Democratising publishing
john.onolan.org
john.onolan.org
It’s been a dream. The core product for that site is a daily newsletter. On ghost it gets higher opens rates and more engagement than via the previous email backend. Build is far simpler too.
The clincher for me for Ghost(Pro) is that if you use your own hosted version of Ghost you need to plug into something else for sending email newsletters - which for the number of subscribers in this instance for a daily newsletter plus weekly wrap-up would cost a fortune. With Ghost(Pro) it’s all wrapped in. And their support is superb.
I found Ghost to be too "on rails" and much more robust than what we need, so it felt like paying for software that sat mostly unused. In my admittedly unskilled experience (I am learning webdev, but not anywhere close to a pro, yet) it felt like I was using WordPress with a different name, which was a turn off.
I have Drupal 11 spun up on VPS but I have not had a moment to sit down and start really digging into it, yet. If anyone has some smaller CMS to recommend (even paid is fine, if the prices is reasonable) that allows for a nice WYSIWYG editor, user accounts and roles, code editor when needed, I'd love to try it.
Honestly, you’re actually not going to find much better for a simple multi-user setup than Ghost. It may have a lot of features built around newsletters and analytics that you’re not using, but the thing is, they’re there because it’s essentially throwing you the package it thinks will benefit most users, rather than forcing you to choose a bunch of plugins. If it feels overkill, that’s only because they wanted to cover the broadest use cases, rather than forcing users to decide on a package of 30 plugins, by a myriad number of developers.
I have used a lot of CMS platforms and I think you will find the complexity actually goes up from Ghost in most cases. (And if simplicity is your goal … you’re not going to find that with Drupal, which is extremely enterprise-oriented these days.)
If you think you’re getting overcharged for it, I’d recommend looking into self-hosting. Ghost is an extremely easy piece of software to run in a Docker instance on a shoebox somewhere. I do it myself for a couple of small sites. It’s really not that bad.
I am also looking at October, which sounds like it checks some of my boxes, but we'll see. Thankfully, there is no time-table for this project, so I can try a few things out before we settle.
Also, I know that you have said you’re willing to pay and you’re not necessarily looking for FOSS, but I will point out there was some licensing drama with October a few years ago that led to a full-on fork: https://wintercms.com/blog/post/we-have-forked-october-cms
You may also find Kirby a good fit: https://getkirby.com
Will be trying both Winter and Kirby this weekend. I am really struggling getting Ghost up and running properly (LEMP stack). It seems to install fine, but breaks my nginx config so when I go to access the admin page (https://<my.domain>/ghost/) I get a 404 error.
Is it possible for some clever business person to start a non-profit, amass a bundle of money, convert to for-profit, and then own the bundle of money to do with as they see fit? If yes, I'd assume there would be tax implications in that the bundle of money would be some ~70% after paying the gov.
But yeah it can be done.
Not a lawyer, but as the Ghost Foundation is not a charity, the trustees can currently do whatever they want with the money.
DNS registrant is from West Yorkshire, GB [2].
0. https://eservices2.mha.gov.sg/ros/search-society
Ghost Foundation is a Company Limited by Guarantee [1] in Singapore. The UEN is 201605007D.
As I wrote above, it's not a charity, and therefore doesn't need to have charitable goals.
0. https://www.tis.bizfile.gov.sg/ngbtisinternet/faces/oracle/w...
The "founders" got fat salaries and bonuses after the conversion. They then started going around town hyping their success and whitewashing the history of the "startup" as if it was bootstrapped.
I have no idea how they managed to legally pull that off...
What happens when Ghost gets popular enough to get their own "G Engine" competing with with Ghost (Pro)? As Wordpress.com shows, there's no serious moat for open source hosting. Either Ghost devotes resources away from their open core and towards their hosting platform, or they lose the competition for marketshare to a company that does devote those resources and then they have no funding stream, aside from what G Engine deigns to give them out of the grace of their own heart. And all of the platitudes about voting or board seats and everything else don't really make one lick of difference if you don't have any funding to make that happen, and you have to rely on pay-to-play funding from the people who are actually making money in the space, and let them set your agenda.
So, Matt's behavior aside, I do think these issues are pretty endemic to the idea of "open core" funding as a company (or market) grows beyond a certain size. Unified non-profit or dual-corporation structure (Mozilla Corporation vs Mozilla Foundation) doesn't change the fundamental logic of "where does the money come from?". I don't think Ghost is providing any new solutions here—they've just gotten lucky / been small enough to not be out-competed in their hosting niche yet.
2) Not all foundations-behind-open-source-projects use revenues from hosting as their sole source of funding. Notable examples include the Blender Foundation and the Linux Foundation.
For #1, that is the kind of logic that works fine for the early adopters, but frustrates and turns away the people who just want e.g. a Substack that won't squeeze them for login walls or a Wordpress that is easier to use. I've seen a lot of non-technical people in that bucket turned away recently by Ghost (Pro)'s opaque and confusing member-based hosting costs. It makes it completely impractical to run a free email newsletter, and plenty of other Ghost providers seem to have this worked out. So all it takes is one of those competitors breaking through to achieve name recognition and get a lucky roll of the marketing dice to overtake Ghost in revenue. And then they can fund their own fork and the Ghost community is forced to agree to their development wishes or become outpaced by their proprietary features. It's a pretty bad place to be in.
Or the number of customers who would pay an $X premium to have "Ghost(Pro)" over another host (at the same features) will be roughly equal to the number of people who would spontaneously donate $X anyway. We have ample evidence that affection isn't enough to keep FOSS financed unless the developers are very visible and the ratio of developers to users is very low.
