Micro.blog Alternative: A Blog Without the Network Attached

Micro.blog and ULTRV agree on nearly everything that matters: no ads, no surveillance, own your URL, thesmall webis worth defending. Where they part company is the shape of the thing you are writing into. Micro.blog is a social platform that produces blogs. ULTRV is a blog platform with no social layer at all. That single difference decides most of the rest.

Micro.blog has been going since 2017, built by Manton Reece, who also wrote a book about independent microblogging. It is one of the few places on the modern web where the indie-web standards are treated as the product rather than a checkbox, and that deserves saying plainly before any of the comparison below.

What Micro.blog gets right

• A small, notably civil community built in — replies, conversations, and a real feed of the people you follow
• Indie-web and fediverse standards as first-class citizens, not add-ons
• Short posts and long posts in the same place, without two different tools
• Automatic cross-posting to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky, so one post can go everywhere
• Custom themes with full template editing, for people who want to write the HTML themselves
• Podcast and video hosting on the Studio tier, including recording in the browser

If you want a small, kind social network where every account is also a proper blog, Micro.blog is a strong choice and one we genuinely like. Four tiers as of August 2026: $5/month for blogging and the fediverse, $10/month Premium for up to five blogs and newsletters, $15/month Family, and $20/month Studio.

The timeline, ActivityPub, and the social layer

This is the section that should decide it for you, in either direction.

• Micro.blog gives your blog a fediverse identity.Your posts federate over ActivityPub, so people on Mastodon can follow and reply to you from their own servers, and the replies land back on your blog. That is a genuinely good idea and ULTRV does not do any part of it.
• The timeline is the front door.You open Micro.blog and see the people you follow, the way you open any social app. Posting is fast, conversations happen, and the writing takes the shape of the room it is in — which for many people is exactly right, and for others is the thing they were trying to escape.
• Cross-posting keeps the other networks fed.Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky automatically; X manually. If your reading and posting life spans several networks, that is real work taken off your hands.
• ULTRV has none of it, on purpose.No timeline, no followers, no replies, no ActivityPub, no cross-posting, no Webmentions. Nobody can follow you inside ULTRV, because there is no inside. Readers subscribe by feed or come back because they meant to.

What a blog without a network looks like

• Longer by default.ULTRV is shaped for posts rather than notes: headlines, tags, static pages, image galleries. Nothing stops you writing three sentences, but nothing is pushing you toward it either.
• A free tier with your own domain on it.Micro.blog includes a custom domain from $5/month and lists no free plan. ULTRV includes custom domains on the free tier, alongside a.ultrv.blogsubdomain, with a single $5/month plan above it — the whole ofpricing.
• Eighty-four themes instead of a template editor.Micro.blog lets you edit templates directly, which is more power and more work. ULTRV has 84 themesthat switch in one click, and no template layer to learn.
• Typed pages.Albums, recipe collections, bookshelves, guestbooks, and now pages are first-class page types with their own URLs and layouts. The rest is on the features page.
• Multiple blogs on any tier.One account, as many blogs as you want. On Micro.blog, up to five blogs arrive with the $10/month Premium plan.
• A terminal client.Both platforms have an API — Micropub there, aREST APIhere — but only ULTRV ships a fullterminal clientwritten in Rust.

Choose Micro.blog if

• You want a small, friendly social network attached to your blog, and the conversations are part of why you write
• ActivityPub, Webmentions, and Micropub are part of the reason you are shopping at all
• Cross-posting to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky would save you real time
• You want to edit templates directly rather than pick from a set
• Podcasts or video are part of the plan

Choose ULTRV if

• You want a blog with no social layer — writing at your own URL, and nothing else in the frame
• A timeline is the thing you were trying to get away from
• You would rather not pay before you have decided whether you will keep writing
• Themes, typed pages, and publishing from a terminal are what you would actually use
• Feed subscribers, not followers, is the relationship you want with readers

Frequently asked questions