John O'Nolan: Democratising Publishing

Having seen how things worked on the inside for several years, the conclusion I personally came to was that WordPress and Automattic were not truly about democratising publishing, after all.

At the same time, I felt the product was becoming slow and bloated. WordPress was desperate to no longer be seen as "just a blogging platform" - and so it was adding features left, right, and center, to try and compete with Tumblr, Wix, Squarespace and Shopify. All at the same time.

I found myself constantly wondering: What could WordPress look like if the product, the technology and the organisation lived up to what I thought democratising publishing actually meant?

In November 2012, I wrote a blog post pitching my answer to that question. I called it Ghost

I’ve been running Birchtree on Ghost since 2019, and it’s been a decision I am very happy I made all those years ago. The blog had originally run on WordPress, but I had grown more and more frustrated with it. It was very functional, but it was a piece of software I simply didn’t enjoy using — it won the feature checklist war, but lost the experience war for me.

Ghost was comparatively less feature-rich, but it was dead focused on bloggers like me. Over the last 5 years I’ve been on the platform, they’ve added some new stuff, largely around newsletters, but the core experience has mostly been great (save the smartphone web UI which is painful) and remained that way though all these updates.

Ghost isn’t for everyone (some people need the features WordPress supports, others might value the integrations it provides, and still others might even prefer the experience, to each their own), but it is absolutely for me.