Democratising publishing

https://john.onolan.org/democratising-publishing/

by mxstbr • 2 years ago

174 47 2 years ago

john.onolan.org

apitman• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

nightpool5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

nightpool5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

nightpool5• 2 years ago

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.

anon70002• 2 years ago

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.

nightpool5• 2 years ago

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.

23B13• 2 years ago

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'

jdtig2• 2 years ago

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.

dartos• 2 years ago

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.

nightpool5• 2 years ago

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

ValentineC4• 2 years ago

"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.

saaaaaam2• 2 years ago

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.

0xEF3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Comrade Ernie Smith wrote a thing on this: https://tedium.co/2024/10/20/wordpress-cms-alternatives-cont...

shortformblog3• 2 years ago

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.

hobs• 2 years ago

Just mentioning that Drupal is way more complicated than any of the other offerings as well.

saaaaaam2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

If your name is Scam Altman then it's a breeze to do so

mandmandam• 2 years ago

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.

ValentineC4• 2 years ago

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.

adolph3• 2 years ago

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

hammock• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

I just post on X. Get paid for it too!

echoangle• 2 years ago

How much do you get out per month?

joshmanders• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.)

Democratising publishing

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