johnonolan's comments

Hi! Founder of Ghost here.

The way to cancel a trial is to go to the billing area in the product, then click on "Cancel" - red link at the bottom of the page. That instantly cancels the trial and deletes the account.

If you don't cancel manually, and the trial ends, then we still automatically cancel and delete anyway.

> I don't think the point of the article is that everything was intentional.

Author of the article here - that was exactly the point of the article.

I think if you were to ask an ActivityPub absolutist about this (of which I am not one) the answer would be that you follow different things from different places, and it all balances out based on utility. So the idea is not that you have centralise all your following under a single account, but rather than you can follow anything, from anywhere. So maybe you follow video stuff from a Peertube instance, and you follow longform writing from a Ghost instance - but if every so often you want to mix and match... you can.

ActivityPub, like many of 'open social' web standards before it, suffers to some extent from being invented without clear enough usecases in mind. Much like WebMentions (which we also adopted) the answer to "what's it for?" - often seems to be "yes".

So you can either try to ship the spec and support everything, or you can try to build an end-user usecase that fits within the spec, and get more specific. We tend to lean toward the latter, and try to create something useful - which would still be useful even if nobody knew it was running on [whatever web standard].

Whether we can succeed with it or not, remains to be seen :)

John from Ghost here, happy to answer any Qs if there are any. I know HN crowd tends to have pretty mixed feeling about the utility of ActivityPub, but we're pretty excited about it. Will it work out and be amazing? Don't know - but we're see what we can do and find out.

pretty much yeah

No, we are not on the Mailgun affiliate program[1]

[1]: https://ghost.org/docs/faq/mailgun-newsletters/

I mean I kind of wrote 2,000 words answering this in the post that these comments are about. We've always been focused on a single core usecase: Publishing, and that is still true today. WordPress diverted away from blogging and became a tool for building general websites, ecommerce stores, job boards, real estate listings, social networks (bbpress), enterprise tools (altis), and even full blown applications. In terms of diversity of usecase, you really can't beat WP for how many different things it can do.

Ghost's scope has grown significantly relative to Ghost, but - as I outlined in the post in some detail - our target usecase for the platform has remained pretty consistent, and far narrower by comparison.

All that being said: Apps have to evolve with the market, and Ghost is no exception. It's no use making something and then never changing it, because the world around it doesn't stand still.

100% of profit is reinvested each year and carried forward toward future investments in the product and the team

Then we will support it in a few months. That's how LTS works. We can't just add support for Node 18 if all the upstream packages we depend on don't support Node 18.

This is answered in some detail in the post :) Ghost uses Knex and Bookshelf, and can work with any database that is fully supported and made interoperable by those packages. So if anyone contributes to the upstream repositories, the Postgres will work automatically. The core Ghost team focuses on MySQL because we're a small team and we can only really have the resources to document and support one environment properly.

I'm still on the fence about this one a bit! From a product PoV — god yes I wish we just used Laravel. We'd have been able to move about 8x as fast and get so much more built for users just because the ecosystem is so much better developed. When Ghost first launched in 2013, there wasn't even an off the shelf RSS lib!

That said, Ghost succeeded in large part because it was a new and interesting Node thing, and we might never have gotten as far as we have done without that :)

Hi HN John from Ghost here. Excited to launch 5.0 today, 9 years after Ghost first got built thanks to a popular post right here on Hacker News. We're hanging out in the comments today if you have any questions or thoughts!

It doesn't say that anywhere - there are 0% payment fees on transactions in Ghost.

Ghost powers several FP stories on HN every single day and this is the first time I've ever heard of it having an issue handling the load. Sounds like a T2 environment issue

Hey everyone, John from Ghost here - this is our 9th time on Hacker News in 8 years, because of course Ghost originated from a Hacker News blog post that gave way to the original Kickstarter campaign.

The platform has matured a huge amount in the years since, and we've gone from a scrappy codebase to a relatively mature architecture.

Our next big steps will be to decouple the product further, separating out the core API, admin client and front end so that they can be both built and deployed independently of one another - which is a bit more nuanced in a decentralised environment than it might otherwise be!

After that, not sure. Maybe crypto payments. We'll see

Thanks as always for your support over the years

Developers are not our primary target audience, but there's still a large "Developers" link in the resources section of the main navigation - as well as a GitHub badge in the footer on every single page.

I think if we were "trying very hard to hide it" we would probably do a much better job of it than that.

We dropped Postgres (7 years ago) because pretty much nobody was using it, and it was causing lots of bugs and issues in our upstream ORM layer, which has great and working support for MySQL and SQLite. Ghost is open source, and we put out multiple calls for help with Postgres issues - but nobody contributed. So that's how open source goes.

> Now it's a platform for creating multiple sites, and anyone can do it once you have installed Ghost. The default installer does not ask you a question to turn this off; I couldn't find it in the configuration options, either.

There is no way to create multiple sites with Ghost, and never has been, which is why there is no option to turn it off.

Overall, I think if you try using the product I think you might get a more realistic idea of what it does and doesn't do. But I'm not here to sell you anything, so I'll leave it at that :)

Founder of Ghost here - not sure how our business model (which has not changed) is unfriendly to self-hosting? Extensive docs and tools here: https://ghost.org/docs/install/

But let me know if there's anything I can help with

Not clear how those changes would make it more accessible or what problem you're actually trying to solve? There are lots of things we're working on improving but I promise you changing the programming language of any of those components wouldn't make any difference to the end experience of the software.

A lot of blogging platforms (including Ghost) start out at $5/mo targeting personal use -- but the ones that survive never stay there. Probably some worthwhile takeaways from that :)

Founder of Ghost here - would love to hear what parts you were hoping to make more efficient / if you have any suggestions :)