Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting
9 comments
·November 12, 2025kstrauser
Just wanted to say that I love Micro.blog. It finally got me off my own Hugo plus voodoo setup because it’s so freaking ergonomic, and decently priced.
I had fun playing with SSGs for years. I’m having more fun just writing posts and letting them get broadcast to Mastodon on wherever else I’ve configured them at the same time. It wasn’t clear to me until I read Manton’s book, but its goal is to be a social media service that’s built completely on open web standards that everyone can participate with.
mnemonet
It's a great idea and challenging YouTube's monopoly is noble, but I don't see how the economics work out. The current pricing [1] charges $20/month for videos up to 20 minutes of video, which is reasonable but still far too expensive for most people to use.
It's a great first step, but I struggle to see who this would be used by. So far Bluesky seems to be the only decentralized platform that's broken into the mainstream, and it'll only be more difficult for the video market.
tracker1
Was curious about Cloudflare's pricing as a comparison... it looks like $1 per 1000 minutes viewed, which means a 10 minute video will cost #1 to have 100 views... That just seems prohibitively expensive to me, it's pretty much 100% of the lower end of video advertising just for delivery fees.
I know there are competing and cheaper services, but it still seems to be a big burden to get into. I've been trying to use Rumble a bit more, as well as appreciate the entry of Pepperbox, Floatplane and others. It's still a bit of a mess and none of them match the 10' experience of YouTube on Android TV, but it's getting better.
simonw
$1/1,000 minutes is the pricing for Cloudflare's "Cloudflare Stream" product, which is specifically about live video streaming: https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/pricing/
If you're not streaming live I believe you can serve video content out of R2 instead, which still somehow only charges for storage but offers completely free outbound bandwidth (egress).
simonw
Making a 20 minute long video is a sizable time investment. I imagine many people who are willing to invest that much effort into creating content would be happy to pay $20/month for hosting.
tethys
Official announcement (that gets straight to the point): https://www.manton.org/2025/11/11/microblog-studio.html
james-bcn
Now that Vimeo has been taken over by Bending Spoons it's good to have more hosting options.
rcmjr
This is a great little site that might motivate me to leave substack
Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025?
My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work.
What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections?
UPDATE: Looks like this offers some answers to my questions: https://help.micro.blog/t/micro-blog-studio/4081
The hardest bit appears to be HLS - HTTP Live Streaming - the thing where a video gets divided up into lots of little .ts segment files and served via a m3u8 playlist.