Ghost 4.0

This thread and comment in the forum of the blogging platform Ghost show me, that it was the right decision to not use Ghost anymore since 2018.

While I was excited about their 3.0 release in 2019, I’m unsure what to think about the recent 4.0 release.

I always had the impression that Ghost had a focus on simple publishing and was especially popular because of the open source concept, minimalism and PHP freedom. But since some time the focus seems to go away from this. There are more and more integrations with some third party services, Ghost as a Service (so expensive!) is becoming more prominent and the membership feature is being pushed. While there is still no native comment feature.

At the same time, I think many just want to use Ghost for blogging. Without all these integrations and without these newsletter and membership features. People want to blog without necessarily earning money.

But sure, somewhere I can understand it from Ghost’s point of view, always follow the money.

My opinion on monetization has also changed a bit. Yesterday I read this article by Manuel Moreale:

​​And I have nothing against people that monetise side projects. I think it’s great that we live in a time where this is a possibility. But I also think this is slowly killing most of the great content on the web. As soon as someone finds a niche that “works” they stop exploring and they start digging as deep as possible into this one single thing that works. And by works I mean it makes money. But making money is not the same as creating good content.

I get more and more the impression that nowadays it is not possible to publish anything online without having money in mind. Kind of a bummer. For many, the temptation is probably just too great.

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