Ghost is building a blogger decentralized future

While some areas of the internet have become overwhelmed by AI, subject to AI creation as a process, been captured, or turned evil in some other way it is encouraging to see Ghost's success!

Ghost's support for blogging as a cultural practice and a technical one has been impressive over the years. I've only been getting more impressed lately and I think it means it's time to admit that I was wrong about Ghost when it first began.

This is no diss to WordPress, but: When Ghost peeled off of WordPress they said it wasn't a blogging platform anymore, and that WordPress was evolving away from solo and small bloggers. At the time I said they were wrong and their positioning wouldn't work.

I was wrong. They were right.

WordPress is, at a spiritual and fundamental level, enterprise software now. It needs to be that, people need it to be that. But it isn't a blogging platform anymore. Ghost has taken up the role on the internet of the blogging platform that WordPress once had.

In the changelog for Ghost 6.0, the company also highlights one particularly interesting statistic: three years ago, when Ghost 5.0 launched, Ghost’s revenue was $4 million, while publisher earnings were a little over $10 million. As of Monday, Ghost’s annual revenue is “over $8.5 million” while publisher earnings have crossed the $100 million mark. “Indie media isn’t just surviving, it’s thriving,” they write.

I think Ghost being the future of the blogging web has been clear for a while now. The latest update integrates ActivityPub and has optional bridging into ATProto and Threads. I can't think of a better set of features for a modern blogger than that. It's clearly building for an audience of users and developers who are invested in being free of the closed big-tech-dominated internet and connecting with each other directly and unmediated. That's very exciting! Other people, especially big companies, will have other needs and requirements, but that's fine. Ghost got where it is because it never wanted to be the tool for everyone and that's a good way to run a project. Ghost has focus and that focus is on ideals I really appreciate.

Ghost now uses the ActivityPub protocol, and publications can be natively distributed across social platforms like Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, WordPress, Flipboard, and so on. Publishers will also get access to a built-in social feed — which looks a little bit like Substack’s notes, except it shows posts across multiple platforms — through which they can both read other publications and follow what users are saying across the internet.

For my comeuppance I will switch one of my longer running WordPress sites over to Ghost at some point in the near future. I'm very excited to see Ghost's success and what it means for building a better web.

“If you’ve been around on the web for a while, and you can remember back that far…you might even call it the return of the blogosphere,” Ghost says.