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.

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.

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

Btw, indexing issue is another big problem on this platform.