Back when Twitter was fun and Tumblr was new, the idea of posting small blogs, or “micro blogging”, caught the public’s eye. For those of us who found regular, long-form, blogging to be too overwhelming, posting a little thought here or their on our micro blog would allow us a foot in the door without the stress of WordPress. It also allowed for much easier community building when all the bloggers were on the same platform.

But those days are kind of gone. Tumblr still exists (and we still await their ActivityPub integration), and technically Twitter (now X) is still there, nobody really calls it micro-blogging anymore.

Is the idea dead?

I’ve been thinking about this for a week or so, because I’ve considered adding in another post type to my blog that is meant solely for “micro” blog posts. I’d style them differently, offer a different RSS feed, and try to figure out a way I could post them from my phone.

I figure if I could do this, I could try to take part in the “micro” thoughts thing that some people do, but in blog post form. I’m not sure if I’d stick with it, or if I’d even start that type of thing, but there is something alluring about a 100-200 word blog post that sits alone.

But as I thought about it, I thought about why Tumblr and Twitter failed. Sure Elon was a big part of the latter, but Twitter was shite long before Space Karen took over, and Tumblr died around the time they were bought by Yahoo! of all companies. Micro-blogging was a fad, while real blogs stuck around. Why?

I think some of it is that despite the easiness of reading a short-form blog post, they never really provided any value to the reader. It’s hard to tell a story in 200 words or less. Stories and thoughts need context, and that needs space. Another reason I think this failed is that short-form video took its place. People enjoyed that a lot more than reading the short blog posts of yesteryear. Reading is a lot harder than mindlessly scrolling through TikTok.

I don’t know if micro-blogging on a real blog makes sense. I could just post a blog post of the size I want and leave it at that. Why make it special? Instead of putting effort into re-creating a Tumblr feed here on this site, I’ll just continue blogging as I do. It makes more sense and its simpler.

It was a good thought exercise, however. Sites like Tumblr offered non-bloggers a great way to blog without the overhead of blogging. Whether it failed because of tech greed or lack of attention span on our part, I don’t know, but at least real blogging remains.