Disappointed that Ghost created a custom posting API instead of adopting Micropub, which is a W3C recommendation. It’s okay to have Ghost-only APIs as long as you start with standards as a baseline. Now we have fragmented client apps.
@aaronpk @manton Look at how often they blogged as a group back when they needed the help of regular citizens, and look at it now. Sillo, enterprise, proprietary. You can't even use the link to their Kickstarter page in their original blog post!
Turns out John O'Nolan is about as reliable for sustainable web contributions as so many other "well-meaning" founders of such projects. Yet another platform built about individual ambitions rather than the betterment of the many.
@aaronpk This is so weird. I saw your reply first at 5:50pm, then again at 5:51pm, and now for a third time at 5:53pm.
@simonwoods @manton fun fact: I support their kickstarter... but I’ve never actually used it. When I finally had the time to dive into it I realized it was too expensive and that I couldn’t run it on the ISP I use
@adamprocter I recommend asking Ulysses directly for this. Apparently they aren't hearing the message loudly enough.
@manton Not particularly. Ghost is not for regular people. It’s for people willing to pay $36/month (or $29/month).
@simonwoods @aaronpk Yeah, this is an issue with external replies sent multiple times via Webmention. It shouldn’t update the time if nothing changed.
@robothive @jemostrom You can also just remix this Ghost Glitch project and run it for free, with a couple of technical limitations. Good way to try it out, at least.
@manton I just saw that too :-( I understand that Micropub doesn't cover 100% of their use cases, but it would have been a great opportunity to improve the spec to cover more ground too!
@manton This is a deal breaker for me. Every time something in WordPress frustrates me I take a sideways look at Ghost and alway thought that it could one day be my emergency exit, but openness and interoperability are non-negotiable.
@manton On the note of that, I am (in Swift albeit) writing a wrapper, which takes MicroPub and posts Ghost compliant API.
Later on I plan to touch the MobileDoc directly, but small steps
@jemostrom It's a shame they didn't have the foresight to see the impending backlash against social media and the resulting gap in the market for personal blogging.
@simonwoods @jemostrom To be fair to John and the team, that was the original intention of the platform — but they couldn't find a market for it. Hence the pivot to a publishing platform.
John and Hannah wrote about this in detail a year ago:
So the biggest takeaway after 5 years is that we have been moving, and will continue to move up market, toward professional users who value power and flexibility over ease of signup. This is where we can win compared to the competition. This is where Ghost comes into its own.
I'm a happy user of both Ghost and micro.blog, and this conversation feels a bit like Mummy & Daddy fighting! 😉