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Micro.blog Wish List

What the heck is Micro.blog and why does this list exist?

Micro.blog is a weird and wonderful service dedicated to the open and social web. It’s ambitious and unique in all that it offers — host full-on blogs, publish microposts to a small community or out to the broader and interconnected social web, track books you read, host a podcast, send out newsletters, host an archive of your Tweets, and so much more — and I really believe in its mission. I’ve been hosting my microblog there since 2022 when I left Twitter, and I’m anxious to move HeyDingus there so that I can achieve the holy grail of having but one place to publish.

However, it’s not a perfect platform. Being founded and primarily developed by one guy, Manton Reece, is Micro.blog’s greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness.

Its strength is that, led by Manton’s vision, Micro.blog can adapt and pivot on a dime. It gets frequent updates and new features. It has a strong sense of purpose to foster a quieter social web, more genuine human interactions, and getting more people to own their writing at a domain they control.

Its weakness is that there’s only so much that one developer can do. It’s bound to have rough edges and even features that fall out of mind or out of favor with Manton. And with things trending toward more people using more devices on more platforms, it’s becoming harder for Manton to keep up with the latest and greatest.

There have been countless conversations in the Micro.blog Help forum, blog posts written, and exchanges hashed out on Micro.blog itself regarding bugs and feature requests. I’ve participated in many of them. But this is my personal ongoing list of things that I wish to improve on Micro.blog, that would make me a happier user.

I’m maintaining it to document both the small papercuts that should be addressed and the big structural changes I think should be made. It’s here for me to have something to reference when Manton calls for suggestions of new features and bugs to fix. And it’s to help me remember the things that do improve over time, and that our requests don’t just go into the void.

I’ll try to share when I make updates to this list on — where else? — my Micro.blog.
  • Prevent ‘Publishing latest changes…’ pop-up from covering the all-important ‘Post’ button
  • Retain formatting for truncated posts on the timeline
  • Ability to add new categories when writing a post
  • Username suggestions even if they’re typed/edited in the middle of a post or a reply, not just at the end
  • Threaded conversations
  • Previews/quick-actions when long-pressing links (iOS app)
  • Left/right swipe actions on posts in the timeline/conversations (iOS app)
  • Timeline position sync
  • Horizontal scrolling for multiple images in a post on the timeline (the sweet pinch-to-panorama gesture from Threads would be awesome too)
  • Allow editing the path/slug of a blog post’s URL
  • Allow dropping the “.html” from URLs
  • Enable better organization of pages, such as into folders, for those of us who have a whole lot of pages to maintain
  • Allow actionable metadata in frontmatter/YAML
  • Fix changing your Fediverse username so that it doesn’t nuke all your followers in the process
  • Let Direct Messages be marked as read so the notice for them on the Mentions tab can go away
  • Add Webmentions view in the Mentions tab
  • Show the inline formatting for italic text made with asterisks *like this*, as is done with underscores _like this_
  • Add a setting to adjust the formatting of embed/quotes when you click the embed button (as Quoteback, as simple blockquote, etc.) using variables
  • Something like Twitter Lists so that you can check in on a separate curated timeline of posts without having to follow every user and see all their posts in your timeline all the time
  • Fix iPadOS cursor issue where clicking on a post won’t open a post’s conversation (iOS app)
  • An on-page “Edit” link on pages and blog posts
  • Fix the inconsistency of character counts between the app and the web editor (including only counting an emoji as one character)
  • Selecting the Link (🔗) button with text highlighted should always make that text a Markdown link from a URL on the clipboard
  • Text replacements don’t work everywhere; I notice it most when I try to use my xjic shortcut on the login page, which should expand into my email address
  • Let users set their default “Copy as…” action on uploads; I’d want Markdown as the default, one-click button, but others might prefer HTML

And my pie-in-the-sky wish:

  • Enable your-blog-as-a-synced-folder-of-text-files-on-your-computer, like Blot
Granted in 2024
  • ✅ Show character counts when editing a published post
  • ✅ Animated GIFs should animate in the Timeline (iOS app)
  • ✅ Fix scrolling issues in the editor (iOS app)
  • ✅ Add ‘Copy Markdown’ button on the web for uploads, like the ‘Copy HTML’ button

Last updated: 2024-12-19