I originally was looking for a self-hosted, federated blog, that wasn't American and didn't rely on US servers. The options I explored were:

• Ghost: depends on mailgun (US tech)
• Plume: not maintained
• write freely: not accessible
• Wordpress: made by American big tec, requires PHP

Micro.blog is American and not selfhosted, but at least it's small tech. So I thought I'd give it a whirl. Unfortunately, my initial impressions are not promising.

First, getting stuff copied to european servers for an initial blog took some doing. I think the intent is you start in the US, then move to the EU, or something. But it took quite a bit of fiddling to get my domain to even save.

Second, I keep my bookmarks in Google Chrome. It looks like none of the html bookmark import options can import a chrome export. They say they found several hundred bookmarks, then don't actually import anything. No errors in the logs.

Third, the plugin to embed my Finished reading bookshelf just...doesn't work. Once again, No error anywhere, nothing. Just displays no books.

Fourth, the google chrome extension is unavailable. Not even an error about it being unsupported, it's just gone. And it's not in any of the other stores like the edge store, so those of us running other chromium based browsers can't get it. Maybe this is the way to import chrome bookmarks? If so, it's impossible to actually use.

Yes, I recognize this is a small business, probably with one or two employees. However, because they've chosen to create a closed-source proprietary platform, they're unable to keep up with the existing featureset, and nobody else can dive in to help.