I came from the Discourse point of view about open-source forum software. On Discourse, migrating from self-hosted to customer or back and forth is seamless – everything is contained in one ZIP file, including images and everything. You don’t need CLI access to migrate all content — you can just do it from the UI.
I started a political writing publication, moving from Substack to Ghost, and my writings caught the attention of interesting people — including political artist George Burchett, son of notable Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who offered to recommend me to book publishers that he knew of.
Non-competitive Pricing
Pricing for Ghost hosting across different providers is not particularly competitive.
Ghost migrations – not everything is easily exportable
- Native comments are not in an easily-exportable format from the UI
- Files and images are not in an easily-exportable format from the UI
- Ghost Pro will only provide a one-time site archive (I had to ask for another one because comments)
- Ghost Pro did not initially include the Members CSV in my archive, which I wasn’t aware of before following their instructions to disconnect Stripe and starting to delete members.
Third Party Services Not As Good
People were recommending Magic Pages and I was initially excited. But I cannot recommend Jannis too. He simply objected to migrating my content because he said a large part of his family is Ukrainian. So that is totally due to his own bias.
While hundreds of billions of dollars are sent unchecked to the most corrupt country in Europe — regularly rates amongst the most corrupt country in Europe — we should absolutely be writing about it and criticising it.
Look at these other journalists who also criticise the lies about Ukraine.
The first is a person who lived in Ukraine until 2022, and writes regularly about the neofascism and more there, including direct translations from Ukrainian publications and Telegram channels of prominent people in Ukraine. He also writes about how the Ukrainian liberals waged war on and regularly denigrated the working-class people in the eastern Donbass regions, calling them a “cancerous tumour” to be excised.
The second journalist is Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald.
It beyond disgusts me that the liberals of Europe try to compare Ukraine to true anti-colonial movements in the world, like my people, the Vietnamese, liberating themselves from French colonialism and American imperialism:
These labels were handy because they implied three fashionable – if silly – ideas… [including] that Ukraine can be recast as a victim of imperialism on par with, say, the Belgian Congo or Vietnam fighting off first the French and then the Americans.
Jannis from Magic Pages said that he supports freedom of speech, and told me to find another hosting provider.
I’m telling you this because my content wasn’t all that different to what the journalists from Events in Ukraine, Glenn Greenwald, and historian Tarik Cyril Amar have been saying. Ghost Pro also had zero problems on my content.
If you’re one of the many people also critical about the situation in Ukraine and other topics, which you have every right to be — especially if you’re from the US where the government sends billions to its puppets in Ukraine and provides so little for people at home facing disasters — you could find yourself arbitrarily refused for hosting.
What if I had started a fresh blog on his hosting and started posting blog entries he didn’t like after? Would he also start to refuse hosting content after?
Maybe the response will change after, maybe it won’t.
This is also extremely disappointing because popular third-party services on Discourse will also host your content, whether left-wing, right-wing or outside of that. I consider myself to be outside of that.
I also reached out to Spectral Web Services which say that they offer content migration on their website. But in their response, they said that they don’t provide migrations to self-hosting, which is extremely surprising coming from Discourse.
In the Discourse ecosystem, there is definitely third party services which provide migration to self-hosting, e.g. Literate Computing.
I have some experience with self-hosting Ghost so it’s not a big deal to migrate other content — but I wanted to explore the paid options.
TL DR
I wanted to explore the paid options for hosting with Ghost Pro and 3rd party services, but I had my expectations way too high compared to the Discourse open-source ecosystem.
Not all content is easily exportable, third party services aren’t that reliable for migrations if you want to shop around for better hosting prices.
I don’t care so much for myself, but I know that there is a lot of opposition to the US ruling class and also broader Western empire right now, that is flourishing on Substack and other places. Substack is extremely popular for these people, and I thought that Ghost would be better since it’s open source.
I’m writing this for my fellow dissidents and journalists about some notes that are worth being aware of, if they are also considering Ghost as an option.
To finish off with a quote from one of favourite political artists/journalists:
If you want to support the genocide lady, then do so. But you don’t get to demand that I pretend you’re doing something other than what you are doing just for your emotional comfort, or to coddle your self-image. That’s not a thing.
You’re entitled to support whatever politician you want to support, but you’re not entitled to have other people let you feel nice feelings about it.
It applies to any cause. You can blabber all you want about Ukraine being a beacon of democracy and refuse to host content that goes against your biases, but you don’t get to have nice feelings about it.
Here is another interesting quote from Events in Ukraine:
That any talk about ‘listening to Ukrainian voices’ is somewhat simplistic. What is a voice? In Ukraine, one’s thoughts, let alone one’s voice, can be very incriminating. The trainer’s voice - he swore at some mobilization officers who came into his gym to take away his clients - cost him a great deal. Is it any wonder that the ‘Ukrainian voices’ that make their way into the oh-so-free western media space enthusiastically repeat the militarist slogans that allow one to stay on the right side of the glass bottle?
And finally, one of the most basic motivations behind this substack. A feeling of intense gaslighting. I am lucky enough to have been able to escape Ukraine […] Since then, I have found myself in the western media space, surrounded by oh-so well-meaning western citizens. And everything I see on the news, in the responses of people if I am forced to reveal that I was living in Ukraine until 2022 - everything makes me feel as if I had and have access to some sort of parallel reality.
On the one hand, the most democratic country on earth. On the other hand, a man beaten, raped, and soon to probably die (if he is even still alive) because he swore at the wrong people in public. At the very least, I hope my readers are infected with the same cognitive dissonance, the same epistemic alienation.
The Ghost writing community is not yet as politically diverse as the Substack community. I hope it will keep changing and I will also keep doing my part to make it so.
I’m going to take a break from this Ghost place and keep connecting with people from elsewhere. Don’t let the nonsense from insular identity-politics-above-all Western tech people here limit the scope of conversation that you can have. I don’t want them to try to shut someone else off and for it to become normal in the Ghost ecosystem. I do know that the things that people publish with Ghost are also much broader than that too.