Notices by John O'Nolan (johnonolan@mastodon.xyz)

Another year, and several milestones all at once.

12 years since Ghost launched on Kickstarter, now at $8M ARR, and powering almost $100M in revenue for independent publishers 📈

A few reflections on building an open source publishing platform, for a long time:

https://john.onolan.org/12/

🚀

Did a fun lil episode on The Business of Open Source recently, talking about building an OSS company designed around long-term sustainability.

Will be chatting more about this at Open Source Founders Summit in Paris, in May! (Link in the shownotes)

https://share.transistor.fm/s/b15a5e8f

It's been a while, but we are HIRING again 🚀

Join us as Staff Product Engineer and get paid to work on open source software shaping the future of independent media!

🌍 Fully remote since 2013
📅 4 day work week
💸 Competitive salary
🧑💻 Equipment paid for

https://careers.ghost.org

@julian @matt @pfefferle THE LONGFORMERS

On my way to Brussels for #FOSSDEM - I’ll be speaking (about ActivityPub, Ghost, and the fediverse) on Saturday evening in the Social Web track.

Hope to see you there if you’re attending 🤗

Open source software on Kickstarter is my jam.

Ghost.org was born on Kickstarter, and now thrilled to be able to sponsor the amazing ActivityPub-driven @pixelfed on our collective quest to bring back the open web.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

@pfefferle What's the 'fediverse preview' ? I clicked but wasn't sure! Is it going into core?

I've had a lot of questions over the last few weeks about how Ghost is going to avoid ending up in the same situation as WordPress.

A lot of trust in open source has been broken.

So, I spent some time writing up how we structure and think about business, governance, open source, community, and ecosystems more broadly.

I certainly don't think we've got it all figured out — but I think our model is especially relevant at this particular moment in time.

https://john.onolan.org/democratising-publishing/

Thinking about putting together a post on how we think about community, governance, open source, product, & business at Ghost

We’ve been doing things differently for the past ~12 years, and for a long time most didn’t understand why.

Feels like now might be the time to talk about this in some more detail?

Has been a lot of debate about the problems, for the past few weeks, but seen very few ideas for solutions.

I don’t have all the answers, but I think we’ve figured out at least a couple.

Very excited to have Ghost partnering with @swf, which launches today, with a mission to build an healthier future for social networking.

It's time to bring back the open web.

https://socialwebfoundation.org/

We have full 2-way interaction now happening between @index and Mastodon / Threads / pretty much anything else that has ActivityPub. This is so cool.

We just added support for native tips and donations in Ghost! 💸

Now you can accept 1-time payments from people who want to support your work, with or without a membership.

https://ghost.org/changelog/tips-donations/

Very excited to welcome Mill Media to Ghost 🎉

Local news on Ghost has been growing like crazy over the past couple of years, and The Mill has been doing some of the best reader-funded sustainable news in the UK since they launched.

https://pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/mill-media-leaves-substack-ghost/

I'll be sharing a live demo of Ghost's progress in ActivityPub development this Saturday at https://fediforum.org - around ~8am PST

I'm very excited to be successfully following our Ghost newsletter about building ActivityPub support, on Mastodon! @index

I am once again asking for follow recommendations!

Looking to follow more people on Mastodon who are building cool indie projects, generally - particularly anyone involved in Laravel and/or open source and/or media 🫶

@erlend Exactly. A lot of it feels like early web ~2005ish, and I love that

I'm a lot more excited about ActivityPub than I am about AI atm. Both are cool, but very different energy.

What's most interesting to me about ActivityPub (at least right now) is less the specific technology, and more the people who it's bringing together.

ActivityPub, the idea, is a little campfire attracting a fascinating band of misfits to gather around it.

We just sent a fresh edition of the Ghost ActivityPub newsletter — our behind the scenes build log of connecting Ghost to the fediverse.

This week we managed to get Ghost<>Ghost following working!

If you haven't signed up yet: Get instant access to the archive, here 👇

https://activitypub.ghost.org