So I’ve seen a lot of nominally open-source projects where the features available in the open-source/community version are really limited compared to the paid version. Ghost is one of the few projects with a paid/cloud-hosted version that actually has all the features available in the self-hosted version.
Seriously. No fancy features are added into the open-source version to create what goes out as Ghost Pro, unless you want to count their internal billing/admin area, which I don’t. In fact, you could argue that self hosters get MORE functionality, since Ghost Pro has some enforced limits that doesn’t apply to self hosters.
I really don’t think this is fair criticism. The only way it could be more like what’s on Ghost Pro is if they didn’t provide a mostly-working nginx/caddy config and just told self-hosters “oh, plug it into Fastly’s enterprise-level offering, since that’s what we do.”
I am sorry you feel that way. I am telling you how do i feel with the information provided by ghost.
I do not know how an opinion or a personal feeling can be fair or not.
you can decide I am not fair and that ghost is doing all perfect or maybe consider that they do not as some people like the Op of this post and myself feel that this is not the case.
I again think that most people won´t have the courage to come to this forum and express what they feel, because the backslash that you get here when you do is big (or I feel that, again I can be confused…)
But I think that the only way forward is to be able to talk everything, even when we do not agree.
Back to the topic, I feel that there is not real transparency on what do the options on the new technology does when used in production.
Example: I read the public blog of activitypub that pubsub from google was completely required for this social media to work on production. There were bad consecuences when not using them and that is why they implemented it with google.
Now they ship a version to self host that does not include that, but there is no real explanation of the implications of that choice.
Well, maybe it is only required when there is thousands of views, or maybe not, I do not know. And that is the problem for me, transaparency and information. If they explain it why, I would be happy, if they don´t, I will be happy as well, but I will came here to ask for more information, as I am doing.
And this is just one example. the whole docker config has been now explained more in another topic (thanks!), but I feel there is more into it that we do not know and they do.
I will stop publishing on this topic, as my feelings and the idea is already written and I do not want to repeat myself again.
I hope you understand better my position and the reasons. I cannot explain it better.
You are mistaken and your criticism reveals your lack of understanding of the meaning, differences and overall culture around ideas like “open source”, “fairness” and “courage”.
For example, you mentioned differences between dependencies of the ActivityPub self hosted and paid versions, but if you actually understand the code and try it out yourself, you’ll notice that only a mysql database is needed besides the activitypub code itself.
Being more specific, if you understand what purpose serves PubSub, you’ll understand when they say “production”, it means serving A LOT of instances at the same time, I mean easily 1000 different installs of Ghost with their respective ActivityPub support. Production doesn’t mean a self hosted instance which could use a self hosted activitypub just using a MySQL database, and if you wanted to use pubsub anyways, you could easily extrapolate the required configuration just by analyze the variables in the Docker compose file from the ActivityPub repo.
Also, if you speak of fairness and transparency… I don’t understand why you think there is a lack of those qualities in the Ghost project, but just for being precise, open source doesn’t mean “free” (FOSS stands for “Free and Open Source Software”, whereas FLOSS stands for “Free/Libre/Open Source Software”), where Ghost is Open SOurce and it’s license is MIT, which gives you a lot of freedom, like modification and commercial use.
I understand your position, but that doesn’t mean you are right or you are somewhat “courageous” for posting your opinion based on wrong facts and a lack of the technical expertise to suggest shady or malicious behaviour from people who could easily spend their precious time doing whatever else they want instead of contributing and participate in projects that actually works and do their little but important contribution for a better world.
And, BTW, I’m not related by any means to Ghost or the people behind the organisation.
