I approve of Dries’s plan!
I'd like to be able to consume content from https://micro.blog and comment on peoples posts and get back their comments but without actually the need to use their software. It's kind of close because they use webmentions and I've seen some links to RSS feeds, but the UI if you're not logged in is quite awful.
For example, I found https://micro.blog/jthingelstad by randomly typing https://manton.micro.blog/ which turned out to be the test blog of the creator of Micro.blog all the way down in the footer I found a link to https://micro.blog/manton which for some reason has compleatly different content than the subdomain. There I saw him mentioning https://micro.blog/jthingelstad so I rewrote the URL to https://jthingelstad.micro.blog and was looking for a link to their RSS. The footer didn't have one but the HTML head has one which luckily my browser shows. https://micro.blog/jthingelstad didn't have a link to that RSS feed nor to the subdomain where I can find the link to the RSS feed.
I think they would get much more traction if they did some homework on not putting up those walls around their garden like everyone else does. I'll follow this one guy now and we'll see if I can get into this community with just my own software and without signing up for a username there.
This is a great analysis on the ability to import and export posts via Micropub/mf2. The benefit of that is even private posts can be exported! I definitely want to think through this more
On moving from silos to your own website:
Over the last year, especially, it has seemed much more like “blog to write, tweet to fight.” Moreover, the way that our writing and personal data has been used by social media companies has become more obviously problematic—not that it wasn’t problematic to begin with.
Which is why it’s once again a good time to blog, especially on one’s own domain.
But on the other hand…
It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site.
That’s true …which is why brid.gy is such an incredibly powerful service for, well, bridging the gap between your own personal site and the silos, allowing for that feeling of ambient humanity.