Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas, for The Outsiders. Great show. First time I had seen it. š
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Made a short video of driving up to Dallas today, with a stop in Waco.
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Michael Tsai blogging about the Apple-funded study on DMA fallout:
Now Apple is acting as though it and end users are the only parties that matter, so by implication the money must have been wasted. Thereās no consideration that maybe these funds helped some developers stay in business or invest more in the products, both of which would be beneficial to the platform as a whole (including Apple).
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Oh cool, Jarrod Blundy's blog post about Micro.blog Studio made it on Hacker News.
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Surprised to read that Sonder has gone bankrupt, despite the Marriott partnership. It seemed like Sonder was a good balance halfway between hotel and Airbnb. I booked one last year in Arizona... although I got the date wrong and ended up having to stay somewhere else!
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Thanks @jarrod for the kind words about Micro.blog Studio. His post actually does a better job of answering the "why" of video hosting than my own announcement post!
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Good move from Google for privacy, building servers similar to Appleās private cloud compute. From The Verge:
The compromise is to ship more difficult AI requests to a cloud platform, called Private AI Compute, which it describes as a āsecure, fortified spaceā offering the same degree of security youād expect from on-device processing. Sensitive data is available āonly to you and no one else, not even Google.ā
Markdown in RSS
Dave Winer has been updating the web page about Markdown in RSS. This is an RSS extension that adds source:markdown elements to your feed. Micro.blog supports this by default for all blogs.
For one of my recent microblog posts, it looks like this in my feed:
<item>
<link>https://www.manton.org/2025/...</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2025 15:17:49 -0600</pubDate>
<guid>http://manton.micro.blog/2025/...</guid>
<description><p>Watching <a href="https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/137113">Edge of Tomorrow</a>... </p></description>
<source:markdown>Watching [Edge of Tomorrow](https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/137113)...</source:markdown>
</item>You can see that the Markdown is a little cleaner, without the escaping that is needed for HTML tags in RSS. I've truncated the text here for readability.
Micro.blog works natively with Markdown, so whenever you use the bold or link buttons, for example, it generates Markdown that is run through Hugo when publishing to your blog. The RSS feed simply includes the original Markdown in addition to the published HTML.
Micro.blog Studio
We've launched the first version of a new subscription plan called Micro.blog Studio. This plan joins the standard Micro.blog hosting, the Micro.blog Premium plan, and our Micro.blog Family plan, providing options at a bunch of price points:
Micro.one: $1
Micro.blog: $5
Micro.blog Premium: $10
Micro.blog Family: $15
Micro.blog Studio: $20
Micro.blog: $5
Micro.blog Premium: $10
Micro.blog Family: $15
Micro.blog Studio: $20
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.
I'm pretty happy with this lineup and think it will serve us well for many years without changes. The standard plan was $5 when it launched in 2017, and it remains that price today, but it is wildly more capable than it was back then. It's unusual for blog hosting to stay the same price for so long. Feedbin comes to mind as another blog-adjacent service that has stuck to a flat $5 price seemingly forever.
I think of Studio as a new 1.0 product built into the larger Micro.blog platform. We have much more we plan to add to this in the future, including for podcasts. You can imagine new web-based podcast recording and editing, so that podcasting is more accessible to people, as well as an update to our companion app Wavelength.
Thanks everyone for your support, especially the folks who have upgraded to Studio even if they aren't sure they will use it much yet! As we approach the holidays and the year winds down, I'm excited about what more we can build for the open web heading into 2026.
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Another great game from Wemby. Unreal. 5 blocks, 5 assists, 6 3s, a bunch of points. This season is so much fun. š
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Tim Berners-Lee is the guest on the latest episode of Decoder:
You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. In the old days, the early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website. So that feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all the other people on the web, that is what we are still fighting for, and in fact, we need to rebuild.
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Starting to roll out the new Micro.blog Studio subscription plan. I blogged last week with an overview. I just created a help page with a few more technical details.
There will be tweaks and improvements as we go, based on feedback.
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Cold morning in Austin. Lots to do. Working at the coffee shop but accidentally left my headphones at home! I know, life is hard. š¤Ŗ
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Started watching: The Diplomat Season 3. Good first two episodes. Also great to see both Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford on the show, gives it even more of a West Wing vibe. šŗ
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Watching Edge of Tomorrow. Love this movie. We put it on randomly sometimes, have seen it dozens of times. Still holding out hope for a sequel. šæ
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I didnāt know about subway surfing. Tragic. From a story in The New Yorker:
We blame the digital platforms, and deride these kids as idiot stuntmen, addictsāeven as the savviest adults among us exhibit a similar dependence on platforms to tell them who to be.
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Lily Allen’s West End Girl feels like a complete album, meant to be listened to in track order. Really good. (Not safe for work!) Queued it up this morning on my walk to find coffee and wi-fi. š¶
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Working on video improvements ahead of tomorrow’s launch. One thing I like about the automatic cross-posting is that for videos less than 3 minutes, Micro.blog copies them natively to Bluesky, reassembling from HLS to a single file. You can see this in this Bluesky post.
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Watched: Little AmĆ©lie or the Character of Rain. Glad I was able to see this in the theater today. Beautiful. šæ
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Sometimes I forget about the way Micro.blog archives any web page you link to or bookmark, including images and styling. I just checked the database and there are hundreds of thousands of web pages and millions of resources. Slowly turning into a personal, miniature Internet Archive.
