Exploring the Ghost Platform

I've been writing over on the Substack platform for the past few years. Although the platform has technology issues, I've been able to work around them for the most part.

The most troubling issue, to me, and unrelated to technology continues to be the presence of extremism and hate speech on Substack.

For example: Jonathan Katz reports in The Atlantic:
"At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/

In January, 2024 Richard Lawler reporting for "The Verge" wrote:

"Just a couple of weeks after Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie defended the company’s decision to continue allowing Nazi content, Platformer reports that Substack will now remove “some” publications that express support for Nazis.

McKenzie’s December post was responding to a letter from over 200 Substack authors who cited, among other things, a recent report in The Atlantic that pointed out over a dozen newsletters with overt Nazi imagery, as well as many more with evidence of extremist views. Some newsletters have left Substack over the last couple of weeks for other platforms like Ghost or Beehiiv, and Platformer notes that it has seen many paying customers quit, saying they do not want to contribute to a platform that they see as supporting extremism."

This past weekend I conjured system engineering skills from my past to provision an instance of Ghost, an open source competitor of Substack. The hosted service offered by Ghost (https://ghost.org/) has clear rules that unlike Substack, bans content that “promotes discrimination, bigotry, racism, hatred,” and bans content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence,” and they accept abuse reports and remove violators.

Prior to causing as much "good trouble" as possible my technology career spanned many years, mostly at Oracle before unquietly quitting in 2017. The last part of my career was in service engineering as Oracle transformed its original hosting service from Business Online, to Oracle On Demand, and finally Oracle Cloud.

My exploration of the Ghost platform is long overdue, both from an author's perspective, and from a technology perspective. While I could have simply paid to have ghost.org provision a site for me and encourage my subscribers to join me on ghost, I wanted a deeper understanding of the so-called "nuts and bolts". This is because we are now, through the auspices of Civic Works (https://civ.works), exploring the possibility of engineering a brand new hosting environment for current Substack authors with paid and free subscribers to easily shift to professionally engineered and scalable infrastructure on the Ghost platform. We would provide the same important rules banning content that “promotes discrimination, bigotry, racism, hatred,” and ban all content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence.” We will also be engineered to comply with stringent data privacy rules of the European Union's (GDPR).

Aside from providing an engineered, simple, and affordable hosting capability for Ghost, coupled with a "one-button (or two)" easy migration from Substack, we are looking at mechanisms for deeper integration with BlueSky. With 35 million people and growing, BlueSky as an alternative to the former Twitter, will be an important space for author subscriber growth.

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