I was thinking this week about how Micro.Blog has become the home base for all of my online activity. I’ve had an account since I backed the Kickstarter in 2017, but recently, I’ve started slowly moving everything from my old Squarespace1 site:

  • Blog Hosting. This blog is hosted on Micro.Blog. I’m in the process of migrating my favorite old posts from Sketchbook B here so everything is in one place. At the $10/month premium subscription level, I can even add a few more blogs if I want to.

  • Site Hosting. SbBFonts.com is a static site hosted on Micro.Blog that features my typeface designs. I’ve got other ideas for simple sites I want to build. These “single page sites” are completely underrated feature of Micro.Blog and included with the premium plan. I love the flexibility of adding these kind of sites quickly and easily.

  • Social timeline. I use Micro.Blog’s timeline to interact with other Micro.Blog users and to follow Mastodon and other Fediverse accounts. It’s not the most active timeline because there is no algorithm pushing content at you. I consider that a feature, not a drawback. It’s not a replacement for other social sites like Mastodon, Threads or Bluesky, but it is a nice alternative.

  • Crossposting. Social media is fragmenting. When I post to Micro.Blog, I have it configured to automatically crosspost to Bluesky and Threads. I could also crosspost to LinkedIn, but I don’t want everything I post copied over there. People on Mastodon can follow my Micro.Blog posts at bobwertz@bobwertz.com. And the service keeps evolving. Micro.Blog founder Manton Reese is great about adding features as new APIs are released or updated.

  • My Tweet Archive. Just because I left Twitter didn’t mean I wanted to lose all my tweets. Manton built a way to import my tweets and I now have a searchable archive of 15 years of Twitter posts on my own site.

  • Third-party Tools. The web interface for Micro.Blog is fine, but I like using different apps, too. I can post directly to Micro.Blog from Ulysses and MarsEdit. Feedbin has a nice little integration, too, but I don’t use it much. It’s nice to have options, something that Squarespace doesn’t offer.2

There are other features that I don’t take advantage of yet like email newsletters, podcasts and narrated posts. All of these are included with my plan, I just haven’t gotten around to using them yet.

I know that Micro.Blog isn’t for everyone. It’s easy to get started, but to get maximum customization, you need to be comfortable with tinkering. The text editor uses Markdown, which I like, but many people have never heard of. It’s worth noting that Micro.Blog has no built in metrics. This is by design and I think it’s a good thing, but if you are the type of person who wants to dig into the metrics of every post, this probably isn’t the service for you.3

Micro.Blog is exactly what I want in a service. A home for all of my random thoughts, projects and experiments. The service provides an incredible amount of value for $5 or $10 a month and it feels like the web I fell in love with. If it aligns with your needs, there really isn’t a better service.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.

  1. Squarespace seems to be trying to serve a business audience with a ton of features that I really don’t need. Plus, they recently announced they are going private again with the help of private equity. This makes me nervous. ↩︎

  2. When I first started using Squarespace, there was an API, but they phased out support for that a long time ago. ↩︎

  3. You can add metrics through some other third party services, but I personally want to remain blissfully ignorant. Maybe I’ll write a post about that some day. ↩︎