As we look for new ways to facilitate discovery on Micro.blog, I wanted to recap one of our original approaches to helping you find people to follow: Micro Monday. If you are new around here, you may have seen folks making Micro Monday recommendations and wondered what that’s all about. Here’s everything you need to know about our platform’s weekly ritual!

We launched Micro Monday on January 8, 2018. Micro.blog had just opened up to the public in December, and people were eager to find other people to follow. The idea was inspired by Follow Friday, the Twitter convention, but we wanted to distinguish ourselves from Twitter, and Monday was a day that started with an M. 😊

We also wanted to encourage people to think a bit differently, and rather than recommending a long list of Twitter handles (which I rarely clicked through because it was too much work to figure out who to follow), we strongly suggested that a Micro Monday post consist of one recommendation plus a short description of why someone would want to follow that person. (If you have multiple people you want to recommend on the same Monday, feel free to make multiple Micro Monday posts!)

If you use the phrase “Micro Monday” in your recommendation, it will automatically be added to the Micro Monday feed. You’ll also get a special Micro Monday pin on your account page. We generally add Micro Monday recommendations to the Discover timeline as well.

In March 2018, we launched the Micro Monday podcast. (Subscribe here.) Manton had been working on a podcasting feature for Micro.blog, and I wanted to test it. We will publish Episode 65 tomorrow. Each episode features a member of the Micro.blog community. It has been a great pleasure to host this show and talk to so many of the people behind the microblogs we enjoy. (Your Micro Monday recommendations help me find new people to interview, too!)

This month, June 2019, we launched a Micro Monday newsletter, to complement the podcast and provide updates and selections of some of the posts that caught our attention.

Update, September 2020: This year, we have also been doing informal polls to help like-minded people find each other. I call them roll calls. Here are some of the roll call topics so far.

I hope this inspires folks to add their Micro Monday recommendations tomorrow and every Monday.

(A post about Micro Monday would not be complete without a shoutout to @smokey and his regular Micro Monday postings. He maintains a page of his recommendations on his blog too, a great source for finding people to follow.)