I wrote this draft on 7/28/2025 when I wanted to expand a reply into a full post but then shelved it. Now, almost one month later there is another post complaining about the Micro.blog discover feed. Anyway, I thought it might be nice to gather all of my ideas on the subject in one place.

My Ideas

When I first started, I found the account Micro Monday very helpful to find people around Micro.blog. It was an account that posted occasional roll calls about common topics and people could reply with links to other accounts (or their own) if it fit the topic. There was also a weekly Monday post that people could use to recommend other users or link to an interesting post. I found quite a few of the people I initially followed through that account.

Automated accounts

A roll call account:

What if we brought an account like Micro Monday back? We could crowd source a list of topics for roll calls and automate that account posting a roll call every two weeks. It could be listed on the sign up page as a good account to follow.

A weekly or daily recommendation account:

An automated account that creates a post prompting for this weeks or today’s interesting posts. People could reply and list their recommendations.

Potential cons of this approach

Since both of those would be standard Micro.blog accounts the report/block/mute functionality should work as well as respecting any muted keywords (I’m assuming this works in quoted content, haven’t checked). While this would help ease the burden of discovery, it may increase the burden on Micro.blog with more “report user” requests. It could also lead to fractured conversations if people replied to the automated account instead of following the thread back to the original user. Also the weekly or daily recommendation account would be prone to self-promotion and spamming… so idk.

Follow actions in the timeline

I did this on my own little client which showed the parent conversation first with the replies below it. I had a quick button next to the user I wasn’t following that let me follow them. I was able to quickly expand my follow list, which made my timeline nice and lively. When “seeing replies on the timeline” is enabled for an account, what if there was an indicator that a reply post was to someone you’re not following? And then maybe in the conversation view a follow button next to usernames you aren’t following (like on the “following # users you aren’t following” page)?

Sorting the “following # users you aren’t following”

I would add a last posted timestamp here and sort the list according to that, with the most recently active on top. It can be a burden to open each persons account page to see when they last posted.

Remove non Micro.blog accounts from the tagmoji feeds.

I think if these feeds were cleaned up and made more prominent on the discover UI it would be a nice place to find accounts to follow.

Conclusion

Anyway, these are wish list items and Micro.blog is a very small team. So when I see posts on my timeline complaining about the discover feed I try to think of solutions that don’t require constant attention to curate. But it is a delicate balance to strike, between features that allow discovery and keeping the more toxic nature of social media at bay.

In my personal opinion I like that Micro.blog has erred on the side manual curation for its discovery feed. Yes it is more cumbersome to find people to follow… but I like that? It has made me follow a larger variety of people on Micro.blog than I think I would if not constrained by a limited discovery feature. I also don’t mind the infrequent updates. Once or twice a week is fine by me. I have no urge to visit Discover all that often (which is nice given all the push for services to have you attention 100% of the time)

Just my 2 cents and I’m going to keep thinking on it. :)