A $1 Experiment in Blogging

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

I’m trying out Micro.blog for blogging. I’ve been looking for a new platform to use, and when I saw Tantek’s post about micro.one offering $1/month blogging, I decided to give it a shot. Plus I have this great new domain that I’ve been wanting to use, since the .ing TLD rolled out a year ago.

My main requirements for a blogging platform are ActivityPub support and not being a hassle, either technically or financially. I want replies on Mastodon to show up as comments on my blog.

• Ghost doesn’t support ActivityPub yet, although they are building it and expect them to do some really great things.
• WordPress has great ActivityPub support. Even better, WordPress.com supports it on every plan level. However, the power of WordPress comes from its plugins and WordPress.com doesn’t allow that until the $300/year price point. I have shared PHP hosting lying around, but I don’t think that it could handle the performance needed to handle ActivityPub chatter.
• Write.as looks interesting and supports ActivityPub at $72/year, which is probably where I would wind up if I didn’t want to try micro.blog again.
• Static Site Generators like Hugo and Jekyll are mostly a non-starter because I want ActivityPub support, and a nicer compose interface than a markdown file (I’m currently writing this in MarsEdit 5)

I say “again” because it turns out that I backed the micro.blog Kickstarter back in 2017. I remember checking it out but not really “getting” it. I still don’t know that I do. There’s a feed, and you can add an RSS feed somehow? And I guess this blog is a Hugo behind the scenes? But it still supports ActivityPub? Anyway, we’ll consider this an experiment and see how it goes. I expect Micro.blog to do good things for the open web, so let’s see what happens.