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.
You’ve described Ghost. Subscriptions for content are a first class citizen.
Subscriptions work with fediverse content though?
The docs are super unclear, and written for those not familiar with ActivityPub.
In future, we hope to develop a deeper integration between your social web profile and followers <> and your public website and registered members. To start with, though, they operate independently from one another.
Your social web profile and followers are separate to the rest of your site and memberships, so you can think of it as a new, additional distribution channel.
Emphasis mine. I think the setup is basically federating links in Mastodon style. So if you have a post available as a subscription, it will prompt a login after clicking through.
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
So Medium and Substack are similar? And Ghost is also an open-source alternative to Medium as much as it is alternative to Substack?
Yes. That’s right. There are some subtle differences between Medium and Substack mostly owing to the fact that Medium was originally designed as a blogging site and Substack was originally designed as an email newsletter platform (with a place to park blog posts as well). So each is a bit catered a bit more catered to their original goal, although they’ve certainly become more similar over time.
Ghost seems to be squarely in the middle: both a blog site builder/newsletter platform from the outset. Honestly, Ghost looks to maybe be doing the site builder piece even better (like more ability to remove Ghost branding relative to Medium/Substack, which makes sense since it’s open source).
