I tinker with moving to Ghost every few months because I get bored, and Ghost is a nice change of pace. It’s the best experience out of the box of all the CMSes I’ve used. The idea of using Ghost for blogging and also having ActivityPub features baked in is pretty compelling. Once Magic Pages supported it, I dove right in, but it’s too early.
Having a Fediverse handle of @jack@baty.net is terrific. It’s what triggered this whole thing. I thought I’d snuggle into my little CMS control panel and still participate in the wider web. It’s still a good idea, but there are a couple of things I need before it feels right.
First, I would like to migrate followers from Mastodon. I thought it would be fine to start fresh and mention the move on my Mastodon account. That wasn’t working. Very few people followed me over and I felt dirty begging for followers.
Second, the “notes” need to be better integrated into the blog proper. This is on the road map, but as it is today it feels like I’m working in a feature-poor, buggy Mastodon client embedded in my blog’s CMS. They’re basically separate things.
Every time I’ve moved to Ghost, I’ve backed out in weeks or months. (Or, in this latest instance, days). What made me try again was the ActivityPub stuff. What made me stop, in addition to the above, was that I got twitchy knowing that my Fediverse identity and my blog platform would be completely and forever entangled. I’d need to get over that.
Jannis from Magic Pages was a huge help getting things running for me. I feel guilty backing out of it now, but there’s a strong chance I’ll be back once Ghost 6.0 hits.
So, I’m back using Hugo for now.