Listen to Micro Monday, Episode 78

Jean: Hey, it’s Micro Monday again, the weekly microcast where we get to know members of the Micro.blog community. I’m Jean MacDonald, the community manager here at Micro.blog. And on this show, I am very pleased to welcome Amanda Rush, who is @arush on Micro.blog. Hi, Amanda. How are you doing?

Amanda: Hi. I’m doing fine, how ‘bout yourself?

Jean: I’m doing pretty good. I’m very glad that we have the chance to chat. And I appreciate you taking the time to come onto the podcast. And before we get into all the talk about microblogging and the Internet etc. or whatever else, why don’t you tell the listeners a bit about yourself?

Amanda: So I have been doing web development for, I guess, twenty years now, since 2019. So that’s my day job and I’m an accessibility practitioner at this point, which basically means that when I build websites, I specialize in making them accessible. So my work is helping other people, and that could be anybody from website owners to plug-in authors for WordPress, theme authors, et cetera, to make their stuff accessible for everyone. Not just for people with disabilities, because accessibility is actually beneficial to everybody else as well. So that’s my day job.

As a sort of result of my day job, I guess my hobby and my day job are pretty similar because I do a lot of tweaking and messing around on the internet when I’m not working as well. And I’ve done that for a long time. I’m a contributor to WordPress, the project, and I’m part of the accessibility team, which is where I do pretty much all of my contributions at this point. And so that’s kind of my professional work. And then personally, I like to read a lot of books. I’ve always got at least one book going, usually more than that, I think I have two going right now, actually, so books and cooking are the things that I kind of do personally. So I’m kind of starting to starting to blog more about that kind of stuff. So I think that covers it.

Jean: I’ve been reading your posts on Micro.blog for a long time and I was looking at your personal site today and I wanted to share with the listeners something that just grabbed me about your approach to what you’re doing, which is your your home pages is quite clean and simple, but it has a lot of categories that, you know, that the various things that you do and that you capture online. I like, you know, that you have it so well organized. But it looks like a full picture of your activities. And on your site, you say you’re doing this for a number of reasons.

You say, first, “I want to own my all my content and have control over it. And to that end, I am constantly updating the site so that it contains as much of my data as possible from any silo that I may have an account on.” And you say “I decided to start doing this when I finally got tired of all the curated timeline nonsense and the social media design element that encourages us to be horrible to each other online for clicks.” And I thought that was just a great succinct description of what drives people away from the traditional social media silos lately and to more open and independent options.

You clearly embrace the indieweb. And I’m curious when you made that that epiphany and how did how did the indie web captivate you? What drew you to it?

Amanda: So for me, it started with Webmentions, actually. I think Micro.blog has some some webmention support.

Jean: Yeah.

Amanda: But the idea is that different domains can talk to each other without necessarily someone having to come to your site and leave a comment or use your particular software. The idea is that it’s supposed to be platform agnostic. So if you don’t want to use WordPress, fine. Don’t use WordPress. Use Jekyll or use Hugo or whatever you want to use, and reply to and interact with content that is in an environment that you are familiar with, so you’re not trying to learn somebody else’s platform then.

On top of that, on top of that sort of technical detail, I just thought it was really, really neat. Right now, for the most part, if you want to like or if you want to interact with a piece of content on Facebook, for example, you have to go to Facebook. If you want interact with a piece of content on Twitter, you have to go to Twitter or use third-party clients or whatever. And those two sort of interaction streams do not ever meet. So you end up, I think, compartmentalizing your identity. One for Twitter, one for Facebook, and Twitter tends to be a lot more snarky. I enjoy the occasional bit of snark and I do have still maintain my Twitter accounts, but in Facebook, that doesn’t really work on Facebook. If you snark a lot on Facebook, and you could have just posted something just “OK, I’m snarking at it, but I’m not necessarily making a serious comment,” your comment section is going to be chock full of all kinds of stuff. You have to be careful on Facebook about what you post and what you say. And that’s not even getting into how the platforms control. It’s not the platforms that are, I think, the biggest problem. It’s the people or… I shouldn’t say the people. I should say that how people are encouraged to to interact and what kind of interactions are rewarded. Because I don’t think anybody is is immune from that

If you spend a bunch of time on social media and you know what kind of material, what kind of interactions, et cetera, are going to be rewarded. That’s what you’re going to do because everybody likes being rewarded. So I’m not making a judgment call necessarily and saying people are horrible. I’m saying it’s very easy for people to go to to just sort of slip into that mode.

And for me, webmention was like, “Hey, I can I can maybe have these reactions and I can have people interacting with my stuff without trying to compartmentalize everything into a short, pithy, snarky stuff for Twitter.” Being careful about what you post on Facebook, etc. And so that’s kind of where it all started. And then I went to microformats and post kinds. We can do web mentions, we can have these domains talk to each other. What if you could Like something, what if you could say that you listened to a podcast episode or something like that? What if you could? What if you could reply? And those are all sort of dependent on webmentions to work properly. Along with microformats too, etc.. Webmentions was the gateway drug and then I just sort of rabbithole from there.

Jean: That’s really interesting. One of the things about the indieweb, it’s constantly evolving mostly through the work of great independent developers and people who want to contribute tools and ideas. But helping people who aren’t in the position to actually build stuff but want to use the use of these tools or, you know, have web mentions, have post kinds, if people ask you about the indieweb who aren’t going to be the kind of geeky person who gets it right away and says, “Oh, yeah, I can build that or whatever,” but if somebody wants to observe indieweb principles but needs some or most of it to sort of be built for them. Do you have recommendations you make to people to help them find their own way?

