Why did I make an account on micro.blog and why am I paying a dollar a month to have a place to ramble?

I have been an avid user of Mastodon since September 2025. A couple of weeks ago, likely from overexposure, I got the classic symptoms of social media overstimulation. Messily, I attempted to cut back on the amount of time I was spending on the platform and pondered hard on the reasons behind the decay of my mental health. Mastodon was supposed to be a healthier alternative to mainstream social media right? Why was I hearing and witnessing those same problems? What was going on?

Naturally, I don’t have an answer, only theories. It’s nothing ground-breaking. Social media is made up by users and those users are people. People who are angry, scared, and have grown used to having no boundaries and no respect to their fellow netizens. They left the dead bird site and migrated to Mastodon, bringing along their toxic social networks habits. Part of the cause also falls into the way Mastodon was designed after, a place that only cares about dividing and pitting people against each other. I realized that I had placed certain expectations on a platform that never made such a promise.

Then, what could I do? Microblogging had become an core practice in my daily life. I didn’t want the noise. I didn’t want the distractions. I didn’t enjoy being thrown in a timeline when I wanted to capture an idea or a reminder. I didn’t wanted a social media platform, I wanted a place to microblog in peace. This is when I realized that compared to the activity of blogging, microblogging was intricately linked with social networking that I was unable to find an alternative that just offered microblogging and zero social features. How could that be possible? There are countless minimalistic blog hosts like bearblog.dev and pika where the main feature is to “get the words out." Why was microblogging being treated differently?

Eventually, I found micro.blog. I toured around the edges, inspecting user profiles and official documentation. What sold me into signing up was the book linked at the bottom of the website written by its creator, Indie Microblogging. There’s something about seeing a whole book available for free on a niche topic that tickles my brain in a good way. It’s thanks to this book that I was able to separate the concept of social media with microblogging. The best part is that the book wasn’t just a giant ad to sell the thing he had created. It could have been done with less words than that. The book touched on a lot of topics that were of interest to me like the indie web, decentralized social media, and community. I found the chapters had genuine intentions to make the internet a better place and I can always get behind that.

By the time of writing this, I feel comfortable visiting social media. However, I can’t keep behaving the same way I used to. Just the act of typing on Mastodon makes me feel like I’m talking to someone. Naturally, since it’s a social platform. For certain microblogs, I don’t want an audience. Which is why I am here, on micro.blog, the closest thing to a place that put microblogging before social networks. While it doesn’t fit to my use case neatly, it has certain features that are incredibly appealing to me such as a app.

#Introduction