Based on what I’ve seen, people for years have asked for like and share buttons on posts. Substack and Beehiiv have them by default; I really don’t see why Ghost hasn’t implemented these features. It seems like a no-brainer and, quite frankly, it’s disappointing to see Ghost seemingly ignore demands for these easy-to-implement features. I’ve found work-arounds, but they don’t seem very streamlined with my theme/Ghost in general.
Please, for the love of God, just make this happen. Also, there should be an option to allow comments by non-members… Just saying.
Sharing buttons are provided in many themes, although certainly not all of them. That’s definitely something that belongs in the theme layer, not the Ghost core.
Likes are not all that simple. They require extra data (who liked what) stored in Ghost. I suspect we might get that functionality when Activity Pub releases.
You can set Ghost up so that free members can comment. Given that comments sections tend to be spam magnets, I don’t think I’d want to allow non-members to comment. Heck, even free members can be a problem.
The Ghost team is small and bootstrapped, unlike your other example platforms. But the great thing about open source is that if there’s something ‘easy-to-implement’ that you want, you can always add it yourself, or hire someone to do so on your behalf. Either as a fork of the core code, or as something contributed back to the core for everyone to enjoy.
(p.s. I don’t work for Ghost.org. But I do contribute code to make the project better.)