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
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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 but it's out of date, difficult to use, broken, has no useful features, and we're only adding new stuff to the paid version, so just pay us already."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.
Worth remembering that the benefits of open source are less critical with server-side software compared to when it's your own personal computer. Personally, if it's SAAS then I'm not much bothered what they're running it on. Not to invalidate your general point.
Personally I find the complete opposite, I've [email protected] everything I can with open source services, to keep control of my personal data but access it from anywhere. I know where all my critical data is and I know nobody is selling it out behind the scenes.
On my local machine, I have no concerns about running proprietary software because I can easily sandbox it and make sure it's not going to touch anything it's not supposed to or phone home with things I don't want it to. Running shit like discord doesn't really bother me because I've got it sandboxed away from anything valuable.
I suppose the reason we've probably had such different experiences is I suspect we have different strategies for where to keep our most precious "crown jewels". For me, I want everything on SAAS, but because I'm putting my most valuable data there it has to be MY SAAS and thus open-source and heavily secured. I suspect you on the other hand probably minimize your data's exposure to SAAS providers which you view as potentially suspect, and keep everything valuable strictly local if you possibly can. I don't think one way is necessarily better than the other, and I've definitely made my choice, but this would explain our different perspectives at least.
Very interesting perspective! And yes, I keep all my data locally, literally all of it, and the only bits of it that go on my VPS or - worse! - mobile device are either encrypted or not private. So your theory is right on the mark.
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.
