[HN Gopher] Democratising publishing
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Democratising publishing
Author : mxstbr
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-10-30 14:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (john.onolan.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (john.onolan.org)
| apitman wrote:
| What strikes me about Ghost's story is that if they hadn't failed
| to get in to YC[0], they probably would have failed for real,
| because eventually the VCs would have come calling and they're
| obviously not a unicorn.
|
| 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/
| senko wrote:
| There are so many solid business ideas that take VC money, turn
| out not to be unicorn potential, and crash and burn, where a
| slower, sustainable growth might work just fine.
|
| Gumroad is a famous example.
| nightpool wrote:
| I can't really comment too much on historical Wordpress politics
| --given Matt's recent public meltdown I'm completely willing to
| believe that he's continued to shoot Wordpress in the foot in
| more obscure ways in the past--but the posturing here vs.
| Wordpress really strikes me as someone who has gotten lucky and
| has attributed that luck to skill instead.
|
| 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.
| troymc wrote:
| 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.
| nightpool wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| zokier wrote:
| > 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.
| nightpool wrote:
| 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.
| anon7000 wrote:
| 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.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I shifted a large 20+ year news publication from Wordpress to
| ghost about 18 months ago - and opted to use Ghost(Pro)
|
| 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.
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