Amanda: Yeah. Actually, my recommendation is Micro.blog. (Jean laughs.) That gets into why I love it so much because. It provides the social aspect, which I like. The one thing we like about social media. But then it’s a really awesome way for if you’re like, “I don’t want to spend time messing around with a web server, messing around with software. I just want it to work.” I have been sort of promoting Micro.blog, especially on Facebook. Like I’m trying to get people to leave Facebook and come to Micro.blog. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get them to leave Facebook, but at least, come to Micro.blog. Because a lot of people, especially with Facebook, will say, “oh, my God, I’m so tired of all this sniping and all the crap and all the negativity in this.”

And at the other end, I’m like, “Micro.blog is a lot more chill. Just trust me, like everybody’s nice to each other. You know, we can have actual discussions. We can have nuanced discussions,” which is also related to this. There’s been some pretty nuanced conversations that have gone on and Facebook just does not work for that. Like, if you try to have a nuanced conversation on Facebook, you could just hang it up. And, you know, Twitter is basically the place where nuance goes to die. So you are not going to do it there either.

And so literally I’ve been promoting Micro.blog because I’m like, “If you’re not technical and you don’t want to build all this by yourself, this is really a great place to start.”

And I promote Micro.blog over, say, Mastodon, because Mastodon as a nice sort of middle of the road thing. But, you have a situation where it’s still somewhat technical, does kind of require you to start understanding. “What does federation mean? I don’t care about any of this stuff. All I want to do is post my stuff, have other people see it, maybe comment on it or reply to it, etc.” And I think Micro.blog does a better job of that than Mastodon does. So that’s why I recommend it.

Jean: Yeah. You know, one thing about Mastodon is that it’s more of a Twitter replacement in the sense that it is a timeline and really nothing else where Micro.blog is a platform for blogging that has a timeline. And so some people, all they want to do is just to continue with their 280-character commenting on the world versus maybe writing their own stuff for other people to read. And I think that’s where Micro.blog comes in. And, you know, it’s not for everybody, but it’s definitely, because it has so many different ways you can use it, it’s for a lot of people who are looking for an alternative to what you’re describing. It is interesting how I certainly was still on Facebook when I started with Micro.blog, but I’m not on it anymore. I watch every month some group of people says, like, “You know what? I’m going to quit Facebook, I’m going to close my account.” I said I was going to quit Twitter, but I didn’t do that for various reasons. But it’s like people have to make their own decision, there’s only so much you can tell them, and then you kind of have to let them figure out the rest. And as long as you’ve you’ve kind of at least given them a place to to go and check out and see if they like it, that’s that’s the best you can do. I don’t expect everybody–actually I would certainly hope not everybody from Facebook comes over to Micro.blog

Amanda: Yeah. Maybe we don’t need everybody from Facebook. Good idea.

Jean: That would be scary. Every once in a while, you know, there’ll be an article about the indie web or alternatives to or something that Facebook did or Twitter did. Whatever. That causes a lot of people to come over and check out Micro.blog. And we do have these relatively predictable waves of people coming in and saying like, “Well, where’s the Like, button?”

Amanda: And that sort of thing I like about Micro.blog is it’s really explicit about the things that OK, you cannot have a boost button or retweet (Mastodon calls them “boosts, Twitter calls them “retweets.) and there’s pretty explicit reasons for not doing that. That’s kind of where a lot of the crap starts spreading and that spreads faster than somebody can correct something later. The original that spread and then a correction gets posted because you can’t edit and the correction never gets spread. And I’d like that it doesn’t have quote-posting either. Because on Twitter specifically, that’s a really great way, if you don’t like something someone has said or whatever or you want to pile on to somebody, you just quote-tweet it and boom–it’s another copy of the status. And you can even do that even if someone has blocked you. So if you’ve blocked someone, they can still quote your tweets if they can see it and they can just grab the URL and boom, they’ve still sort of interacted with you. I’m just glad that Micro.blog does not have that. If you want to quote something from somebody, then you have to work at it.

Jean: Yeah.

Amanda: Admittedly when I first signed up a couple of years ago, I was like, “oh, maybe this feature would be nice.” Then it was like, “You know what? I like not having it because it makes everything just a lot more low key.”

Jean: It’s nice to appreciate what we don’t have. I also felt the same. You know, I was more engaged on Twitter with my work friends, like my software developer friends. And I kind of missed having them on Micro.blog, like I wished everybody would come over. But now I realize, like, it’s one of those things where you just start something new and see what happens and then you will have a different group of people you interact with.

And maybe that will be a good thing. You won’t be talking about Apple all day long, every day. You might get some interesting perspectives. That’s what I really like about Micro.blog, as well as, just a pretty good variety of people with different interests and from different parts of the world. I mean, we we still have a long way to go to be considered diverse. We are doing our best to encourage. But it’s I think it’s a slow growth process.

Amanda: Yeah, well, I think it’s going to be slow. I still have my work Twitter. And I log in there to see kind of what’s going on and to kind of keep up. It’s all taken over, you schedule your posts in Buffer or whatever, and everything is scheduled posts marketing this and that. That’s not really telling me anything other than the occasional what’s maybe possibly going on. I can find that out on a Web site or whatever. I don’t need to necessarily do that on Twitter. And so at this point, the only reason I still have it is because I’m expected to have it for my work. And Facebook is the same way, I’m expected to have it. So that’s why I haven’t left. But other than that, I enjoy Micro.blog a whole lot more than I do Twitter or any of the other ones, just because it’s a better sort of different, smarter, more compassionate, etc. people. I really like that about it. It’s encouraged.

Jean: Thanks. I’m glad. I’m so glad that you enjoy it. And I’m also really glad that you are there because you are part of what makes Micro.blog all those things. So, Amanda, before we wrap this up, is there anything you want to add?

Amanda: No, I think honestly, I think that really covers it because if I start talking about other stuff, it’s going to we’re gonna go on for hours. I just sort of cut it off there.

Jean: OK. I’m glad I set myself a time limit for this podcast, because talking to a new person every week or every other week at this rate, I love hearing from people and their stories, and I would have one of those two or three hour podcasts if left to my own devices.

