[HN Gopher] Democratising publishing
___________________________________________________________________
Democratising publishing
Author : mxstbr
Score : 167 points
Date : 2024-10-30 14:52 UTC (2 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.
| theamk wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| nightpool wrote:
| 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.
| anon7000 wrote:
| 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.
| 23B1 wrote:
| > 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'
| jdtig wrote:
| 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.
| 23B1 wrote:
| > 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...
| jdtig wrote:
| 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.
| 23B1 wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| > 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.
| johnonolan wrote:
| > 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.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _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.
| noirscape wrote:
| 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.
| dartos wrote:
| 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.
| nightpool wrote:
| 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
| ValentineC wrote:
| "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.
| 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.
| 0xEF wrote:
| On the off chance that someone here has recommendations, I'll
| reply and say my experience with Ghost Pro was different. I am
| trying to start a small blog that will have a handful of
| writers, so the idea of using some kind of lightweight CMS with
| edit/post capability is appealing, but we don't like the clunky
| feeling of beefy CMSs, especially when it seems to be built
| entirely around the analytics, which we do not care all that
| much about (the blog is intended to be small and hobbiest, we
| are not interested in making money from it).
|
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| Comrade Ernie Smith wrote a thing on this:
| https://tedium.co/2024/10/20/wordpress-cms-alternatives-
| cont...
| shortformblog wrote:
| Thanks to Kye for pointing this out to me.
|
| 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.
| 0xEF wrote:
| You've convinced me to give it another shot. Another
| commenter also pointed out Drupal's complexities, which I
| should have realized, in retrospect.
|
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/octobercms/october
| shortformblog wrote:
| I gave October a pretty serious look about five or six
| years ago. I like the fact that you can code in the
| interface, which can feel more friendly than competing
| platforms. But I thought the community hadn't reached a
| level of scale that I thought was enough that I could
| trust it.
|
| 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
| hobs wrote:
| Just mentioning that Drupal is way more complicated than any
| of the other offerings as well.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Drupal makes me cry. And as other folk here have said, just
| stick ghost on your own host. I have a dev version running on
| a raspberry pi on my desk so that I can test ideas locally.
| Obviously I could have done that on my mac, but I just wanted
| to see what would happen and it's fine. You could probably
| run a live site off it no problem, so long as it wasn't
| heavily trafficked.
| djoldman wrote:
| For the tax or corp. lawyers:
|
| 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.
| haccount wrote:
| If your name is Scam Altman then it's a breeze to do so
| mandmandam wrote:
| Not quite a breeze, to be fair. You gotta manufacture a bit
| of drama, install bad actors in key positions, pull media
| strings, etc.
|
| But yeah it can be done.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _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?_
|
| Not a lawyer, but as the Ghost Foundation is not a charity, the
| trustees can currently do whatever they want with the money.
| adolph wrote:
| Their about page claims non profit, Wikipedia and others say
| registered in Singapore but I don't see anything under
| "ghost" as a society [0] or as a charity [1]. For something
| that has "believe in being transparent" in the about page,
| the lack of any registration number or a link to the touted
| constitution is odd.
|
| DNS registrant is from West Yorkshire, GB [2].
|
| 0. https://eservices2.mha.gov.sg/ros/search-society
|
| 1. https://authoring.charities.gov.sg/
|
| 2. https://www.whois.com/whois/ghost.org
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Their about page claims non profit, Wikipedia and others
| say registered in Singapore but I don't see anything under
| "ghost" as a society [0] or as a charity [1]._
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://ghost.org/changelog/moving-to-singapore/
| adolph wrote:
| Seems like it's filings and meetings are done about this
| time of year. [0] The move to Singapore is super
| interesting, esp with dsivers input. Thanks for linking
| to it.
|
| 0. https://www.tis.bizfile.gov.sg/ngbtisinternet/faces/or
| acle/w...
| hammock wrote:
| Not a lawyer, my understanding is no- assets must be disposed
| to another non profit with a similar mission. The specifics of
| disposition being determined by the particular state
| tchock23 wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but my local university (a registered non-profit)
| had an AI department that took in a ton of grant money before
| they rolled it out into a for-profit.
|
| 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...
| bastloing wrote:
| I just post on X. Get paid for it too!
| echoangle wrote:
| How much do you get out per month?
| joshmanders wrote:
| Depends on how much energy you put into it...
|
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| This is the model that most tech companies who say they are
| founded on the basis of "helping the world to do X" should adopt.
| Major Kudos to the Ghost founders for actually following through
| on their ideals rather than playing lip service to them until the
| big money flows in, like so many others. And you know, this model
| is not for everyone and that's fine, but if you're not planning
| on following through then drop the bullshit idealism from the
| start and just plainly come out with "we're here to make as much
| money as possible". (Looking at you, Altman, and many others.)
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