Pico: A New Android Client for Micro.blog
I don’t use Android, but Pico by Belle B. Cooper’s new app Pico looks like a great choice if you do and want to use Micro.blog. It’s also [open source]. Neat.
I also enjoyed this part of her introduction post:
More recently I tried out Mastodon. Mastodon feels a lot like Twitter to me in terms of the tone and the content you'll see there. For those who like the idea of Twitter but find it an uncomfortable place to hang out, this is great. Personally, I don't like Twitter at all anymore. I don't like memes, or internet culture, or silly jokes, or random thoughts from random people. That's the stuff that Twitter—and now Mastodon—is great at, but it's not what I want.
From my limited experience with Mastodon it seems like it wants to be the same kind of thing as Twitter, but less centralized so that if you don’t want to play in the same sandbox with white supremacists (or whatever), you can just not be a part of that instance, stay on instances which disallow them, and it won’t exist for you.
Micro.blog on the other hand is just a social networking layer built on top of RSS and other web standards. Manton will also let you pay him $5 to host a blog on his server, but you can just hook up your RSS from your own blog for free and get the benefit of a social network. The way I look at it, they’re both more an less ambitious than one and other in different ways, but I really like Micro.blog’s approach, because it will still have value even if it doesn’t get all that big. Also, podcasting with it is awesome, easy, and one of the most affordable ways.
Belle is also ½ of the fabulous Exist.io, which is a service you try if your doing any kind of health tracking and wanted to actually make sense of it.