But the idea was for it to be short and people could get a short introduction to another member of the community. And this week it was you. So thanks a lot for for coming on and spending the time with me.

Amanda: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Jean: And listeners, if you want to follow Amanda on Micro.blog, there is a link in the show notes or you can go to micro.blog/arush. Talk to you next week.

Listen to Micro Monday, Episode 78

Listen to Micro Monday, Episode 77

Jean: It’s Micro Monday again, the weekly microcast where we get to know members of the Micro.blog community. I’m Jean MacDonald, the community manager Micro.blog. And on this episode, I’m very pleased to welcome Natalie Hester, who is nataliekayh, That’s Natalie K A Y H on Micro.blog. Hi, Natalie. How’s it going?

Natalie: It’s going all right. How are you? It’s going all right.

Jean: I think you and the listeners will be able to hear I’m getting at least some edge of that crud, winter crud. And honestly, I can’t complain because I’ve gotten through a lot of the season so far, pretty healthily so. Oh, good. You need to do my part to support the tea industry. And that’s what I’m doing now.

Natalie: Great. We all appreciate that.

Jean: Well, so, Natalie, before we dive into some of our topics, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Natalie: Sure. So I am Natalie and I live in Austin, Texas, and I’m a new mom. I have an almost 9 month old. She’ll be 9 months next week. And I am currently going to start a new job tomorrow, actually. Really? Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, I had I lined up the the new job with the holidays, so I got to take two weeks off. And now I’m about to start a brand new job tomorrow. So.

Jean: Wow, that’s exciting. That’s quite good timing for the new year.

Natalie: Yeah, exactly. I’m probably one of the least tech savvy people you’ve ever interviewed. I don’t even have a computer right now.

I do everything on my phone and. Well, it’s I usually rely on my work laptop. I’ve I’m a job. They don’t have I don’t have a computer. So. Well, yeah, I mean, I’m an academic fundraiser, which means that I go out and ask for money for universities.

Jean: Oh, that’s a good job and a good cause. Good for you. I know you. You must be quite in demand as well. I know from my fund fundraising days that people are always looking for somebody who is good at that.

Natalie: Oh, were you a fundraiser?

Jean: Well, I started a nonprofit in the early part of the 2010s or whatever in 2013, which called App Camp for Girls to teach girls had to make iPhone apps.

Natalie: Oh, cool.

Jean: It was it was great. I mean, I really enjoyed doing it for about four years. And then I realized that I it just it was one of those things where you’re way more successful than you imagined, like. And it’s it’s a good thing. But it’s also problematic because I thought it was going to be a hobby and it turned into a full job, and so I worked for four years unpaid.

We had a board, of course as an official nonprofit organization. And they went on to work with some professional executive directors and then in 2019 it reached a point where they decided it was not really sustainable, the model that we had, and that we would further our mission more to look for an organization that could keep our values and use our resources. We were burning out all of our mostly unpaid volunteer staff.

Natalie: Oh, really? That’s great. That’s really admirable. My goodness. Don’t edit that out.

I will also say that I have definitely learned a lot about the nonprofit and the fundraising areas. I was very, very grateful for the amazing support that we got and we did a lot. Then at our peak, we had six sessions, summer sessions. It was a summer camp, and we held one-week summer camp in five different cities.

And we really did have girls building iPhone apps and putting them on to devices and and then putting those little apps into the App Store. So that is a lot of work for a mostly unpaid team. I came from software development, marketing, and I just missed being, you know, I had become a camp director when I really I am more of a tech consultant. And so, yeah, I had already decided to move on when Manton started Micro.blog. And I read about it and I said, I think I would be really good community manager.

And then it turns out I was right. And Manton was right to agree with me.

Natalie: And yeah, that’s a great variety of experiences. Yeah, really cool.

Jean: So that’s that’s how I got here. But what about you?

Natalie: So. Well, I’ve already mentioned that I’m not very tech savvy. I have a job. It really takes me out and talking to people all the time. So you know that from your nonprofit days. I work for a mission that’s larger than myself. And I go out and I talk to people all day long. If I’m in my office, I’m not doing my job correctly.

And so I’ve been on social media forever. I joined before I got into college. So I’m a millennial. And so I’ve been on it for a really long time. And I have this really great friend whose name is Drew. And he started doing these gratitude posts on Facebook. And he every day he posted and he said what he was thankful for and what he was looking forward to. And I think he may have started it actually in January 2019 and kept it up all year long. I guess this time last year, I was entering my third trimester of pregnancy, which I just was the most anxious and scared, partially depressed, pregnant, pregnant person. Bringing a person into this world is no easy feat. And people don’t typically talk about it, that social media is not always the most encouraging place to go when you’re in it.

So Drew, we’re not actual friends, we’re I guess we’re “acquaintances-plus.” I don’t really see him that often. He lives on the other side of Austin. I see him at parties. You know, with Facebook, you just friend people so that was our connection. And I just loved following these gratitude posts because sometimes he was just like looking forward to going to lunch. Yeah, I guess sometimes I’m just looking forward to going to lunch. So then he posted in September or October and said, “I’m leaving Facebook.” And honestly, I had been thinking about leaving Facebook, but following him, I thought “I need to stick around and I really like reading Drew’s posts. And then he said he was leaving. So I immediately e-mailed him, “What are you doing? Where are you going?” And he said, “I’m starting a Micro.blog.” And I had no idea what that was, but I was so thankful to have an option, you know, if I were to leave Facebook.

So it was obvious. It honestly took me a little while to figure it out. Yes. Even now, I’m probably just maybe touching a tip of the iceberg. Yeah, there’s probably much more functionality, but I’m not even taking advantage of because I access it on my phone and I just log on every day. And I have since I think October pretty consistently, I think I’ve missed a couple of days. But I log on and say when I’m thanksful for and when I’m looking forward to. And then every once in a while . I’ll put a picture up or something.

