An Update on My Experience with Micro.blog

Back in November or December of 2025 I became aware of the “Indieweb” and the Fediverse. In reading through the material I could find on those topics I ran across the idea known as “POSSE”: Post (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere". The idea is that you post your content on a site that you fully control, then syndicate that posting out to other sites e.g. Mastodon, Bluesky, etc in order to let folks know that you’ve posted something new. This does several things:

First, it ensures that your content remains yours and is under your control: You own the domain, you own (or rent) the hosting service, therefore you own and control your content. All of this ensures that your work won’t suddenly disappear if a service on which you rely suddenly evaporates into the ether. (Well, that’s almost true. I did have one hosting provider simply disappear without warning but I had backups of everything, which I strongly recommend!)

Second, by syndicating your posts out to other sites you are bypassing the algorithms that determine whether or not your content is surfaced for potential readers. This means that you can potentially reach more readers than you might through a search engine. (I would actually say you will reach more readers than a search engine will deliver!)

Third, your site is the one being indexed by the search engines instead of your hosting service. What I mean is that if, for example, you’re using Medium to post your work, Medium gets top billing in the search engine and you’re just a link on their site. By hosting your own content, it is your domain that gets top billing.

Now, I love the idea of POSSE but, to be honest, having to take the time to post to various platforms e.g. Mastodon or Bluesky seemed a bit more than I wanted to do. But I did want the exposure. Enter Micro.Blog.

Micro.blog is a site that hosts your content using your own domain (so you’re getting top billing) and coordinates automatic posting to other services, again, like Mastodon, X, etc. You choose where you want to post.

So, somewhere back around early December I ponied up the 5 bucks a month to purchase a subscription. That’s not really a bad deal, value-wise, given what it does. My original site, Iamcuri.us, remains my primary site and is the site I actually post everything to (except short ’thoughts’ posts). Micro.blog then pulls that post and reposts it to the site (saulsnet.org) hosted on their servers AND it sends links out to Mastodon and Bluesky.

How well this all works to drive readers to my site is unknown. My main site, Iamcuri.us, is hosted on a DigitalOcean app which builds the site from my github repository. DO doesn’t provide statistics for their apps. Similarly, if micro.blog provides stats, I’m not sure where to find them. So, I don’t really know whether I’m actually getting visitors to my site or not. Maybe it’s just as well because I don’t really care that much as I am writing primarily for me.

Still, it would be nice to know that someone is reading my work.

On the whole, I liked the idea of micro.blog and the fact that it would automatically post a link to my posts on Mastodon and Bluesky, the two sites I had chosen to use for ‘federation’. But I began to realize that I wasn’t really seeing any benefit to those. I’d check into them and really didn’t see a ton of activity. That is to say that I didn’t see a lot of folks posting on those sites – at least not stuff that interested me. I began to wonder if my content was not a good fit for those sites.

Still, I let the sites run for six or so months. It is my habit, though, to periodically review where my money goes and I decided that the five dollars a month for the micro.blog site simply didn’t make sense to me. I already had a site hosting my content which cost me nothing. The only benefit to micro.blog was the reposts to Mastodon and Bluesky and I really didn’t think that justified the $60 USD annually I would be paying for the service. So pulled the plug on that a few weeks ago.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think micro.blog is a great idea and if you’re someone who doesn’t currently have a site and would like to leverage the concepts behind POSSE, I think micro.blog is a great option. So I’m absolutely not dissing the service. But right now, for me, it didn’t make sense.

Do I still think POSSE is a good idea? Yes. Am I going to continue to “federate” my content? Not at this time. Again, I am writing primarily for me so the motivation to repost to other sites just isn’t there.

Maybe another time …