Ghost is almost perfect, but their decision to go with MySQL really sucks
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Good, though more of a WordPress alternative. I'd like to see actual substack alternative in the fediverse, with the ability for users to pay authors for their work, via subscription, as substack does.
I know people are worried about monetization in the fediverse but authors need payment for their work. Subscriptions don't have the same perverse incentives as advertising.
Flipboard ceo has mentioned he is supportive of the idea.
You’ve described Ghost. Subscriptions for content are a first class citizen.
Isn’t ghost more of a Wordpress alternative? And calling it a substack alternative is trendy.
It’s primary a writing platform with built-in monetization options and the ability to self host. We switched to it from Substack. It’s been fantastic to use and operate. Super slick.
Never used Substack, can someone please explain how this is different from lets say Medium?
Medium is proprietary and publicly traded so is on the enshitification train full speed ahead
Ghost is also a non-profit. It's kind of a poster child of sustainable software development.
So Medium and Substack are similar? And Ghost is also an open-source alternative to Medium as much as it is alternative to Substack?
Yes. That's right. There are some subtle differences between Medium and Substack mostly owing to the fact that Medium was originally designed as a blogging site and Substack was originally designed as an email newsletter platform (with a place to park blog posts as well). So each is a bit catered a bit more catered to their original goal, although they've certainly become more similar over time.
Ghost seems to be squarely in the middle: both a blog site builder/newsletter platform from the outset. Honestly, Ghost looks to maybe be doing the site builder piece even better (like more ability to remove Ghost branding relative to Medium/Substack, which makes sense since it's open source).
Medium has a paywall, which tends to keep me away, but Substack pays Nazis to post there. This makes the Substack platform distasteful for those who dislike fascists.
Ghost has optional paywall as well.
Oh, interesting. I knew something was off about the place when I kept seeing anti-"woke" conservative opinion pieces posted there, but I thought it was just a bunch of MAGA morons voluntarily role-playing as "independent" "journalists".
Substack is newsletter focused, subscriptions are for individual substack writers' newsletters (you can't access all substack newsletters with a single subscription) and it has a recommendation feature that writers like because it can help them grow their subscribers and therefore grow their revenue.
Doesn't seem to be in the latest open source release or at least I can't find how to enable it.
Edit: according to https://activitypub.ghost.org/social-web-beta/, it's indeed only in pro for now.
Maybe it's just their way of restricting the beta, but I really hope they're not moving towards an enshittified open-source business model, "we're still technically open source if you use the *retch* community version... but it's out of date, difficult to use, broken, has no useful features, and we're only adding new stuff to the paid version, so just pay us already."
They have stated on their blog that the self-hosted update is in progress. They're just only rolling out to pro right now as there's more work to be done on the self-hosted version.
Worth remembering that the benefits of open source are less critical with server-side software compared to when it's your own personal computer. Personally, if it's SAAS then I'm not much bothered what they're running it on. Not to invalidate your general point.
Personally I find the complete opposite, I've !selfhosted@lemmy.world everything I can with open source services, to keep control of my personal data but access it from anywhere. I know where all my critical data is and I know nobody is selling it out behind the scenes.
On my local machine, I have no concerns about running proprietary software because I can easily sandbox it and make sure it's not going to touch anything it's not supposed to or phone home with things I don't want it to. Running shit like discord doesn't really bother me because I've got it sandboxed away from anything valuable.
I suppose the reason we've probably had such different experiences is I suspect we have different strategies for where to keep our most precious "crown jewels". For me, I want everything on SAAS, but because I'm putting my most valuable data there it has to be MY SAAS and thus open-source and heavily secured. I suspect you on the other hand probably minimize your data's exposure to SAAS providers which you view as potentially suspect, and keep everything valuable strictly local if you possibly can. I don't think one way is necessarily better than the other, and I've definitely made my choice, but this would explain our different perspectives at least.
Very interesting perspective! And yes, I keep all my data locally, literally all of it, and the only bits of it that go on my VPS or - worse! - mobile device are either encrypted or not private. So your theory is right on the mark.
They had a fairly detailed blog post a few days or weeks ago about the rollout. The plan is to bring it to open source but they’re still working on issues with it that are easier to control on their own servers. IIRC the code for it is actually in the open source version but disabled. I think they said if you know what you’re doing you could go into the code to enable it but it’s unusably slow right now, or something like that.
semi open source. i dont have pro.