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> 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.

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.

Fair! In this case though I meant small in terms of adoption—it looks like there are some alternative Ghost hosting providers, but none of them really have name-brand recognition in the same way Ghost does, and even Ghost is one small player in the "non-Wordpress subscription blog / mailing list" space. But a lot of my comment comes from watching the Redis / AWS Valkey split as well—even if Redis stayed as a smaller team instead of trying to compete with the hyperscalers, they'd still be stuck in the same catch-22—watching their revenue dwindle to zero while AWS and GCP competed on proprietary platform features.

Would they? There are people who would never pay for AWS/GCP; and there are also people who are willing to pay higher prices for better support and very latest features.

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.

1) Many people or orgs who are aligned with Ghost and want it to succeed long-term will be okay with paying a bit more for hosting on Ghost(Pro); they might see the extra cost as paying for the continued existence and development of their publishing software.

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.

Sure, I don't see where in my comment I imply this is a problem for all open source communities, just that it's a problem for the type of open source community John seems to want Ghost to be (no intellectual property, making revenue via providing services).

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.

> 1) Many people or orgs who are aligned with Ghost and want it to succeed long-term will be okay with paying a bit more for hosting on Ghost(Pro); they might see the extra cost as paying for the continued existence and development of their publishing software.

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.

> the posturing here vs. Wordpress really strikes me as someone who has gotten lucky and has attributed that luck to skill instead.

Twelve years is a long time to be 'lucky'

Well, WordPress made it 20+ years without a huge fuss over the fact that everything was controlled by Matt. And it only happened now because Matt himself blew things up!

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.

> Ghost has been lucky that their own conflict of interest hasn't been an issue

But the whole point of this article is that it wasn't luck, it was intentional from the beginning...

I don't think the point of the article is that everything was intentional.

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 main point of this article is to explain Ghost's unique approach to open-source publishing software through its non-profit foundation model and its vision for democratic governance.

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.

> Operating as a profitable non-profit foundation with no owners, where all profits are reinvested into the project

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.

> I don't think the point of the article is that everything was intentional.

Author of the article here - that was exactly the point of the article.

> Well, WordPress made it 20+ years without a huge fuss over the fact that everything was controlled by Matt. And it only happened now because Matt himself blew things up!

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.

It also helps that at least one of those (GoDaddy) has one of the worst reputations for a tech company out there.

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.

Importantly, WordPress.com is not a predominant WP host! (Which is part of why Matt is lashing out, I think.) Yes, it hosts a huge number of small sites, many for free, but Automattic’s revenue comes from a lot of products. (Including e-commerce and enterprise.) There are a large number of healthy WordPress hosts. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_hosting

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.

WordPress.com was a predominant WordPress host for a long time, and now they no longer are. That's exactly the point I'm making.

> 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.

WordPress.com didn’t even allow plugins until ~6yr ago, so it really wasn’t a meaningful option for serious sites —- aka sites with money. It was a predominant blog hosting site for a while, but there isn’t as much money in that market. Other WP hosts have gone after more lucrative types of sites which need something more.

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.

The first line of the article seems to state that ghost is a none profit organization.

They probably don’t need to seek growth by shifting focus away from their open source aspects.

Growth, no, but they need a consistent revenue stream and if they don't shift focus away from their open source aspects to their paying customers, then their market share will be stolen by the companies that do and they'll lose their revenue stream

"Non-profit" mainly means that because they have no shares and no shareholders, they're committed to never letting their company get acquired.

They're still allowed to grow, and have to in order to pay their salaries and hire more people.