I think I just really wanted to kind of document this really important time in my life where I am taking care of a baby. She’s she’s wonderful. Her name is Aria. She was born in April. And every day is so different. And at the very beginning, if I had started this in April, I probably would have posted “I’m looking forward to the next time I can sleep for more than an hour” or something. And so now it’s more about like documenting what the heck’s going on in my life because so much of my life revolves around another person right now. And so that’s kind of how I got to Micro.blog. I was a long winded answer, I know.

Jean: It was a good one. That’s really interesting because I quit Facebook last year myself and there were definitely people I was sorry I wasn’t going to see their stuff anymore. But, you know, in general, it just was it was too much mental overhead. Plus, I’m working at this company where we have the opposite philosophy. Yes. And it was just too much cognitive dissonance to go in there every day. I liked your micro blog because you had a commitment to this this notion of the gratitude journal. And there were also some baby pictures thrown in that are just adorable.

So one of the things I thought was interesting when you when you replied to my email was you wrote, “Oh, I’m surprised. I didn’t know anybody was reading my microblog.” And I’m thought, “Really?” So that would be interesting to talk about because, it’s sort of the opposite of a lot of responses I get, which is people want to know who is reading their microblog. Micro.blog does have a different kind of setup. We don’t we don’t list who your followers are. We don’t post follower accounts or retweets or even likes. So in order to know that somebody is following you or appreciating your posts, that person has to reply to you.

And I then realized like, oh, I probably never replied and said, “oh, cute, adorable baby.” And, maybe that would have freaked you out!

And let me explain another thing, which is that one of my jobs at Micro.blog is curating what we call the Discover timeline, which is a timeline that shows various posts from a whole cross-section of users, and a cross-section of topics because it’s kind of hard to find people at Micro.blog. We don’t actually make it super easy because that’s part of our plan as well. One of the problems with social media is people can track you down and abuse you, so we have it set up so you kind of have to know who you’re looking for to find them. And there’s no hashtags or anything like that.

So there’s no big dog piling on somebody because they said something that outraged the other readers. So far, anyway, we’ve managed to create a space that is relatively safe for people to just express themselves. So the Discover timeline is a way to see people you are not following that I pull out of everything that comes in, and you know, a lot of stuff that gets posted in our system is is pure B.S. crap, whatever.

Anyway, so I do read all the posts or actually skim them. Oh, so I’ve been seeing yours and I have definitely added some to Discover. So some people have been reading you, but also apparently maybe a gratitude journal is like something that people are like, OK, you know, like I read that, I’m glad, that’s a good point. I’m looking forward to lunch as well.

So you are basically doing a gratitude journal for yourself. But it is a public thing. I hope you realize that.

Natalie: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s fine. I think actually it’s funny that you mention the like how hard it is to find someone else. Like I’ve noticed that when I searched when I went into Discovery, I’ve done at least that and there were themes I think, and like almost all of them are ball sports related. I’m honestly more interested in finding other moms. Yeah.

Jean: Because there are definitely other items. There are more than ball sports. Unfortunately, depending on how you accessed that Discover timeline and when we had it sort of rotating like showing three icons. And honestly, I know this community probably better than anybody, and I know we’re not really a bunch of jocks at all.

I’ll put a link to all the tag with what we call tag motif, which are OK because we don’t have hashtags, but we decided to go with like these sort of themes with with emoji text instead and all of the ones that are available.

But one of the ones we don’t have, like we have cats and dogs, but we don’t have children, you know.

Natalie: And I was thinking you really just know your constituents.

Jean: There are a lot of children, though, and a lot of people are very proud of their kids. And that is basically it. I don’t know if it’s like the old fashioned newspaper ethos, but I definitely your post is a picture of your cat or your dog or your kid, I add it to the main Discover timeline because I think cats and dogs and kids pictures make a lot of people smile.

Natalie: It’s one of the reasons why I have the Micro.blog and not like a journal next to my bed. You know, reading Drew’s Gratitude Journal, which he has his own Micro.blog.

Yes, I know. I noticed. I wondered if you two knew each other. You’re both doing it in the same format.

Natalie: Yeah. And then there’s also like Casey Hunt, he does his own thing. I think reading Drew’s posts really kind of changed my attitude a little bit because, not to say that I’m like waking up in a different mood, but just kind of having that moment where I have to think about what I’m thankful for. And there are definitely days when I’m not feeling very grateful for anything. And so I think that’s why I think back to Drew’s post where he’s like, I’m just really looking forward to lunch. And I’m like, I’m really looking forward to washing my hair. Like it doesn’t overglamorize, especially at this point with a nine month old who’s like learning how to crawl, which means that she’s getting into everything like that. Right. I’m looking forward to taking a shower.

Jean: And I’m actually looking at Casey’s Micro.blog now. And he’s grateful on December 10th for flour tortillas.

Natalie: See? Yeah.

Jean: Actually, I feel we need a we need an emoji like, you know, thankful hands and.

Natalie: Oh, yeah.

Jean: People who do a gratitude journal usually use the word grateful or gratitude and we could probably automate it.

Natalie: Oh yeah. I think I usually say I’m thankful. I try not to get too formulaic about it. I’m just like, “Okay what am I thinking about right now?” I wrote about you today. I don’t know if you saw it. And then, you know, I was interviewing for a job at one point. I’m looking forward to this job interview, but I knew it was public. So I wrote, “I’m looking forward to a really intense discussion today.” So sometimes you have to be a little cryptic.

Jean: Yeah, this is great. Honestly, it’s inspired me, because I’ve tried to do it before and I’ve kept like little lists, but I like this formula of, you know, I’m thankful for this thing and I’m looking forward to another thing. Because if I give myself a little time to think about it, I don’t think I would have a day where I can’t come up with anything.

