You can actually do almost everything on micro.blog for free: you can use the web interface to post/reply/comment and can syndicate from your RSS feed into the public timeline from your own site — no cost. It’s $5 per month to have a hosted micro blog, and I think there’s another tier for micro podcast hosting. I use my Hugo blog to post into the system and have been thinking of hooking up my hand rolled tilde club feed, too ... if I ever get around to it. I’d say that for free it’s worth checking out, as there’s a lot of common ethos between m.b and tildes.
Alan