After a couple of days, I have mixed feelings about going all-in with Ghost for my blog and fediverse identity.
This all started because I was frustrated with Hugo breaking things after nearly every update. When I get mad at Hugo, I start CMS shopping. Usually, this ends up with me moving to Eleventy or Blot or Kirby. Sometimes it means I move to Ghost. I seem to always end up back in Hugo, though.
Ghost is one of those things that looks like The Right Answer™. It's open-source, can be self-hosted, is pleasant to use, and the themes look good right out of the box. It comes with newsletter features that I don't need yet, but might one day. Ghost's editor strikes a decent balance between plain and fancy. It's not "plain text" but I don't hate it, most of the time.
At the same time I was growing frustrated with Hugo, the Ghost team was working on adding ActivityPub features directly within Ghost. What this could mean is that my blogging and my social media posting could be done in the same place. Even cooler, my social media identity could become @jack@baty.net, which I find ideal. Not being part of someone else's "instance" is a welcome change. Even better, I don't have to self-host my own Mastodon or Mastodon-like instance, which was a nightmare last time I tried it.
Yesterday, I migrated my content as best I could and flipped the switch. Baty.net is now running Ghost. I've done this several times before, but this time is different because of the corresponding migration from being @jbaty@social.lol to @jack@baty.net. If I change my mind, it won't just be a matter of making a little DNS change.
So, how do I feel about it after a couple of days? I'm nervous, to be honest. I'm twitchy about not having my "main" blog as a static website running on a simple server somewhere, nearly free. The fine folks at Magic Pages are hosting everything for me, at a cost of $15/month. This is a fair price, but there's a weight behind the "pay every month forever" feeling.
Blogging with Ghost is mostly a pleasure. The editor does some stupid things that may drive me nuts later, but I'm ignoring them for now while I enjoy simply dragging images into the post and having them resized, placed, and linked for me. That's really nice, coming from the manual process when using an SSG.
What I'm more troubled about is that living in Ghost as my social media hub isn't feeling the way I expected. It feels claustrophobic, somehow. It's lonely, even though it's very Mastodon-like. There's no way yet to migrate followers, so I've got to spam my Mastodon followers and beg them to follow my new account. This is a little gross for me. I'm watching where Ghost goes with all this and I am banking on them making it all feel more, smooth, I guess.
I know me, and that means I know that some day, probably soon, I'll feel like I should be using an SSG for my blog. Some thing or things will bug me about Ghost and it'll make me second guess everything. Happens every time. Maybe this time I'll ignore it and just keep going with Ghost. For now, I'll occupy my time fretting over themes. Otherwise, I'll keep you posted.