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Thinking about how much code is written by AI is becoming less interesting to me. We didn't used to care how much code was written by literal copy and pasting. Although maybe we should have? š¤Ŗ
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Iāve seen the new Mac ad on TV several times now and really like it. Thereās obviously something special about it. Didnāt realize at first that it was voiced by Jane Goodall.
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Watched: Pluribus S1E1, We Is Us. Not sure what to think of this yet. Rhea Seehorn is good, but want to watch a little more to see where the story is going. šŗ
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Not sure if this is fair or not, but I think of Bird Bird Biscuit as a hipster version of Chick-fil-A. And to be clear I love both.
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If you are on the TestFlight beta for Micro.blog iOS, you will have seen our experiments to enable Liquid Glass. I'm admitting defeat today, going to opt out of the new UI for the next version. There are too many little glitches.
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OpenAI continues to shoot for the moon. Based on a tweet by Sam Altman, they seem fairly clear-eyed about it. It’s a gamble that AI will be needed everywhere. OpenAI will either succeed or fail spectacularly.
I would bet on OpenAI long before the likes of Perplexity and startups riding only hype.
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Scott McNulty blogging about the new Star Trek LEGO set:
$400 is a lot of money for some pieces of plastic, but how can you put a price on happiness?
The minifigures look great. Wish I could just buy a few of them without the full set. We have no space for more LEGOs.
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Trying something new! A short video to start my morning. Coffee at Cosmic. āļø
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Enjoyed this video with Matt Mullenweg and John Borthwick. I thought I was familiar with Betaworks, but I had never actually heard John speak. Some interesting thoughts here about the future.
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Watching the Wicked special on TV. Iām fine with it being one long commercial for the movie. Canāt wait. š§¹
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My blog has always been a mix of personal posts and business topics. Itās not a collection of press releases. Itās not perfect and itās not everything. I think where we often go wrong is judging people harshly from a snapshot of their life, mostly out of context. Much better to look for the good.
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Staying busy this week. If I stop to let my mind wander, I can start to feel grief inching closer, like a dark fog coming over the water. Gotta stay on ground away from the coast, with things to do, for now.
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From the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI depositions, there are a couple more details around the firing of Sam Altman, but it appears mostly the same drama. Smoke but no fire. However, there was this fact that I did not know:
According to the deposition, during Altmanās ouster, Anthropic reached out with a proposal to merge with OpenAI and take over leadership of the company.
Video plan preview, launching Monday
I posted a couple months ago about improving Micro.blog's video hosting. Not just fixing the existing problems but greatly expanding what it can do. I've been thinking about how this impacts current and future customers, and I'm ready to share the next step.
Technical plumbing for the new video support is already rolling out. It's the biggest change to how uploads work since we first added photo hosting. Instead of a single hosted file, videos are processed into chunks at multiple resolutions to support quick playback.
All Micro.blog subscribers will get 1-minute video uploads. There will be a new subscription plan to increase the limit up to 20-minute videos. The new plan will also be the place we add new features for podcasts.
Videos hosted on Micro.blog will automatically cross-post to PeerTube and Bluesky at launch. POSSE! YouTube will be enabled whenever Google approves us. Mastodon will get a link back to your blog post to watch the video.
I have heard the feedback that it appears too limiting to have only 1-minute videos on the rest of our plans. However, Micro.blog and Micro.blog Premium are a good value with their existing features. There's a simplicity to not needing an asterisk on each plan for how long videos can be.
After it ships, the complete set of plans will look like this:
Micro.one: $1 ā cheap, while supplies last!
Micro.blog: $5 ā standard hosting
Micro.blog Premium: $10 āĀ up to 5 blogs plus more features
Micro.blog Family: $15 āĀ up to 5 members per blog
Micro.blog Studio: $20 āĀ coming soon!
Each plan includes everything at the lower tiers. This is a lot for us and for users to juggle, but I believe the best way we can keep prices low is by adding new features at higher tiers instead of raising the price on the $5 and $10 plans.
For comparison, here are some other services and their prices:
Tumblr Premium: $7 ā up to 10 minutes
WordPress Premium: $18 ā less than 2 GB recommended
Vimeo Plus: $12 ā up to 5 GB
Twitter / X Premium: $8 ā up to 2 hours
Bluesky: $0 āĀ up to 3 minutes, 100 MB
Mastodon: $? āĀ less than 100 MB
It's all over the map. The pricing we have in Micro.blog feels right to me, and hopefully will be sustainable enough that we can support and expand it well into the future. And of course, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are there if you want to directly monetize your videos, or if you want the $0 price and don't mind feeding the ad machine.
I canāt wait to share more about how this works in Micro.blog. It officially launches next week.
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Listening to the final episode of Under the Radar. Congrats to David and Marco on a great 10-year run!
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Leaning heavily into the YOLO mindset for travel planning right now.
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The second of three big things for today: updated Mac app! This has the movies and TV show search that I previewed earlier this week.
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Added one of the oldest requested features to Micro.blog today: editing the slug for a post. There's a new page for managing URL paths. A couple other things will go here later, like batch delete, to avoid cluttering the main editing interface.
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Good morning! Coffee at Houndstooth. Big day, going to release the new Mac app and blog about the upcoming video hosting. Maybe a new web feature too. āļø
