Discussion
The more I learn about Ghost, the more conflicted I feel. It's a big step up from SS, and I really enjoy the carefully thought out UX of the Ghost interface. But it ...
1) can't send so much as a single email newsletter to a subscriber without a MailGun account
2) can't accept payment from subscribers without a Stripe account
3) can't do basic web traffic analytics without an account on a third-party service - TinyBird - instead of integrating Free code like Plausible or Matomo
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5) ActivityPub support is not in core, and the separate module is a PITA to set up.
Ghost's pivot to the fediverse - Like Medium, FlickR, Tumblr, and even Mozilla - is looking more and more like a marketing stunt, an attention grab mostly abandoned as soon as the next bandwagon ("AI") came along.
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Speaking of which ...
6) AGENTS.md files in the repo, and committed code auto-generated using Claude;
https://forum.ghost.org/t/ghost-stance-on-ai/63383/2
This tends to indicate technical decisions being made by financial extractors rather than technical staff. Or at best a stressed team focused more on the survival of their business than the quality of their infrastructure.
Not exactly a rock-solid foundation to build on.
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So what keeps occurring to me is, maybe a hard fork of Ghost is in order? One optimised for the needs of community-hosting, like what BackDropCMS did with Drupal 6.
It could fork from after the last commits before the first slop code crept in. Keeping the web client with its wonderful interface, but minus the proprietary add-ons. Completely rebuilding the nodeJS backend in a production-quality language like Go, Elixir, or Rust (even Python would be better than node).
Thoughts?
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@strypey Yeah, Ghost is good but is for a very particular type of user. Unlike, say, WordPress, it's *opinionated*.
In terms of these three issues, you can actually get around them with some perseverance:
1. Analytics: turn off Ghost’s own and add Plausible, Matomo or Umami through Code Injection. Easy!
2. Payments: use Liberapay or Open Collective, then give those people free paid-tier access through the Admin API. Fiddly.
3. Newsletters: this is the real lock-in, but Ghosler* sends through your own SMTP: https://github.com/ItzNotABug/ghosler
*I didn't implement this when I was running Ghost as it hasn't been updated in a couple of years.
@dajb
> Ghosler* sends [Ghost newsletter mailouts] through your own SMTP: https://
github.com/ItzNotABug/ghosler
This could be worth a try with our Ghost instances @lightweight, or maybe there's a maintained widget that does the same? Like the one @joshbuddy mentioned.
Thoughts on this idea @dajb?
@strypey @lightweight @joshbuddy
Given @Bonfire is modular I think you'd be better off adding to its functionality rather than hard-forking Ghost, tbh
@strypey I wrote a little proxy that talks mailgun and lets you use any smtp account after I had mailgun mysteriously cancel my account (an hour after making it). happy to give you the source if thats useful to you
@joshbuddy
> I wrote a little proxy that talks mailgun and lets you use any smtp account ... happy to give you the source if thats useful
Could well be, if this idea has legs;
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
If the core of the Ghost software was rock-solid, a soft fork could just swap out these integrations without much bother. But then there's;
4) nodeJS - building server-side software in JavaScript is like building a parachute out of duct tap. If you're a MacGuyver type you might survive.
As with Mastodon's rolling snowball of Ruby-on-Rails, Sideqiks, etc, Ghost have made a fantastic client app and thrown the back-end in a 'sort it out later' bucket, where it now lives rent-free.
Also...
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