Substack open source rival Ghost is now connected to the fediverse
Newsletter platform Ghost, an open source competitor to Substack, is now connected to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Federated apps run
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.
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
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.
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".
Ghost has optional paywall as well.
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 but it's out of date, difficult to use, broken, has no useful features, and we're only adding new stuff to the paid version, so just pay us already."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.
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.
Ghost is almost perfect, but their decision to go with MySQL really sucks
semi open source. i dont have pro.
