Sep 24, 2025

I’m always juggling a lot of different tasks at the same time, from small bug fixes to major new features. When I keep hearing about the same thing over and over, I’ll jot down notes for how it might work in Micro.blog, or I’ll run experiments, but sometimes it stays in the back of my mind for months. Eventually there’s a sort of tipping point and I know it’s time to give it my attention.

It was like that this week for video hosting.

Video has been a weak spot in Micro.blog, especially the lack of clarity on how long a video can be, because we count file size and not duration. Many other platforms also wrestle with how to support video. Bluesky took about a year to add video.

At the same time, we’re seeing how people use podcast hosting, which we now offer even in our $1/month Micro.one subscription. And there are renewed efforts such as the alternateEnclosure tag to apply the openness of podcasting to video. Whatever we do for video, because of the costs of hosting and bandwidth, it should balance the fact that we try to offer inexpensive hosting for photos and audio.

This is an early heads-up on what I’m thinking:

• Rebuild our video infrastructure to support HLS, so video loads quickly.
• Switch to a duration-based limit for new uploads: 1 minute, across all of our plans.
• Add a new pricing tier for people who want longer videos, up to 20 minutes. I like this because it’s easier to understand and is also much more capable. The trade-off is that 1 minute might be a downgrade for some existing users. We have never made our plans more limited, and we have never raised our prices, but video is a special case, and it feels like the right time to have a better, sustainable path forward for it.