I kept reading this thread and holding off from posting, because I know that after releasing a major amazing update to something and being faced with maybe a vocal minority can be quite depressing and upsetting. Pair that with some responses that were probably driven from emotions and things escalate quite quick.
I love Ghost - ever since the Kickstarter and dumping my hobby WordPress blog following version after version and this major version just felt different to me in so many ways.
I like following Ghost from Twitter to GitHub - I learn a lot, but something changed where a lot of work/discussions happen in repos that aren’t public. That is strange to me, because I loved reading the back n forth large discussions of Ember vs Angular, CodeMirror, this vs that, etc. Maybe that is a needed portion as a company grows, but point of asking us to put no effort in - hurts. I put effort in and most of the links I tried and crawl are faced with a 404 in the recent past. (TryGhost/Team)
I’ve noticed this with PRs too. In the past I liked viewing open PRs and reading the approvals/comments/etc to learn about Ghost more. More often than not now, PRs go up and just merged. I assume discussions and reviews are happening behind different doors. Lets take a random PR from last year and one from today. The one from a year ago had many staff members +1 and discussing it. Nearly every merged Ghost PR now is just straight in if build passes. What changed?
Next something happened that was a big pivot or maybe the goal the entire time. I was first slightly upset with a forced dependency (portal.min.js) that loads from a CDN. I don’t really want a CDN - I have a personal choice with themes that decide to use one to inline the script. I have no choice here and even when asked it appears this file is required for Ghost to operate. Why does Ghost depend on code from a 1st party, but 3rd party CDN that is required to operate? Not to mention seeing a constant 401 error is annoying - maybe required to check for auth, but just looks like something is broken with a red line in my console.
I thought I was being crazy at first, because I don’t pay and self-host so I’m not the target. I just started thinking - if you never enable Stripe - then what is the point of showing a MRR graph? If I don’t have click/track enabled - what is the point of open rate? If I don’t have email subscriptions - what is the point of an activity feed? The UI could probably do a little fade out and explain why, but do I really have to look at an MRR of $0 for the remaining history my little hobby blog? Do I have to have toggles for sending emails to paid/free members if I have none?
This reminds me of the whole AMP debate a few years back. One day after a new release I just got a bunch of AMP warnings and I was like - wtf is this. I don’t want AMP, don’t believe in it and a few releases later there was a toggle for it.
I’m not being stubborn to be stubborn, I will try a free based email subscription model - still learning and asking questions, but I don’t think a paid model is in my sights anytime soon.
I’m not going anywhere yet. Sorry for the novel.