I don’t think self-hosted will ever happen. Centralisation wins for consumer services. This has been proven even with the crypto shitshow, which revolves by and large around a few centralised platforms.

On the other hand, are micro-blogs so different from TikTok stories, other than the format of the content (text vs. video)?

I don’t think self hosting can win either. As you’re saying. I do like the idea of everything like micro blogs not having to be on a central site. Though even that seems unlikely. It would be nice to have the format of blogs again where there’s different subdomains or domains and you can’t directly click thru to get to the rest of the “social media” bigger org.

I sort of described substack here but a bit more personalization and independence if possible.

is geocities.com available? i like being old enough to witness how back and forth the pendulum swings...

There is NeoCities. https://neocities.org/browse

Microblogs are _the thing_ just have always been "too early". Not sure _how_ this will work but I strongly believe that microblogs are the _end goal_ here.

Or just a personal webpage with a guestbook.