[HN Gopher] Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hos...
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Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting
Author : justin-reeves
Score : 99 points
Date : 2025-11-12 13:46 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (heydingus.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (heydingus.net)
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| - [1]: https://micro.blog/about/pricing
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| mnemonet wrote:
| That's a fair point, especially considering everything else
| you get with the plan.
|
| However, the pricing is still a far cry from non-
| decentralized solutions (for example, MUX's _free_ plan
| offers 100K minutes per month [1]) and so the only other
| selling point is joining the fediverse--which is a good
| thing, but hard to get people to convert on (in Bluesky 's
| case the turmoil that is now X was required).
|
| - [1]: https://mux.com/pricing/video
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| $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).
| JimDabell wrote:
| Cloudflare Stream isn't just for live-streaming, it's for
| generic video hosting too. It does transcoding, adaptive
| bitrate, HLS, etc. It's terrible and you shouldn't use it,
| but it does a lot more than just serve static video files
| like R2.
| jadbox wrote:
| Just to add, you should never serve video straight from
| R2 unless you pre-render all your videos for all major
| devices. Otherwise you get very, very subpar device
| buffering performance. Generally use R2 as a cache layer
| over your stream processor (CF Stream).
| tracker1 wrote:
| I may be misremembering, but I thought R2 terms disallowed
| video streaming content... I'm unable to find any
| references to this now, though I didn't do an exhaustive
| search.
| simonw wrote:
| Looks like they dropped that restriction in May 2023:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/
|
| > [...] Finally, we made it clear that customers can
| serve video and other large files using the CDN so long
| as that content is hosted by a Cloudflare service like
| Stream, Images, or R2.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's also nowhere near long enough for most podcasts I've
| listened to.
| rcmjr wrote:
| This is a great little site that might motivate me to leave
| substack
| simonw wrote:
| > Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn't be the
| only game in town.
|
| 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.
| skydhash wrote:
| I believe the bit where HLS is needed is when you want to
| change the format or the resolution on the fly. But browsers
| and othe players are perfectly capable of buffering and seeking
| single video files.
|
| For most media, 1080p is fine enough. Add 720p and you have
| enough for 99% of the world.
| jshen wrote:
| The other issue is that it's expensive. You can put a video on
| youtube for free and they carry the cost and cover it with
| advertising. If you self-host and your videos get a LOT of
| traffic it gets expensive quickly.
| skydhash wrote:
| LOT of traffic is a big if. A lot of videos only have 1k+
| views and I will believe those are mostly drive-by viewing.
| Using a CDN can help you if you go viral.
| dewey wrote:
| A video CDN isn't cheap though, so outsourcing that to
| YouTube is the best option for most people.
| simonw wrote:
| Cloudflare egress is (somehow) free.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I feel people are often unreasonably scared by this sort of
| thing, so here are some numbers to give perspective and aid
| in decision-making.
|
| Bunny CDN charge $5/TB for their volume network, which should
| be pretty good for video distribution, reducing after
| 500TB/month.
|
| At a bitrate of 5Mbps (respectable for 1080p, significant
| overkill for more static types of content, as technical stuff
| will tend to be), 1TB is 444 hours. If, like OP, you publish
| 90-second videos, that's 17,777 complete watches per
| terabyte. Depending on your situation, that might sound like
| not much or like a lot.
|
| Put the other way round, at 5Mbps and $5/TB, each watch-hour
| costs $0.01125, a bit over one cent, and it takes 3,555
| people watching your 90 second video to cost one cent.
|
| For the sort of scale that most people are dealing with, it's
| simply not an issue.
|
| I don't know if bots upset this balance. They may.
|
| If you actually are spending more than a terabyte per month
| on it, then for technical audiences at least, I suspect that
| if you invited donations to specifically cover hosting costs
| (something along the lines of "I host these videos myself
| because ads and relying on YouTube are both bad for society;
| if you feel inclined, you can donate to help cover the cost,
| currently about $X/month") you'd very quickly get a surplus.
| Or for longer-form content, charge something for 4K video
| (which costs 4.5C/ per watch-hour at 20Mbps and $5/TB) and
| let that subsidise the free 1080p (costing 1.125C/ per watch-
| hour) stream.
|
| (On the $5/TB figure: my $5/month Vultr VPS includes 1TB per
| month, and charges $10/TB after that. Some VPS providers
| include a lot more; a Hetzner EUR3.49/month VPS in Europe
| includes 20TB then charges EUR1/TB. But remember, if you host
| video from one point only, that it is unlikely to work well
| for people halfway round the planet. See another of my
| comments in this thread for description.)
