Micro.blog uses Markdown for styling and links in your blog posts. We have a ℹ Markdown reference. But why? We use Markdown because it’s a simple syntax that matches how many people already write in plain text. It’s natural to italicize text by surrounding it with _, or make a list by using * on each line. But even more importantly, we use Markdown because it scales up to anything you need to do. From the official Markdown page on Daring Fireball: The overriding design goa...

Tim Chambers has his yearly predictions post for the open web. I enjoy these posts and I agree with most of his predictions for 2026. But there is one prediction that I think is too optimistic: > The ActivityPub Fediverse (excluding Threads) will cross 15 million registered users, monthly active users […] will plateau around 2-3 million. Another good year in terms of stable base, but no big waves of new users. Both Bluesky and Fediverse growth won’t come from big waves of migration this year. To put this in context, according to FediDB the current count of registered users is just short of 12 million. It has grown about 1 million users in each of the last couple of years. I know from Micro.blog’s contribution to these numbers that there are also spam accounts and other junk that has yet to be cleaned out, but still I think these numbers are mostly correct. You can see this steady, slow growth in total users from this FediDB graph: The problem is active users. There, we see occasional spikes as users migrate from Twitter / X, but generally the fediverse in terms of active users is shrinking, not growing. Absent some major event or new fediverse platform, I don’t expect active users to get much over 1 million again, let alone 2-3 million. Here’s the graph of the last couple of years: January through April 2025 was the influx of users from Twitter / X, as Trump took office and Elon Musk went all-in on politics and culture wars. But a few months later that fediverse growth had evaporated, and active users today is apparently less than it was two years ago. One way to view this is that the fediverse rises and falls naturally based on current events and popular software. Another way to view it is that the fediverse is in trouble, boxed in on one side by massive Bluesky growth and on the other side held back by the dominance of Mastodon. Mastodon is an incredible success story, yet it still feels unapproachable for new users and it has changed very little in the last several years. I think Mastodon recreates some problems from Twitter in likes and boosts, fixes a few things such as an open protocol and more hands-on curation with small communities, while also adding new wrinkles in the form of local timelines leading to filter bubbles and pile-ons. There is nothing wrong with Mastodon remaining a small platform in the context of Threads and Bluesky. If people are finding value in it, contributing to the open web, that’s great. But if I’m right that the fediverse has already plateaued, and we care about expanding indie blogging and open social networks, we must continue to adopt a plurality approach, not tied only to the ActivityPub-based fediverse. More platforms should have strong support for RSS and multiple social protocols, rooted in blogs and the broader open web.

We’re dropping the Slack group as the NetNewsWire forum and switching to Discourse — here’s the new forum. Slack’s been pretty great for us, but it does have some limitations: conversations are automatically deleted and they’re not findable on the web in the first place. The switch to Discourse means conversations will be preserved and they will be able to benefit people for years to come. And we get to use an open web app that’s also open source.

As recently shared on my blog, I have finished (or mostly finished1) building a simple front end for Micro.blog. This front end, as depicted in the following screenshot, presents the user with a straightforward UI: a title field, a body field, blog post categories, and a Publish button—very focused, with no distractions. It works on desktops and mobile devices. I even added PWA support. But why did I build this? First, I wanted to dip my toes into Vercel. I’ve recently stumbled upon many posts about web apps built and deployed on Vercel by people claiming no programming experience. Most people were using Claude AI or Claude Code to describe their app and deploy it to Vercel. Some apps were impressively designed and functional. Yet, I thought it wasn’t that easy and required a lot of technical knowledge. I was intrigued. I was “mostly” wrong. I’ve been using Claude AI since mid-December, in conversational mode, for different tasks, including getting explanations on building apps on Vercel and other platforms. I’ve been looking for small project ideas since then. Building a simple front-end to Micro.blog quickly became the perfect test. Micro.blog offers a simple API for many things. Using Claude and the API documentation, I asked Claude AI whether it was possible to build a simple UI for posting on Micro.blog. Sure enough, it was. My initial prompt describing the envisioned app follows: > Let’s build a web app hosted on Vercel that lets me to write blog posts for Micro.blog. The form will include only two text fields: a blog post title and the blog post text itself. Include a character count that will update as I type. Maximum of 5000 characters. The web page should include a title “Microblog Poster", centered. > > Micro.blog supports Markdown, so the blog post text field should support it too. > > The authorization token should be stored in an environment variable named “microblog_token” which I will provide once the project is created on Vercel. > > I will use a GitHub repo, which should be named after the application name: “(redacted)” where the app will use the full URL: https://(redacted) > > Provided that Micro.blog supports draft posts as exposed in the Micro.blog APIs, a toggle named “Draft” should be on the web form and be off by default. When enabled, this means I can send the blog post to Micro.blog but with a draft status. Otherwise, the blog post is published. > > The initial state of the web app is to list all available blog post categories as a series of checkboxes, all off by default. You will need to retrieve possible blog post categories during the initialization phase. A blog post can have more than one category selected or none. This list of checkboxes should be left-aligned. The category list should be saved in the browser’s local storage and initialized on the first invocation of the web app. > > The form will contain a button “Publish” centered horizontally (like all the other UI elements, except the toggle underneath the Publish button which should be left aligned. Once clicked, if the post operation is successful, add a small banner (centered) telling me the operation was successful with an appropriate message. > > For a non-draft post, after hitting Publish, the form should display a clickable link to the blog post’s final URL. For the draft post, you should display the clickable link to the draft post instead. > > Images or any other attachments are not needed. > > You can look at micro.blog API documentation in the following URLs: > > For reading data from Micro.blog service: https://help.micro.blog/t/json-api/97 > > For posting to Micro.blog service: https://help.micro.blog/2017/api-posting/ After a few hiccups and errors, it eventually worked. I had to install GitHub Desktop on My Mac as well as Visual Source Code, but I eventually realized Claude AI wasn’t optimal. I ultimately switched to Claude Code to iterate on the initial release. My experience was so much smoother. I do experience so weird issues with GitHub, but it seems without impacts on the deployment. So, building the app requires a GitHub repository for holding the source code. Vercel connects to my GitHub repo, and as soon as a new commit is made, a new app deployment happens; It’s all automatic. One important thing to know: a project environment variable2 to hold the Micro.blog app token is needed before trying the app for the first time. My first try mainly worked as expected. I made sure to have a draft mode available in the UI so that I don’t mess up my timeline with test posts. Once the app is deployed and available for use, any modifications are made through prompting Claude Code on my local machine. Code changes are pushed to GitHub on demand. It takes a few minutes for a new iteration to be available for testing. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them, and I’ll do my best to answer them to the best of my knowledge. One more thing: Vercel is free to use in my case because my app is relatively lightweight. Lastly, one benefit of building my app is that it will circumvent a design issue with Micro.blog’s post editor on the web: the title field and categories aren’t listed by default. I find this to be annoying. My app shows them. I’m happy with that. * * * 1. Software is never finished! ↩︎ 2. It’s the most secure way to keep that token away from unauthorized eyes. ↩︎

