The team @micro.blog have done it again.
They soft-launched https://micro.one yesterday¹.
This may be the most accessible onramp to the open social web ever.
Cost: $1 a month. Yes you read correctly.
This is the simplest and cheapest (where you are the customer, not the product) way to own your identity and content online².
Stop posting in someone else’s garage³.
Time to export your Twitter, and migrate your Mastodon handle to your own home on the web.
Of course you can bring your own domain name. Additionally:
* blog posts, naturally, both articles and microblogging notes
* photos
* podcasting
* custom themes
* web-clients and native mobile posting clients
* WordPress, Tumblr, Mastodon, Medium import
More details (and alternatives) at https://micro.one/about/pricing
And yes, it interoperates with the open #socialWeb, including:
* #ActivityPub support, #Mastodon and #fediverse compatibility
* #IndieAuth to sign-in to third-party apps
* #microformats support in all built-in themes
* #Webmention for sending and receiving replies across websites
* #Micropub standard posting API, supporting dozens of clients
* #Microsub standard timeline API, supporting social readers
More #indieweb support details at https://micro.one/about/indieweb
Did I mention the the superb micro.blog (and micro.one) Community Guidelines?
* https://help.micro.blog/t/community-guidelines/39
Well done @manton.org and team.
This is post 6 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #ownYourIdentity #ownYourData #openSocialWeb
← https://tantek.com/2025/003/t1/lastfm-year-in-review-playback24
→ https://tantek.com/2025/012/t1/eight-years-webmention
Glossary
IndieAuth
https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth
microformats
https://microformats.org/wiki/microformats
Micropub
https://indieweb.org/Micropub
Microsub
https://indieweb.org/Microsub
Webmention
https://indieweb.org/Webmention
References
¹ https://www.manton.org/2025/01/03/microone-was-effectively-a-softlaunch.html
² https://tantek.com/2025/001/t1/15-years-notes-my-site-first
³ https://tantek.com/2023/022/t2/own-your-notes-domain-migration
#microsub
@maffeis #ActivityPub is for federation whereas #micropub and #microsub are for interacting with your instance, so they are not really exclusive though.
Micropub is already supported by tools like micro.blog, @ia Writer and such.
Not sure if anyone has implemented it on top of an ActivityPub backend though.
#Webmention, #WebSub and #Microformats would be the more direct #IndieWeb “competitor” to ActivityPub, but eg @snarfed.org and @pfefferle are both showing that the two can be bridged
@maffeis I like how the #IndieWeb is approaching this with #MicroPub and #MicroSub:
* https://indieweb.org/Micropub
* https://indieweb.org/Microsub
Clients can chose to implement one or both of those.
A typical social media app would implement both.
An app that’s meant only for authoring posts picks just MicroPub and an app that’s simply meant for consumption picks just MicroSub.
I find the #Fediverse / #Mastodon focus on #ActivityPub as the one and only API to be a bit lackluster in that regard.
@benpate @scottjenson Oh, but there is no need to _host_ your reply within your reader, you simply have to be able to _write_ your response within your reader.
Eg: I use @ivory as a client for my Mastodon account and it both reads and writes to that Mastodon account (using the Mastodon-specific API?)
With #indieweb it instead could do:
- Read the content using a standard protocol like #MicroSub: https://indieweb.org/Microsub
- Write any actions / replies using #MicroPub: https://indieweb.org/Micropub
@yosh This is one of the things I like about the #IndieWeb, that it clearly separates authoring, hosting, aggregation, subscribing, reading, mentioning into different composable parts.
Good thing that it’s possible to bridge Mastodon and the IndieWeb.
Now eg clients are not built for open standards but rather a Mastodon specific one, whereas the IndieWeb has #MicroPub and #MicroSub + the ability to advertise where your such servers are similar to how you add email server discoverability to DNS
@jasnell Great to see some plurality in this space!
I guess next up is to find a way to make apps like @ivory support non-Mastodon #fediverse servers in a standardized way.
Maybe through the style of the #IndieWeb specs of #MicroSub + #MicroPub or similar: https://indieweb.org/Microsub + https://indieweb.org/Micropub
Maybe the #ivory folk should do a #microsub / #micropub app.
That was the reason for the awkward protocol (where everything's a query string, and "form-urlencoded" **or** JSON, and everything's also an array, except when it isn't), that talented designers would develop great apps (except nobody **really** cared, unfortunately).
@KevinMarks @sil Yeah, that’s problem of Mastodon building many things like this into their instances rather than have it be separate clients from the core tool.
It should be built on open protocols instead (Ideally both #MicroSub and the Mastodon equivalent, the latter not really being an explicit standard, right?)
The rabbit hole goes deep. I started looking into #ActivityPub which branches out into many different standards itself (#Activities, #Actors, #webfinger and #jsonld, oh my!) and now I find myself exploring #webmentions and the #indieweb and #micropub and #microsub...
And I started out just wanting to build my own website that hosted my online ID...
Agree we need this "Social Reader" concept based on #Microsub - badly. I know of a few early attempts but need a robust version. #Netnewswire could evolve to be this. So could #Thunderbird.
Or as this author suggests, #Mozilla's #Firefox could.
@thunderbird @killyourfm hej Jason,
that is really neat. Even with ad blocker!
I wonder about other feeds tho. What about JSON (haha - Jason.. sorry.. getting it together again) feeds? Or hell - let's even say #MicroSub?
#RSS itself is rad but… sync between different devices is kinda a thing in 2022 and MicroSub offers all this and is basically not limited to a specific feed format. And this is why plain RSS feels… limited?
Cleaned up my #MicroSub subscriptions. Whopping 137 #RSS feeds survived 
Who says blogging is dead? I’ve social media where I follow less people 
(https://beko.famkos.net/t/KhHc)
https://boffosocko.com/2021/04/26/a-twitter-of-our-own-at-oerxdomains-2021-conference/
I heartily agree with @waxpancake that the open web needs some better discovery options.
#aperture #discovery #google-reader #indieweb #indigenous #microsub