I’m reading Your WordPress as Your Personal Mastodon Instance and this seems like almost the ideal setup for me. The thing I particularly love about this – and really wish Micro.blog would support – is the ability to use 3rd party Mastodon clients to browse and interact with the timeline.

To be fair, my understanding is that Micro.blog has a very extensive API, so Mastodon apps like Mona, @MonaApp@mastodon.social, could potentially implement Micro.blog support. However, this approach opens up the possibility to use a number of apps without each one having to implement Micro.blog support.

Why does this matter to me? Unfortunately, experience has shown me that accessibility comes and goes. It’s not uncommon for an app that’s totally accessible today to become inaccessible tomorrow because of some unexpected regression. For example, Facebook recently released an update which made the ability to comment on posts inaccessible. They’ve since fixed it, but commenting is kind of a major part of that platform, and suddenly not being able to do it left me, and many others, shut out.

This isn’t a one-off issue. Amazon has occasionally broken their Kindle app in ways that have made my entire library temporarily inaccessible, and Microsoft has broken things in ways that have made it impossible for me to actually do my job for days. Fickle accessibility is unfortunately a fact of life for many of us, and despite the very best intentions of companies and developers, well, shit happens.

This is why whenever there’s the possibility to use a service with even more apps, I fully support it. Accessibility issues aside, apps very often take different approaches to accomplishing tasks, which is often what differentiates them from one another. As an end-user, this opens up a world of possibilities because I get to choose to do things in the way that works best for me.

To be fair to Micro.blog, while I would absolutely love the ability to use it with Mastodon clients, I recognize that this would likely involve a huge technical lift. Whereas this is possible to address in WordPress with a few plugins, a WordPress blog instance is likely used by one person while Micro.blog is a platform used by many. In addition, Micro.blog does not support certain Mastodon concepts, such as “boosting” or reposting posts. Personally, I wish this were supported as well, but I certainly respect that Micro.blog is its own platform for a reason.

Ultimately, I know I can’t have it all, but that certainly isn’t going to stop me from wanting it.