|
| As for storage: each 90-second 5Mbps video is 56.25MB, and at
| a rate of $0.01/GB/month, each one will cost you $0.00675 per
| year to keep. Were you to post one 90-second video every
| single day and keep them all online, your monthly bill would
| grow by about $0.20 each year.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Unfortunately, proximity can be important.
|
| I grew up in Australia, and more recently moved to India. Both
| are well away from the USA, where we who visit find the
| internet to be bafflingly fast just because of low latency
| (since most developers aren't _at all_ careful about avoiding
| request waterfalls, so even ignoring restricted bandwidth,
| 200ms of added latency makes the page load take several seconds
| longer).
|
| Australia wasn't great for playing high-bitrate videos _hosted
| in the USA_. With a high-quality 4G broadband link (rural
| western Victoria, clear line of sight to the tower 400m away
| that might host under 300 subscribers; at least 55 /25Mbps via
| cheap phones when I measured it eight years ago), somehow you
| couldn't actually download them at more than a few megabits per
| second at best. I think this is mostly _latency_ effects, even
| though TCP is supposed to speed up.
|
| India is _terrible_ for playing high-bitrate videos hosted in
| the USA. A 100Mbps fibre connection can be completely
| undermined by what I imagine to be terrible peering
| arrangements on _all_ broadband ISPs I've interacted with
| (Hireach, Airtel, Vybe), and files hosted in the US may trickle
| across at half a megabit per second or even less. Right now I
| can copy a file from my VPS in Australia at 1.6Mbps.
|
| And so CDNs are, very sadly, rather valuable.
| skydhash wrote:
| That's solved by CDN.
| hamdingers wrote:
| So it remains an unsolved problem for self-hosting.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Depends on what exactly you mean with "self-hosting". As
| in you can run your own dedicated servers across the
| world, with one or more providers, and run all the
| software yourself, have your own CDN. Varnish works great
| for that. If you're limited to "self-hosting as in hosted
| in my home" then yeah it gets harder. Maybe P2P/P2P-like
| thing could help if you're dealing with public content,
| like PeerTube?
| simonw wrote:
| Sure, but CDNs for static content feel to me like effectively
| a solved problem in 2025.
|
| There are plenty of good providers and some of them are
| practically free.
|
| I mean sure, if you want to roll your _own_ CDN by hosting
| boxes in colos across multiple continents and applying
| geographical load balancing via DNS you 're taking on a whole
| lot of extra complexity, but I think outsourcing that to
| Cloudflare or Fastly or Fly.io or whomever is a reasonable
| strategy that still counts as "self-hosting", at least in
| comparison to using YouTube.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I _want_ self-hosting to mean only hosting (as in, speaking
| HTTP) from servers that I control. I acknowledge this is
| not exclusively how the term is used any more, but I do
| think it's still at least a preferable _goal_.
|
| I want to self-host things. Currently I use a VPS. I'm
| planning on trying out hosting from home. Either way, if I
| get into doing much multi-megabit-per-second video stuff,
| hosting of _that_ bit will definitely be going behind some
| CDN.
| whynotmakealt wrote:
| Hmm, I am Indian and I'd love to experiment with the setup, I
| have a 40 mbps fibre and I think my upload speed is very
| limited and I'd love if there are ways to replicate your
| setup? (maybe any websites which can do what you basically
| did and give me some stats which I can later share here?)
| bradgessler wrote:
| I just setup private video for https://beautifulruby.com and
| can confirm the trickiest part is setting up and hosting HLS.
|
| I extracted a RubyGem at https://github.com/beautifulruby/hls
| that I use to point at a folder full of videos, then my scripts
| converts them into HLS and uploads them to a private Tigris S3
| bucket. I then have to rewrite playlists from the server with
| pre-signed S3 URLs.
|
| It's not that it's difficult per se, but it does require a
| meticulous attention to detail to put all the pieces together.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Why would you do this instead of just using html video tags?
| simonw wrote:
| The video tag needs something to link to, so you still have
| to solve the hosting problem somehow.
|
| The weird m3u8 trick gets you better streaming and seeking
| performance, plus different video quality depending on the
| device and network connection.
| tethys wrote:
| Official announcement (that gets straight to the point):
| https://www.manton.org/2025/11/11/microblog-studio.html
| james-bcn wrote:
| Now that Vimeo has been taken over by Bending Spoons it's good to
| have more hosting options.
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