Natalie: Well you’re looking forward to a meal or like finishing up work, there’s always something. And then, you know, I think sometimes I’ll wake up and I’m like, oh, my gosh, my body hurts because, you know, I’ve been like chasing after a baby here because I’m still nursing and she’s getting violent now or whatever. And I’m just like and I’m so thankful for a body that hurts.

Jean: It’s definitely a community where there’s a lot of people who are in tune with this approach to thinking about their their circumstances in the world. I’m thankful that my voice held out this long. And I think we should probably wrap this up. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Natalie: I do think that there is value in and trying out a gratitude journal approach, even just for a couple days, maybe even a week. It really has kind of changed the way that I think about my day. I think it’s so easy to kind of get stuck and kind of especially this time of year when it’s cold and it’s dark. It’s kind of nice to take a moment and live in the moment and think about like, okay, right now, what can I appreciate and what can I share? And then what am I actually looking forward to?

Jean: Well, that’s really good. I think people will appreciate that insight. And I really want to thank you, Natalie, for being here on the podcast today. And listeners. If you want to follow Natalie on Micro.blog and her gratitude journal, there’s a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening. And we’ll talk to you next week.

Listen to Micro Monday, Episode 77

Manton: I think the best way to start out is first with a couple of the questions you ask all the guests on the Micro Monday podcast. So we can just kind of start at the beginning… How did you find out about Micro.blog?

Jean: I found out about Micro.blog from the Kickstarter, which is almost three years ago. I knew that you were working on something like this, but I didn’t really know exactly what it was. And the Kickstarter and your Kickstarter video just made me go like, “Oh, now I see.” And in fact, in the post that I read, you had already met your original goal for the Kickstarter and you were putting in a stretch goal. And part of that stretch was, if you made it that far to $80,000, you would hire a community manager. And it was like, “Oh, I think I would like that job.” And I was right. Yay for being right once in a while. So yeah, that’s how I found out.

Manton: So before Micro.blog… I know you had blogged off and on a while back. What did your blog look like and had you been blogging recently, or was it kind of needing to be dusted off?

Jean: Exactly. So I started on the internet in the 90s as a web designer. I learned how to build web sites, and that’s what I did as a freelancer for several years. So I always wanted to have some kind of blog, but it was before WordPress and I wasn’t super technical, like backend oriented. So I thought, well, if I have a blog, I’m going to have to redesign these pages every time I add something new. So I never really got anything seriously going in the 90s. And then I got on Twitter pretty much early on. And the next thing I knew, I wasn’t really that interested in blogging anymore.

Jean: I started a blog in 2007 or 2008, which was my version of a parenting blog, but for aunts like myself, somebody with no kids. And so focusing on all the fun stuff that aunts and uncles get to do and not really worrying about any of the financial or, you know, health or nutrition things, they don’t have to worry about. So that was pretty fun. But I think being on Twitter siphoned off some of my interest in posting on my own blog for sure.

Manton: That basically happened to everybody. When Twitter’s first getting started, it’s pretty small. But when it really starts to hit, it just starts pulling everybody away, even people that have been blogging for years in some cases.

Manton: So as you mentioned, the Kickstarter was almost three years ago. We’ve been working together for… it wasn’t quite at three years, but over two years for sure, and it has been great to work with you. In that early time when we were emailing about this community manager job, the role I think was admittedly kind of vague when you first signed up. [laughter] What were your early expectations? What did you think it would be like?

Jean: I thought it was going to be more time spent being the Judge Judy of the community where people would be doing things that we thought were against the guidelines, or they would be potentially harassing other members. And I would have to step in and make a judgment call. I think what you said at the beginning was this person would be very involved in writing the community guidelines and then also making sure that any harassment that didn’t get screened out by automated systems was caught early and dealt with early. And so I actually thought it was going to be a more combat oriented job than it has turned out to be, so far. Knock on wood.

Manton: We’ve been really lucky, I think, that the community is fantastic. There have been been issues that come up that need to be discussed and judgment calls need to be made. And I’m sure that will continue to happen as we grow. So what you imagine may still come to pass. [laughter]

Manton: And on the flip side, the automated systems and the things that I thought I was going to be able to build to catch a lot of things, that hasn’t really panned out the way I had hoped it would. But luckily, like I said, some of that hasn’t been needed yet. The most important thing is that we’re prepared, you know. We’re on top of it. And that was really the goal from the beginning. And certainly we’ve been able to follow through on that. Just be thinking about this stuff.

Manton: What did you find yourself, I guess, thinking about and how you interacted with people in the community first? If it wasn’t the, “I’m going to make a judgment call and this person needs to go”, what was the experience like?

Jean: The early days, because this was new and it was very… It wasn’t very different from other social media type experiences, except it had some some pretty definite and maybe unexpected to new users things that you couldn’t do or wouldn’t do. The truth is, I didn’t totally understand Micro.blog in the beginning. I thought it was supposed to be like just like Twitter, a Twitter thing that would would be able to be cross-referenced, cross-posted wherever and that you would be able to just be on Micro.blog but you could still keep things on Twitter going, and that’s all it was. It didn’t totally sink in until I had been working on this for probably a couple months that this was a blogging platform. And when you use the app or the web site to put up your little short post, your tweet-like micro posts, all of those were being collected and published on a blog site that was yours. That was literally like the lightbulb going off. And I’m like, “okay, now I get it.” So a lot of the early stuff was me trying to help people when I didn’t totally understand it myself.

Jean: And I think there were a lot of questions. You know, people hadn’t quite figured it out themselves. And so it was more being a a resource in the community. And a lot of that, you know, resource was like, “I will ask Manton about that.”

Manton: And early on, I don’t even remember when we built the help site, but pretty sure it wasn’t there at the beginning.

