👻 Ghost is REALLY awesome. Overkill, but awesome.
@maique It's great to see a viable alternative to the dominant platforms.
I just took a quick look; they have 33 employees and 21,000 customers. If it wasn't awesome, I'd be asking serious questions.
@gr36 Yeah. Not ideal for microblogging as well. But it looks so cool, and that back-office is just wonderful.
@maique I know you don’t need it, but just in case, I saw someone share this very cheap hosting option for Ghost should you want another play. www.pikapods.com you get $5 credit with sign up (no card needed) and can stand up a Ghost instance with one click. I made a site to play with portable-pogona.pikapod.net
@AndyNicolaides Thanks. That’s where dinkiwinkiminkiwinki is hosted 🙂 I just started a new one, to play around.
@pratik Probably a big factor, yep. Their initial Kickstarter also raised more than twice as much as Micro.blog.
@SimonWoods Ah! Never knew it was a Kickstarter project too. Raised more coz they set a higher target or was it oversubscribed? I can look it up.
@pratik Yeah it was a big "we love open source" campaign, so they also leveraged that side of things. I don't know exactly why it turned out to be more successful — though there's a good chance they spoke about it at the time — however I do have a few guesses:
- John O'Nolan initially partnered with two people and between the three I assume they had relationships which helped them gain early partners such as Microsoft.
- Plus of course the direct advantage of starting with three full-time team members.
- They specifically targeted the money side of the web; helping people to make money whilst talking about publishing and journalists and the like.
- At some point they definitely targeted big customers (Apple, et al) and as a result gained greater exposure in the press and with the type of audience that is actively looking to purchase subscriptions.
- The whole project was dedicated to the platform — no big promise about publishing a book was included, as far as I know.
- And I know it's obvious but Ghost was first, by about 4 years.
(I'm probably wrong about all of that — I need to properly research the subject.)
FWIW if it wasn't for the generosity of the company, I wouldn't be on Micro.blog because I wasn't able to afford £5 a month for a long time... actually, I'm not sure I could justify that right now even. So whilst I understand the frustrations we in the community share about Manton's patience, I am beyond grateful that he chose a more forgiving and genuinely open route as compared to the likes of Ghost.