I've been using microblogpub as my primary Fediverse account for about a week, and I thought it would be a good time to talk about it.

My first post was this reply. At least, as far as I can tell from the database; I wasn't going to bother to keep clicking through the web interface.

microblog is a self-hosted, single-user instance. I'm running it on my own hardware, and, if I want to, I can tweak the code anytime I want. This came in handy when a weird bug popped up this week. I went two days without my posts propagating to the wider Fediverse. When someone else (not the dev) figured out a fix for the issue, I didn't have to wait for the fix to be pushed. I just patched my local copy, and I'm good to go again.

I like that, even aside from modifying the code myself, there's a lot of customization available for it. I'm planning on making a lot of changes to the template soon.

Another great plus is that I can write my posts in Markdown, and have plenty of formatting options. Unfortunately, any followers on Mastodon will lose that formatting, as Mastodon strips out most formatting from incoming posts. I try to keep that in mind for any formatting I might add to my posts, knowing that they won't see it. (@[email protected], it would be super cool if Mastodon didn't do that)

Another positive is the lack of word count. I can make my posts as long as I'd like. This was actually my main motivation, because I've started to do some #writing lately. I didn't want to be always constrained by a 500 character limit.

On the downside, because it's self-hosted, any time I'm having Internet problems at home, I just can't use it.

Another limitation is the lack of a decent mobile app. The downside of this is that there are no push notifications. I find that the default template works just fine on mobile, but the lack of push notifications is a little annoying to me.

One of the projects goals seems to be to have as little Javascript in the web app as possible. A lot of people like this, but I don't really. There's a lot of things that I think would make the app easier to use by just adding in some AJAX calls and not completely reloading the page. I'm planning on making some changes to my local version to make this more possible.

Finally, the biggest issue that prevents me from using this exclusively is the lack of discoverability. This is mostly due to the fact that it is a single-user app. My local instance only knows about the people that I follow, and whatever they post or boost. But there's not really any search ability for even that content. There's a tag search, but it only shows my posts that have those tags. In this respect, it's intended to work more like a blog than a social network.

For now, to get over the lack of discoverability, I'm planning on keeping my Mastodon account, and using that when I want to look through tags. I have several tag-based tabs set up in Fedilab for following several of my interests, which I can use for my Mastodon account. If I see a post there that I want to interact with, I have to copy the post link over to my microblog instance, look it up, and then I can reply/like/boost/whatever.

Mostly, I'm very happy with it, and glad I made the switch. I like having more control of my own experience, and that's part of the appeal of the Fediverse. I'll be keeping my Mastodon account open, but I think from here on, I'll primarily be using this account from here on out.

#Fediverse #microblogpub