Jean: Certainly not in the form it’s in now. It’s been a really interesting process, and it’s a process I have been through before working with software developers who have really cool software, that is really useful and really great, except it’s hard to explain it in in one sentence. TextExpander especially was always a challenge to convince people why they would use it. I mean, it’s been around long enough now that I think there’s not too many people who say, “Oh, I type fast already, I don’t need that,” which is what people would say. And I think for this, what we’re doing is people may think, “Well, I’m okay on Twitter, I don’t need another social network.” And that’s really answering the wrong question. The question is, would you like to have your work in a site you control, whether it’s short or long posts? And we didn’t have a long post in the beginning either. As things have been built out that has helped people to understand what they would do. But yeah, in the beginning, I think I was just trying to figure out what people were doing and for myself as well.

Manton: So we didn’t have long posts in the early days of Micro.blog and we also didn’t have podcasts. And one of the great things that you work on that I really love is the Micro Monday podcast that we’re talking on right now. What was the inspiration for that podcast? How did the idea kind of come up?

Jean: I think it was probably a little before we started doing Micro Monday that Brent Simmons was doing the Omni Group podcast, which I thought was cool. Because there’s always this feeling like if you’re going to do a podcast, you’ve gotta have a big audience, you know, like, why would you do it? But what I’d learned, starting with Micro Monday definitely is like: doing a podcast for a specific audience that will appreciate it is as rewarding, maybe not necessarily financially, but it’s just rewarding to know that people enjoy what you’re doing. Certainly in our community, it’s really made a difference, I think, for people to figure out they can learn about people they want to follow because you can listen to them and you can say, “oh yeah, I wouldn’t mind hearing what this person is up to on a regular basis.” That definitely makes the users of Micro.blog who come on the podcast are now more fully fleshed out as human beings and not just short 280-character or less posts. And I like doing that. But yeah, it was definitely not in my… It wasn’t on my to-do list to create a podcast for Micro.blog. Probably not even in my contract.

Manton: Yeah, it was a great kind of proof of concept for can we even hosts podcasts? So technically it was great, but even more than that… Yeah, just like you said, getting a little insight into who people are and what their thoughts are on the platform or blogging. I really loved how that’s worked out.

Manton: You actually had a blog post recently about starting small and appreciating micro things. I have it here in front of me. You said:

Ever since I became the community manager for Micro.blog, I’ve developed an appreciation for the beauty of going “micro”: microposts, microcasts, micro meetups, microcosms of interesting humans interacting online on a human scale.

Manton: I thought that was really great. And it was kind of a nice reminder of you can start small with something and it can turn into something big. And I think the podcast is like that. When you look at so many episodes also like going back it has a nice history of all those members of the community.

Jean: Yeah, it’s interesting. Actually back when I was in my early 20s, I worked as a secretary in the history department at the University of North Carolina. And next door to my office was the Southern Oral History Program, which was at that time — so we’re gone back, you know, early 80s — was a new idea to do oral history, because most history up until that point was being written based on archives of documents. And that meant if you didn’t have something that got archived, then you weren’t in the history, right? And so the oral history program was actually quite famous there at UNC. And I was friends with the secretary from that department and I got to go to some of the things that they did and saw their projects and everything.

Jean: Their primary program at that time was going out and interviewing mill workers in North Carolina. Like cotton mill workers, that was very much a thing. Learning how they lived, how the jobs went, how all that kind of stuff that you wouldn’t get out of going into the state archives to look at the records of the mill or something like that. So I gained an appreciation for oral history. And I think, while I don’t do it in any kind of… I don’t have a methodology for this — I’m not trying to earn my PHD in anything — I just like that we’re capturing a moment and a slice of time that in the evolution of the internet and internet communities.

Manton: So we’ve had a few in-person meetups. And you mentioned that in that post too, micro meetups. There’s been at least a few. And I know that you’ve done a couple that I haven’t been at. How has that been, talking to either members of the community or people who are just learning about Micro.blog? How does that compare to like talking to people on the podcast?

Jean: That’s an interesting question. For talking to somebody on the podcast, I get like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, at least, talking to somebody one on one. And for example, when we have meetups at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference there’s a lot of people and I want to talk to all of them. And I generally lose my voice, as some people can attest. But it’s fun to see the spirit of people meeting other people. So people who are on Micro.blog seeing other people… When we do the name tags, I make the name tags myself and I put people’s usernames on them so that people can say, “oh, so you’re that person.” And it’s pretty cool.

Jean: Yeah, we could probably be doing more of that. But, you know, we have been a little overwhelmed. I mean, here in Portland, there’s certainly a small group of people who I’m sure if I could get them together once a month, they’d be into it. But I’ve been a little overwhelmed this year. [laughter]

Manton: So the podcast is definitely one way to highlight people in the community. And also before the podcast, we had Micro Monday, just as a “post to your microblog recommending somebody to follow.” And we also have the Discover section, which has evolved, but it’s kind of settled into something I really like right now, which is highlighting posts that are coming from users in Micro.blog. Not actually highlighting a person specifically, but just posts. So it’s kind of a curated timeline of just like a little snapshot of what is going on in Micro.blog. It’s not everything, but it’s a bunch of stuff that people are posting. So you can see not just someone’s name, but something that they actually posted, or a photo. How do you feel about the way that’s going and how that should evolve or how we can grow it or what more we can do with that?

Jean: Generally, I feel it’s going pretty well. It is hand-curated by myself and you. And so there are some limitations there. Eventually that’s not going to be the way we do it forever. It’s a good place to find the people who post their photo first Micro.blog post. We try to make sure if there’s somebody puts something up that’s anything more than just like “hi”. So if they make some effort, either they’ve they’ve put in their photo and their bio, like a way to know who they are. If they post something in the vein of “Hello World”, we add that to Discover, because that’s the idea for people. They want to know who’s new and whether they’re new people to follow.

Jean: It’s been very important for us because what we don’t have, that say Twitter has, is we have no algorithms. We have no recommendation engine. We’re not going to pop things into your timeline and say, “here’s some people you should follow!” Your timeline is your timeline, in chronological order, of the people you follow. And that’s the way it should be. But if you want to dip in to what else is out there, going to Discover is a way to do that.