Tim Chambers has his yearly predictions post for the open web. I enjoy these posts and I agree with most of his predictions for 2026. But there is one prediction that I think is too optimistic: > The ActivityPub Fediverse (excluding Threads) will cross 15 million registered users, monthly active users […] will plateau around 2-3 million. Another good year in terms of stable base, but no big waves of new users. Both Bluesky and Fediverse growth won’t come from big waves of migration this year. To put this in context, according to FediDB the current count of registered users is just short of 12 million. It has grown about 1 million users in each of the last couple of years. I know from Micro.blog’s contribution to these numbers that there are also spam accounts and other junk that has yet to be cleaned out, but still I think these numbers are mostly correct. You can see this steady, slow growth in total users from this FediDB graph: The problem is active users. There, we see occasional spikes as users migrate from Twitter / X, but generally the fediverse in terms of active users is shrinking, not growing. Absent some major event or new fediverse platform, I don’t expect active users to get much over 1 million again, let alone 2-3 million. Here’s the graph of the last couple of years: January through April 2025 was the influx of users from Twitter / X, as Trump took office and Elon Musk went all-in on politics and culture wars. But a few months later that fediverse growth had evaporated, and active users today is apparently less than it was two years ago. One way to view this is that the fediverse rises and falls naturally based on current events and popular software. Another way to view it is that the fediverse is in trouble, boxed in on one side by massive Bluesky growth and on the other side held back by the dominance of Mastodon. Mastodon is an incredible success story, yet it still feels unapproachable for new users and it has changed very little in the last several years. I think Mastodon recreates some problems from Twitter in likes and boosts, fixes a few things such as an open protocol and more hands-on curation with small communities, while also adding new wrinkles in the form of local timelines leading to filter bubbles and pile-ons. There is nothing wrong with Mastodon remaining a small platform in the context of Threads and Bluesky. If people are finding value in it, contributing to the open web, that’s great. But if I’m right that the fediverse has already plateaued, and we care about expanding indie blogging and open social networks, we must continue to adopt a plurality approach, not tied only to the ActivityPub-based fediverse. More platforms should have strong support for RSS and multiple social protocols, rooted in blogs and the broader open web.

This might be my favorite time of year. Many people don’t enjoy how dark it gets, but I love how we bring the light into winter. Candles, string lights, crackling fireplaces, & toasty ovens filled with treats - these are a few of my favorite things. Micro.blog is hosting a **12-day photo challenge from Dec 15–26,** & I wanted to share it here in hopes that you will join in too. The prompts are super fun & a little chaotic in the best way. You can see the full list below but there will be daily reminders. I’ll be posting along the way, & I’d just love to see how you celebrate & savor this season - the quiet moments, the cozy chaos, the traditions, the creativity, all of it! Dec 15 - Frost Dec 16 - Cozy Dec 17 - Firelight Dec 18 - Evergreen Dec 19 - Beard Dec 20 - Sparkle Dec 21 - Solstice Dec 22 - Grinch Dec 23 - Baking Dec 24 - Travel Dec 25 - Feast Dec 26 - Home

I created Micro.blog. I also have two podcasts: Core Intuition and Timetable.

Manu Moreale reflecting on a Mastodon post that attempted to simplify the world into effectively good and bad people: > I keep thinking about this tweet because to me it embodies one of the core issues I have with general social media discourse: the lack of depth. This fits with a theme I’ve been blogging about throughout the year. In a stressful, divisive world, we are quick to label _other_ people. We dig our heels in without nuance, vilifying our perceived enemies. As I blogged earlier this year: > I’m drawn to blogging about divisive topics, but it would probably be healthier to avoid it. People can be so tribal now that everything is either good or bad. Our views have become extreme caricatures of the truth. And after my post recently about Mastodon, someone reminded me of when Wil Wheaton was run off Mastodon. Wil Wheaton, really? Moments like that make it easy to see why newcomers to the fediverse often feel like unwelcome outsiders. I want to err on the side of defending good people even when they are caught up in overblown drama online. Yet I often do so in roundabout ways, from a distance, because engaging directly is a losing battle that makes everyone feel worse.