I’ve been having more fun on micro.blog lately in large part to the excellent work of Matt Langford and his delightful Tiny Theme for Micro.blog.

When I saw Tiny Theme I instantly appreciated the design and support for all the capabilities that micro.blog provides. I liked how Matt had built in support for some of the most popular plug-ins, including Sven Dahlstrand’s great collection. Plus Tiny Theme is super fast. I switched my site to it and have been having a great time.

Matt has pushed new features and improvements on a weekly basis (or more) since release. It has been fun to see the continued improvements. He recently started integrating Tinylytics, a new service by Vincent Ritter, and Matt’s enthusiasm for the service, and built-in support coming in Tiny Theme, was enough to get me to sign up for a paid account.

Great blogging platforms have these wonderful developer communities that form around them. I’ve hosted my blog on several different technologies, and the one thing I miss about WordPress is the massive (almost too massive) community of themes and plugins built around it.

But no blogging platform has developed an economically supported ecosystem around it. I think that is an opportunity.

Matt has a PayPal link in his Tiny Theme documentation which I was happy to see and use to send a Thank You. That is fine, but it is hardly the way to support an on-going effort like maintaining a theme.

The introduction of Tiny Theme added a lot of value to my micro.blog experience. Not just for the service directly, but also for other plugin developers too. I’d love to support a Community Fund to continue to support the development of additional themes and plugins.

Could we have a micro.blog Community Fund? Micro.blog already has different tiers of service. Imagine if I could “upgrade” with a $50/year “Community Fund” add-on. Those funds would go to micro.blog, and then be distributed to theme and plugin developers to help make the ecosystem even better.

Distribution of funds would need some thought, and should be more editorial and algorithmic. You would not want to game a system of plugin developers seeking installs to drive funding. And you would want to fund things that have no usage yet. But creating an economic system to drive community innovation would be a great step to a sustainable, independent, and thriving platform still at human scale.

Maybe Micro.blog creator Manton will find this intriguing. 😎