I’ve been using Feedbin to consume (micro)posts on social platforms so that I can use the full prowess of a feed reader’s ability to organize and serve content with custom rules on top. One of the key enabling aspects of that is how Micro.blog generates excellent RSS/JSON feeds for its user profiles, which also works for Mastodon users.

But the trouble is a feed reader is only proving useful for consuming social posts. Something is social only if we can easily interact with it. What I realized is that since Micro.blog-generated feeds link to the original posts via their title and date elements, there’s no way to visit a post’s view on Micro.blog, where one can reply and interact. This means currently one is forced to manually browse and hunt a post on the native Micro.blog interface. I could think of two possible solutions to this problem.

The first solution is if we could search posts within our own Micro.blog Timeline, or even on a Micro.blog profile. I’m not sure if Manton is considering the same or has already discarded it for some reason. It would be pretty useful to have search anyway, which would make that part more powerful than Twitter and Mastodon.

The other option is to have something akin to what Mastodon does with v4.0, wherein after you paste the URL of an external post in your Mastodon instance, you can interact directly with said post. So if I want to reply to a post from Mastodon, Tumblr or any other supported platform really via Micro.blog, it would be pretty neat just to paste its link on Micro.blog and respond.

The only workaround I’ve found so far is to manually add the external link as a Bookmark on Micro.blog and then hit Reply. But as you can imagine, that’s cumbersome and takes a lot of time.

I’m essentially thinking what if Micro.blog could easily reply to any post on the Internet? That would be pretty rad, and the intriguing part is it’s almost there.

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