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Democratising publishing
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Democratising publishing
#22I 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 Eng…
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
Re: Democratising publishing
#23I 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 Eng…
> 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.
Re: Democratising publishing
#24[flagged]
You broke the site guidelines today in so many places, and so many ways, that I think we have to finally call enough enough and ban this account.
Re: Democratising publishing
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 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…
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.
Re: Democratising publishing
#26I 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 Eng…
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…
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.
Re: Democratising publishing
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 alternativ…
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.
Re: Democratising publishing
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 WordPr…
> 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...
Re: Democratising publishing
#29I 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 s…
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.
Re: Democratising publishing
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 WordPr…
> 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.