Jean: We want to bring in more community curators for sure as the platform grows and the volume gets bigger. That’s going to be important. And. That’s the main thing that I can imagine changing over time. I think we could probably make the specific categories under tagmojis — so under the emoji tags that people have used for certain categories that we’ve been following — we could eventually find a better way to promote those to people because they’re a little easy to overlook. Maybe eventually we’ll have some specialized timelines that people in a certain interest group or whatever might curate. I don’t know. But the bigger we get, the more important it is to make it easy for people to find their niches.

Jean: One thing I’ve been really proud of lately is sometimes there are posts that are not in English in our timeline. And I’m something of a polyglot. I don’t know every language, but I like languages. I like to figure out what things say. And if a post looks like it might be of interest, I might run it through Google Translate just to make sure it’s not something horrible and then I’ll add that to the Discover timeline, knowing that 99 percent of the people will not read this Swedish post or whatever. But there will be one person who says, “ah, another person who posts in Swedish.” And I have noticed more conversations going between people in non-English languages, and I’m kind of proud of that.

Manton: Yeah, I’m excited about that. Looking forward to the problem of having lots of languages in Micro.blog and having to having to handle that. I was thinking back to how the platform has changed. The things that we kind of expected or the things that I thought it was going to look like, and the things that it turned out to be good at. And one of the things we haven’t touched on, but it reminded me when you talked about there’s no algorithm that will recommend who you should follow is that we’ve tried to get away from the popularity contest kind of aspects of other social networks. So there’s never been follower counts. There’s never been “like” counts and that sort of thing. And I wasn’t sure at the beginning if we would be able to stick with that, because it was kind of unusual for a social network. What did you think, if you can kind of go back a couple years, that we didn’t have those? And then what do you think now?

Jean: Well, I remember that I was campaigning for some of those features. [laughter] That was before it totally made sense to me. But not being able to see who’s following you is definitely a thing you have to get used to.

Jean: Back then, yeah, I was like, well, I wanted it to be like Twitter, but better. In my mind, meaning: we have all the features of Twitter. You had thought a lot of this through in a way that I had not. And over time, I became a fan of how we do it. If you don’t like how we do it, you’ve probably not hung around terribly long. So the people who are there are all discovering a different way of interacting in social media. And, you know, not having likes is very hard for people too because there’s a lot to like on Micro.blog. And it would be so easy if there was a little thing we could click to say, “I saw that, you know. I see you, I heard you”, whatever. But we’ve stuck with that. And what ends up being ironic is how other platforms are saying they’re gonna get rid of likes. And it’s like, yep, okay then.

Jean: Sometimes I’ll just post one emoji as a reply to somebody, usually somebody that I know and I’ve interacted with and they know that I’m not blowing them off with just one emoji. But I reach out to people and say “that is really cool” or “I really like the work you’ve done here” or “you raised interesting questions”. It takes a few seconds longer than clicking the like button. But it can lead to some interesting conversations and I would say friendships. I feel a lot of Micro.blog friendliness throughout that I maybe wasn’t expecting, since I was originally expecting to have to fight with everybody. [laughter]

Manton: Yeah, and I think there’s more we can do. Like your example of just sending someone emoji or a quick reply. I think that we can experiment with making that easier or encouraging that even more, especially for people who are clicking the favorite button right now, thinking it does something to notify the other person, which it doesn’t. And I know Instagram has experimented with quick emoji reactions also, and Slack has a similar thing. I think there’s more we can do, but there is something about actually taking the time to reply to someone that is meaningful. You’re being deliberate about telling someone, “that’s a great photo you took.” And that’s something I didn’t expect and I’m really happy about. I thought there was something to this idea of not having that how many followers you have because of the pressure of it. And just kind of like some people are more popular than other people and like judging people based on how many… I knew there was something that we wanted to avoid with that. But the fact that it also encourages conversations in some cases is a really nice bonus.

Jean: Yeah, it’s great.

Manton: Well, thanks so much for everything you do for the platform. It’s been an amazing couple years, almost three years now. As we’re talking there’s so many more things that I think we can do. But I feel I feel good about the progress so far and like staying on top of the community, thinking about this stuff, and… Here’s to 2020. I’m looking forward to it.

Micro Monday interview with Jess Nickelsen (@herself)
Published May 7, 2018

Jean: Hey it’s Micro Monday again, the weekly microcast where we get to know members of the Micro.blog community. I’m Jean MacDonald, Community Manager at Micro.blog. And I’m really happy to welcome to the show Jess Nickelsen who is Jess Micro.blog.

Hey Jess, I’m really glad you could make it. I’m glad we could work out our timezone situation. Why don’t we start by you telling our listeners, and that’s of course our community at Micro.blog, a little bit about yourself?

Jess: I’m Jess and I live in Wellington, New Zealand, although I’m originally from Washington State, from Vancouver,Washington, just over the river from you.

Jean: Wow! So close and now so far.

Jess: My family is quite well-versed at figuring out that time difference because I used to be on the other end, ringing my grandparents from basically Portland. I have a little girl. And so my whole life is sort of tied up with kid stuff these days.

Jean: How long have you lived in Wellington then?

Jess: On and off since the late 90s. I finished up at university here after a stint down south at Otago University, which is down South Island. Most Kiwis tend to go overseas for a few years and have their overseas experience, or their “OE”, and I went off to Dublin for three years. When I came back, yeah, I came back to Wellington. It’s a nice place to live.

Jean: Yeah I’ve heard that. New Zealand is numero uno at the top of my list of countries that I’m going to visit as soon as I get that to work out. In fact, I was supposed to go there a few years ago. I had everything booked. I was going to do a kayaking tour on the South Island and then spend a couple of weeks with some friends in Wellington and then I had to have my gallbladder out.

