Resting Comfortably

Since I got back in the saddle in early July, I’ve been doing an unexpectedly good job of dropping a new piece here once a week or so. But about a week ago, not long after I hit publish on the last one, my health hit a brick wall. Leading to a pretty rough time a couple of nights ago.

I’ve mostly been trying to rest up for what’s left of the week. But I’ve got a piece nearly ready, about the challenges of fully replacing the range of features FarceBook offers behind a single login and interface. I’ll probably push it out in the next couple of days if my energy levels and executive skills continue slowly but surely creeping back. No promises, just cautious optimism.

In the meantime, go and check out the release announcement for Ghost 6.0, along with this charming pug. Look, he’s wearing a coffee can, cute little squashy-nose doggy promoting my favourite beverage! Awwwww.

But why do I want you to go Ghost hunting? A few paragraphs into the post about returning belatedly from my summer sabbatical, I wrote in some detail about why I’m increasingly uncomfortable with posting on SubStack, and why I’m still doing so, when so many others now consider them beyond the pale. But just before that, I put it in a particular context by talking up the new undead hotness on its way;

… the team behind Ghost are ramping up to the release of version 6.0 of their Free Code publishing software, which will add official ActivityPub support. In practice, this means that as well as reading on the web or in your email, publications using Ghost can be found and followed without leaving the comfort of your fediverse apps …

Combine my litany of reasons for going cold on SubStack, with this very good reason for warming up to Ghost, and I’m pretty clearly hinting at a possibilty. Moving to a community-hosted Ghost service (which could be hosted on-shore) was already a strong candidate for the future of Disintermedia.net.nz. For everything they’d been offering since Ghost 0.1; fully free code; potential for on-shore hosting for digital sovereignty; simple low-distraction interface; not-for-profit governance; engineer-driven, agile work culture; and more.

On top of all that, Ghost was working their tails off to offer us a range of publishing options SubStack doesn’t really have1, and doesn’t seem inclined to offer in the future. With the official release of federated publishing support, Team Ghost confirm it’s a bit broader than publishing over ActivityPub to the post-corporate fediverse, which was already impressive. From the release announcement page;

“In Ghost 6.0 we're introducing another new distribution channel: The social web. Now, millions of people can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts from any supported social web client - including Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, WordPress, Surf, WriteFreely, and many more.”

The only thing that gives me pause is the built-in analytics. Now I know, analytics don’t kill people, drones kill people. Fair cop.

But I also know that analytics software is not neutral. We need to make sure what’s going on here benefits authors and our readers, and there’s no privacy-washing going on. So this new version of them must be subject to the same natural scepticism and critical scrutiny I would apply to claims of fully independent, Free Code analytics offered by Goggle or FarceBook.

I only learned about this new component when I read the release announcement a couple of days ago. For reasons mentioned above, I’ve been resting, so that’s a deep dive I’ve yet do. But given the alignment of values and structural incentives in the way Team Ghost work, for all the reasons given a couple of paragraphs back, I expect to be pleasantly suprised (if indeed that’s something it’s possible to expect).

Presuming it does pass muster, my next question will be how to get Disintermedia hosted on a Ghost service that’s sustainable, both in the sense of environmentally wise, and enduring over decades, or centuries. Ideally on a computer located in Aotearoa and under local ownership2.

More on this later, but first, that piece on replacing FarceBook …

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Images:

"Pumpkin Pug Spiced Latte Anyone?" by DaPuglet, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.