Stupendous Blog – Page 2 – Spaceman Spiff to the rescue

I feel like I am reasonably happy with the way my migration of micro.blog has worked and I will stick with this setup for a month or so while I wait on @pratik@writing.exchange’s tests on Pika.Page which look super promising. While WordPress was not my first choice for migration, given that I have past experience with wordpress, it made sense for me to first start out from here. I am self-hosting a wordpress instance through Pika Pods and if their estimates are right I should not be spending more than 2.5$ a month to maintain this instance. I also bought Echofeed App subscription which allows me to cross post anything I post here to Mastodon and BlueSky, which was a requirement for me. The inbuilt wordpress plugins didnt do the job well, and more I worked on it I figured having a separate “micro” service to do cross-posting just made sense – it allows me now to ditch WordPress and move to Pika if I wanted to without breaking the cross-posting part (of course I’d have to re-configure them all again).

So why all of a sudden this move from micro.blog which was pretty decent at what I was doing? Was it because of the kerfuffle that happened recently over company vs individual policies at micro? Certainly that played a part, but it was not the whole thing. I was initially going to blog about this in my yearly post, but will save that for another topic. My biggest frustration with Micro was that 2 years in the site still felt and operated like something out of college dorm. The posting experience was slow and unfriendly; it took so much time for even simple posts to appear on the timeline it was not funny. Sharing links and images was a ridiculous markdown task, and while I understood why Manton wanted it that way I was like if its that hard in 2025 to post a link or image, or reply with link or images, there is a problem. I refuse to buy the markdown notion. And then the discovery part of the whole experience was just broken after Jean left, and felt like it was just an abyss. Which then leads me to engagement – I honestly just felt Micro was a nice tea party of like minded white folks, and while there are POCs on the site, I just never felt the engagement on the site as many others felt. If anything I always felt like an outsider peeping in, and I stuck to my usual band of crew for interactions.

Which brings back to kerfuffle last week. The moment Micro and Manton’s position was clear, it was clear to me that ultimately Micro operates as someone’s favorite project, not as a company. Its no wonder that all the choices of what Micro can be or could be is dictated purely by the owner and not its customers. Its a little jarring for me to grapple that I pay 60$ (admittedly very cheap) a year for a service that purely develops on whims of how the owner thinks it should be. I have been frustrated with Micro experience for a while, and this incident basically put it over the top that no matter what, the owner of the service is going to let his personal feelings dictate how the product should and will be built. While 60$ a year is barely anything, I am not comfortable with the idea that an individual has this much power over their own companies. I mean its the reason why I quit twitter, why I limited FB usage to HOA groups, and why increasingly I dont feel like going back to X. Heck its the same reason as much as I wanted a Tesla I will never buy it because of its Nazi boss. Forget that I have given up subscriptions and apps that cost 99cents a month because of this, so there was no reason for me to stay with Micro either.

Once that decision was made, moving out was surprisingly simple! The import of posts into wordpress went great. The self-host option gives me ownership of my own data on my own servers, so I am happy with the data residency it offers. I have no intention attaining global popularity with my micro/macro posts (heck I still keep my primary blog separate) so this setup will work. While I am excited to see how Pika works and maybe might move there after all, but I do love the fact that I own my own data on my own server and thanks to fediverse my content can be published once and pushed out everywhere. I am not missing anything that I was not doing earlier!

And thanks to all this, I have discovered I still retain the tech knowledge I gained about DNS and domains decades ago. If anything I’d like to use this opportunity to learn more and keep up with times. And to Micro, I wish it nothing but the best. I had a good experience and may it grow and who knows maybe one day it may become a place where we can go back. But for now, onwards and upwards.