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- cross-posted to:
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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).
Ghost is also a non-profit. It’s kind of a poster child of sustainable software development.
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.
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.
Ghost is almost perfect, but their decision to go with MySQL really sucks
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.
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.
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.”
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.