Jess: Oh no. That’s nowhere near as much fun.

Jean: No, it really was not. So it’s one of those things I feel like I have to go, you know like kind of like get back on the horse, don’t let that become something that I almost did but never did. But I’ve been pretty busy lately.

Jess: It’s hard, especially when it takes so long. We have it in reverse: when you go anywhere, you feel like you have to go for a long time to make the most of it or to justify the long flight.

Jean: And the expense and everything. Well, I predict it will not be too too long before I actually get there. That’s something else to work on. I’d love to just go around and visit everybody on Micro.blog. I always get that urge when I’m in a community. But enough about me, let’s talk about you! Tell me how you first heard about Micro.blog or how you got started with it.

Jess: Well I’ve been actually racking my brain because I heard you asking a few other people and they all had very concrete answers. All I can say is I think in the past I was just really interested in looking for some alternative venues for blogging. And for a while I was looking at Github static page hosting and sort of mucking around with that. I’m techie but I’m not the super duper techie and I just hit a few roadblocks then. I don’t know, I was just tinkering at the time. I put it aside and I must have come across some reference to Micro.blog. And at the time I think you had to sort of register your interest so that you could be invited. So however far back that was.

And then, at some point, I got the email saying “Hey would you like to sign up?” I just signed up for the trial and to be honest, I sort of thought I’ll have a look. Like most things, it’s probably not going to turn into anything, but I’ll sign up for the trial, even though I’m feeling quite allergic to creating new accounts on sites these days. But the community was so great and people seemed so nice and there were some genuinely interesting conversations going on. It just feels like a really nice place to hang out.

Jean: That’s true. I agree with that 100%. So did you have a blog before you had a microblog? .

Jess: Yeah. I’ve got sort of quite a long history with blogging. I think my first blog, I actually had to look it up because I was with Diary-X and I’m pretty sure that was in 2000. And so that was the start of my first blog, 18 years ago and I would have been in my early 20s. I was experimenting with what happens on the Web and what are we going to make this into. And those early sort of heady days of people just baring their hearts out to this random space and you know having conversations with other people before everything became monetized and everyone was trying to sell you things.

Unfortunately, nobody knew it at the time because I guess we never knew to ask, but the people who were running Diary-X never made any backups. So when the servers failed, everybody’s blogs were lost. It was a real tragedy.

Jean: Oh my goodness!

Jess: And so that’s when I moved over to WordPress. So I’ve been there since about 2006, although I managed to recover a few older blog posts and things and migrate them over. My current blog goes back about 12 or 13 years now. It’s a very vague and all over the place sort of blog. It’s definitely rambling.

Jean: I feel like that was like the definition of blog in the beginning, that people posted what they were interested in and they didn’t confine themselves necessarily to one topic, but then, as you mentioned, came monetization, it became a trend to have blogs be focused so that they would reach an audience in a target market. And I miss those old days where things were all over the place. And so were the comments but you could read them then.

Jess: And it was more about the person who’s behind the blog than it was necessarily even about what they were saying then. Often you just sort of really fall for someone’s writing or maybe it was just exotic sort of snapshot of life living somewhere really random and different from where you were. A little window into another part of the world. It was quite cool.

Jean: You make me curious: what are some of your favorite blogs that you used to read or still read today or writers in particular? .

Jess: I mean there were a few who, I can’t even remember their names now, on Diary X, we were always commenting on each other’s blogs and but these these days, to be honest, I can’t even keep up with my RSS feed. Every once in a while I’ll go through and clear everything out and start all over again. But my relationship with my computer is a little schizophrenic these days because I feel like I do so much on the computer because I’m a software tester, and my other hobbies are writing and I’m getting back into photography and things now. So I just feel like I’m spending so much time at the computer. When I’m not doing those things, I feel like I really have to force myself to run away.

Jean: Yeah, I understand completely. I’m not sure what I would say if somebody asked me that either.

Jess: Yes there are still a few really good ones that I like to follow on Wordpress. One is really random, a retired police officer, you would think you’d be really random and boring, but he provides some really bizarre insights into things like crime. And I think I started following him after some of the terrorist activities over the U.K. because he was saying some interesting things.

Jess: I’m quite frustrated with a lot of blogs these days, especially other writers, because everybody’s got this idea now that the most important thing you need to do is collect email addresses of people who read your blog. It’s all about “Sign up for my newsletter!” Everybody is following this path to self publishing success and I wish them all the success in the world. I find myself backing off quite rapidly when I get to one of those sites. I do enjoy popping in and checking up on some of the people on Micro.blog.

Jean: Yeah, that’s true. It feels like I always have something to read if I want to. Well let me ask you one last question. You mentioned a couple of things already but just in case there is something else you’d like to add. We have been asking people: “What do you like about Micro.blog?”

Jess: I like that using it is really simple. I like that when I hop over to my actual blog page and have a look, it’s just really basic. I like that once you get past the tendency of thinking, “How many people have commented on this? How many people have liked it?” it’s actually a nice little snapshot of what I’ve been up to. And then I can hop back over to the app on my phone, that’s primarily how I interact, and just have some really good conversations. So it’s almost like these two quite separate elements that seem to come together and work quite well. I like that the blog isn’t just filled with replies or you know things that aren’t going to mean anything to anybody else who’s sort of is having a look because Twitter can be a bit like that sometimes. You look at somebody’s Twitter feed and you’re think “I feel like I’m interrupting a conversation or eavesdropping.”

Jean: I’m really glad that you were able to come on Micro Monday today and chat with me and we get to know you a little bit better. I think it’s just a nice thing for the community in general to hear from from other community members and realize every person on Micro.blog is a real person, they’re not just accounts. And you, Jess Nickelsen, are not just an account! Thanks so much for being here.

Jess: That’s alright, it’s been really fun.

Jean: And thank you everyone for listening today. We’ll talk to you next week.