Thats part of it. Adding rel=me links is possible on my microblog site, but I don't necessarily have reciprocal links on my social Media profiles. Those don't necessarily have to be of the rel=me variety, thankfully.
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IndieAuth is another lovely example of shit that should work but doesn't because they failed to consider a different use case.
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If I didn't have a cheap account on a cpanel host I wasn't already making use of, I wouldn't have bothered.
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Most web hosts have fairly straightforward ways to install WordPress. It's definitely better than it used to be.
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the scary thing is: I don't think the proponents of the service see and understand that. They just see "not Twitter" and think it's good.

Pretty much. And they're basically building their own filter bubble.

ouch as in painful or?

Here's my blog post on making a self-hosted WordPrss blog work with micro.blog [phoneboy.com]. Still not convinced it's worth all the trouble.

@kdfrawg then they require hand-maintenance. Which can be tedius.

It's one reason why I like Jekyll (which phoneboy.com and phoneboy.org run on) because the sites are just static HTML files and I get some benefit of a CMS when I want to reskin the entire site.

Sounds about right.