micro.blog is an excellent blogging and micro.blogging service, with an outstanding management team, it’s not a great Mastodon experience. Three main reasons for that:

A. Formatting: When viewed on Mastodon, micro.blog truncates posts at 280 characters, rather than Mastodon’s standard 500. Also, micro.blog strips paragraph breaks from posts sent to Mastodon.

B. micro.blog doesn’t support boosts.

  1. Once you’ve migrated followers from Mastodon to micro.blog, there’s no automatic way to send them back.

  2. Once you’ve migrated followers from a mastodon account, that account is deactivated. I had a vague idea that I’d continue using my Mastodon account to read, boost, and reply, but that won’t work.

I expect 1.A will be corrected soon—management is On It, fixing formatting problems. Until then, I expect I’ll just manually cut-and-paste posts to micro.blog and Mastodon. Once the formatting problems are fixed, I’ll see if I can reactivate micro.blog’s otherwise excellent tool for automatically cross-posting to Mastodon.

However, I expect 1.B will never change. Boosts are antithetical to micro.blog culture. I’m ok with that.

In the long run, I’d like to see better integration between Mastodon and other services, to help folks like me maintain a presence in two or more places at once. I don’t have a clear vision of what that would look like. Maybe a micro.blog Mastodon instance that somehow syncs with micro.blog itself?

  1. I did not actually say “Yippee!” ↩︎