Micro.blog offers an indie alternative to YouTube with its ‘Studio’ video hosting plan
The core of Micro.blog’s mission is to make it easy for people to own their presence on the web. At first, it was a simple blog host that also incorporated a Twitter-like social timeline that put short (title-less) and long (titled) posts on equal footing. In the years since its 2017 launch, Manton Reece — Micro.blog’s founder — has added a plethora of features that expand upon that mission. Here’s a list off the top of my head:
All of this is hosted on your own website, (optionally, but strongly encouraged) at your own domain name. I’ve never seen anything else like it.
There are plans ranging from $1/month to $15/month that include subsets of these features, depending on how much a blogging “power user” you are.
Reece’s next big foray with Micro.blog: video hosting, which launched yesterday.
Micro.blog Studio adds longer video hosting for your blog, with uploads up to 20 minutes. You can read some of the technical bits here. It can automatically copy videos to PeerTube and Bluesky too.
That’s a quaint description for what promises to be a significant challenge. Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. And that’s exactly why Reece has pursued it. It’s not good for the open web for so much of its video content to live centralized at one host. John Gruber lamented this following Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension:
The big problem is YouTube. With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. I don’t know what the answer to that is, technically, but we ought to start working on it with urgency.
Just like Micro.blog encourages people to own their text, reading lists, podcasts, photos, and social network interactions at their own domain, that ethos now extends to videos too.
One of the great things about Micro.blog is how it enables the Publish to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) framework. That’s manifested in features like its automatic crossposting to Bluesky, Flickr, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Medium, Nostr, Pixelfed, Threads, and Tumblr. And manual crossposting elsewhere. This allows the “source of truth” to be at your own website that you control, but you won’t miss out on conversations and audiences in other places. With expanded video hosting, Reece has added PeerTube as another automatic crossposting destination, and hopes to also enable YouTube if and when Google approves his application. It’s not about only posting to your website, but instead centralizing your website as the first and primary place you post and then getting your text, images, audio, and now video out to other networks from there.
... continue reading