By making it a paid service, the author effectively kills two of those issues straight away - No ads and reduced fake news issues.

The ads claim is obvious, they don't host ads because they don't need the revenue. However, that fake news is defeated is less obvious. Fake news largely spreads on free platforms by bot armies, which need to pay $5/mo per bot, making them highly expensive and reducing the likelihood they exist there at all. People will still post and shill shit that is fake, but it's less of a problem in a social network if only the minority who actually buy into the fake news or other garbage are spreading it.

In addition, there are no global timelines or auto-generated trends or retweets at this point. There is Discover feed [1] which is manually curated. So, in case you do see the fake or spam posts, that would be primarily because you follow the accounts. There are also mechanisms to block users which should address the replies spams.

Edit: Added the link to discover feed, accessible without an account too.

[1]: https://micro.blog/discover

I forgot the Discover feed is publicly accessible, it's a good way of getting a sense of what the community is like.

There's also the 2 min video tour that they just released today, and should probably have been added to the front page of the website:

http://help.micro.blog/2018/video-intro/

I don't see the problem with retweets. Sure it can be used for bad, but also for good.

I think micro.blog is worse for failing to have easily ways of sharing content.