A somewhat popular blogger discusses her migration from Substack to "Ghost". I think this level of detail with VPS, Email-lists, and importing email lists from Substack, migration to Stripe and more.
Its a huge amount of detail that's almost certainly relevant to the crowd here in Hacker News.
I do notice that she's written around some of the technical things she's lost with the move: footnotes are no longer clickable, and there is no dark mode. Nice article regardless, the Github repos are appreciated.
> I also ran mysql_secure_installation on my Ghost server to harden up the MySQL server. This does a couple of things to make it harder for people to compromise your SQL database (which is initially set up in a development mode), like disabling remote login as root.
WTF!
Why in the world aren't the defaults set to "secure by default"? Why in the world would DigitalOcean create a Ghost droplet that wasn't secured out the wazoo?
And, looking at what she went through, self-hosting this stuff is still far, far too stupidly difficult.
So she's leaving because Substack didn't go far enough to violate the nazi's First Amendment rights? This makes me ask the question, Is a violation of a nazi's first amendment rights a violation of everyone's first amendment?
I offer a reflection on your idea of a strange irony: This is a question of attention and money flow. Molly White claimed ownership of Molly's work and took on providing the infrastructure to self-host. This means that _Molly_ does not have to contribute directly to a network effect that amplifies voices Molly does not agree with.
In effect, Molly took the argument that voices that Molly does not agree with can always self-host to get their message out and embraced it. Molly's voice is now self-hosted. Molly, in effect, embraced full libre, rather than be silent and accept that Molly had to agree with whatever the hosting provider decides to do.
Myself, I'm really more interested in what happens next to Molly. I wish Molly all the best luck as Molly grows the endeavor.
Any tool can be used for evil. It's stupid to pretend there could ever be any kind of boycott of the blanket concept of tools. I shouldn't have to point that out to you.
She's no longer giving her business to a service that does something she finds wrong.
It isn't, unless you squint real hard and pretend it is. We all understand and accept that we're unlikely to find a place to host content that doesn't also host some content we find objectionable. Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, AWS, GCP, etc they all host some stuff we find objectionable.
However there is a pretty clear line between someone hosting objectionable content and someone promoting objectionable content which is what substack is doing with some of their new tools that highlight other creators you might (or might not) want to read. Digital Ocean doesn't promote any content hosted by people using their platform, they aren't a content platform, same with Cloudflare and others.
So a more apt comparison would be she refuses to use Faber-Castell because they have a weekly newsletter that occasionally suggests Nazi content, and will instead use California Pencil Co. pencils because they don't have a news letter at all much less one occasionally suggesting Nazi content.
Not sure why you have an objection to people taking a principled stand against companies that promote Nazi content.
Substack doesn't take a principled stance on free speech. They choose to censor specific speech. They promote specific speech. What makes you think they're principled?
Substack openly hosts unambiguous medical misinformation that can result in harm. It's reasonable to not want to support that, indirectly or otherwise.
It's not, and maybe my comment was unclear. My comment was about the Ghost managed hosting service and its competitors. It's just a little strange that Substack is blamed for allowing medical misinformation on a thread praising its competitor, when that competitor also allows medical misinformation.
All I'm saying is that when judging the policies of these companies, we should apply a consistent standard.
There is a consistant standard from Molly and others who have left (like Casey Newton) It has to do with social tools. Substack puts out a weekly email digest and has a notes platform where your articles can be next to the nazi articles by substacks algo. Ghost doesnt push social and isnt interested in getting into that space.
Its a huge amount of detail that's almost certainly relevant to the crowd here in Hacker News.