I’m a bit late to comment on this: Micro.blog has released another great blogging tool - summaries:

When automatically cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and LinkedIn, the summary will now be included for long-form posts with a title.

Ok. But what does it mean and why it’s so great? To explain, let me explain my old process for long-form posts (posts that are longer than 300 characters, and usually come with a title).

Among Micro.blog core features is its ability to connect to your other social media accounts (like Meta’s Threads, Bluesky, and even Twitter back when it was Twitter and not the cesspool it is today) and post a link back to the post you’re writing on Micro.blog. So, this post you’re reading now will automatically show on Mastodon and Bluesky (in my case, since that’s where I chose to connect to) without me needing to log in and post to these services manually, linking back to this post here. In theory, anyway.

Because Bluesky and Mastodon have a character limit and most people there won’t read a full-length post even if it was possible, I had to create a summary of the post: I’d explain in one to three sentences what this post is about and then include a link back to my post here. I tried to automate this summary, but even if I had it working somehow through Hugo’s functions (which I didn’t), the summaries would still be manually written.

What Manton did is connect these summaries with AI. It’s the same AI tool you see everywhere that sums up what a post is about, only this time, it’s me, the author of this post, who chooses to turn it on and gets to see how the AI captures my post—not your AI, which might decide I just wrote something about gardening or snake capturing or something worse.

The result is a summary made by AI that passes through a human “quality check” before it’s released to the wild. Of course I also have a choice, as with everything AI on Micro.blog, and I could turn this off if AI was to gives me the gibbies - but it doesn’t, because here on Micro.blog, it is used responsibly and with consent, something I wish would be done more in general.

Here’s how AI summarised this post so far:

“Micro.blog has introduced an AI-powered summarization feature for long-form posts that enhances cross-posting to other social media by providing concise summaries.”

It’s not bad. It’s not great, but I can work with it in a dedicated Summary window from inside Mirco.blog—something that didn’t exist before. I’m changing it to:

“Micro.blog has introduced an AI-powered summarization feature for long-form posts that helps to automate cross-posting to other social media by providing AI-assisted summaries, allowing the author to tailor summaries to their needs.”

This is another example of how Micro.blog works for the author to help the blog. This is something I don’t see often enough.