While I agree with most of your comment, I do want to point out that intentionally targeting to be small/niche is a kinda solution in itself. To me SourceHut is another good example of how being small can be winning move. Being sustainable with <50 employees is far more manageable even if you face some competition, than if you have >1000 employees.
Had Redis stayed small, they would have a smaller slice of income.. but it is entirely possible that even that smaller slice of income would be more than enough to sustain the company.
Getting outcompeted is less of a bad thing as you make it out to be. Ghost is clearly not trying to be the most popular option. They only need to make just enough to survive and pay everyone. That is way easier than trying to grow 30% YoY for a long time. Capitalists and founders talk about how if you’re not growing, your product could be better because people could like it even more. Who gives a shit if profit isn’t your MO?
Literally all they have to do is avoid a scenario where no one wants to use them. If a competitor becomes the de facto choice and they start loosing customers, they can still make adjustments. That is a lot easier than trying to be a high-growth company.
> Literally all they have to do is avoid a scenario where no one wants to use them. ... That is a lot easier than trying to be a high-growth company.
I don't really think it's as easy as you make it out to be. Easier? sure. Easy enough to sustain the company once Ghost gains more alternative hosts? I dunno.
My point is that Automattic was successful for a long time without being the dominant host (at least in terms of money per site).
Honestly, I don’t get why Ghost must be the dominant company in the space. Sure, it’s a bit of a zero-sum game, but not so much that literally every other company in the space must die if one becomes more successful. If that happens, it’s just an impetus for other companies to adjust their approach.
You don’t need to grow so massively big to be able to compete. You just need a better product in one specific area that matters to enough customers, and you can do that sustainably with a small team.
Twelve years is a long time to be 'lucky'
Ghost has been lucky that their own conflict of interest hasn't been an issue: The cofounders don't own anything, but they still have complete control on the nonprofit. It sounds like John O'Nolan is trying to take pre-emptive steps to prevent WordPress drama in Ghost.
But the whole point of this article is that it wasn't luck, it was intentional from the beginning...
He leads with the differentiators from WordPress because WordPress alternatives are a big conversation at the moment. This is a chance to inform people about how Ghost chose to be different: Non-profit, no plugins, etc.
But the final section ("Governance & the road ahead") seems like a subtle admission that the current Ghost structure wouldn't prevent a BDFL from going off of the rails. Maybe it's too subtle, since he doesn't explicitly connect statements like these:
> Neither myself nor Hannah own any shares, assets, domains, trademarks, or other companies related to Ghost. Everything is owned by the Foundation.
> From the beginning, Ghost's governance structure has had a board of trustees made up of its two founders, myself and Hannah.
I think Matt showed that some of the open-source-foundation shell game isn't real: There's a WordPress Foundation, and WordPress.org, but it really all belongs to Matt.
So, if Ghost can follow through on changing it's governance structure, it gains another differentiator from WordPress.
The author (Ghost's original co-founder) outlines how Ghost differentiates itself by:
- Operating as a profitable non-profit foundation with no owners, where all profits are reinvested into the project
- Maintaining independence from investors and commercial interests to better serve its community's needs
- Focusing exclusively on publishing workflows rather than trying to be an all-purpose platform
- Planning for sustainable long-term governance, by
- Intentionally limiting the organization to ~50 people
- Planning to expand its board of trustees beyond the founders
- Growing an ecosystem rather than a single large company
I emphasized the active, concrete verbs (actually gerunds fwiw) so that you may see how they are different than the passive verbs associated with 'luck' like hoping, wishing, praying, etc.
Neither myself nor Hannah own any shares, assets, domains, trademarks, or other companies related to Ghost. Everything is owned by the Foundation.
our intention is to expand the seats on Ghost's board of trustees beyond myself and Hannah.
I don’t see how this is fundamentally different from the WP Foundation approach. It still depends on people who despite claiming an intention haven’t given up control.
Author of the article here - that was exactly the point of the article.
I think most people in the community were willing to overlook Matt's previous petty, vindictive behaviour (e.g. Thesis, Wix, Pantheon, GoDaddy, Tumblr) since he's fairly charismatic in his writing, and was otherwise mostly benevolent.
I don't know if they still do it, but GoDaddy was notorious for just "early buying" domain names if you use their domain search engine (or any affiliated ones; it's why you really shouldn't search for domain names on random sites, GoDaddy controls a lot of domain search engines) to ensure you can't see if they're the cheapest option. Matt being upset with GoDaddy is easy to overlook because they're just plain awful already and it's a sort of "we don't agree with that in specific, but GoDaddy is a genuine problem so like, it's easy to overlook".
By contrast, WP Engine is just another general purpose hosting provider. I haven't found much evidence of them being particularly worse to their customers outside of their funding being a bad long-term choice. A lot of Matt's problems with WPE are well... Matt's problem and he can't seem to grasp that to everyone else, his smearing just makes him look like a petty dick.
They probably don’t need to seek growth by shifting focus away from their open source aspects.
They're still allowed to grow, and have to in order to pay their salaries and hire more people.
Instead, they have a successful organization providing a livelihood for almost 50 people, and real value to countless more.
[0]: https://john.onolan.org/a-decade-after-being-rejected-by-yc/
Gumroad is a famous example.
But for my own experience of someone who isn't trying to be a content creator, I just have monetization turned on because I may as well get paid for the time I'm gonna be on there, which I would do regardless... I'm taking home about $50/mo for my $8/mo investment.
If i have anything that goes off, obviously more. I got approved for monetization in March of this year, and so far with a few viral posts and regular usage, I've made about $1200 this year on the platform.