The Spectre is Ghost, a modest proposal to the unholy alliance of billionaire owned platforms. Ghost is a media platform for independent publishers and content creators with $7.5 million in annual revenue. That's an incredible achievement for a distributed non-profit foundation that has had a profitable and sustainable business for the last 12 years.

Ghost empowers workers to create their own alliances through their built-in growth strategy called "Recommendations", as well as their public "Explore" feature for catapulting new projects to the community. A simple way to say, if you like that, you'll love this. Here's what it looks like in practice:

Sure, Ghost is a blog like this one, powered by free and open-source software. But it's software built by a foundation with a mission to democratize publishing. Ghost is an alternative way to support the labor of content creation for the movement, not moments.

Community over commodity. There is no billionaire behind Ghost, just an organization that exists for purpose rather than for profit.

For a cardboard box company that might not mean much — but for a school, hospital, local news org, or open source project, it means a great deal.

Hi, it's me, your local news worker, open-source contributor, and organizer. As billionaires continue towards subscription models to help their dependent blogs blend in, a need rises for a worker owned alternative. I first started tracking Ghost while working on open-source projects and email reporting dashboards at Mailgun, currently the only bulk email sender for Ghost-based newsletters. Fast forward a decade later, I started exploring Ghost again as a digital organizing tool to replace mailchimp after their pricing changes for the Tech Workers Coalition Newsletter. I went with ActionNetwork.org at the time, but I won't ever make that choice again.

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I see the potential behind Ghost, as a platform and ecosystem to build collective power. I see it as a creative outlet for artists, writers, photographers, organizers, community groups and of course, independent news. I'm not not saying to abandon your current platforms. But consider the social labor involved, what cut your current platform takes, and consider an open alternative for the people, not the powerful.

What are the next steps?

I'm going to start building out prototypes to share with the first groups I've already reached out to.

Don't despair, you can try the managed hosted version of Ghost here. It's currently the least painful way to get started, or you can find a Ghost expert to help run this on Open Source Application Hosting for $1.90 or be on the look out for worker-owned platforms that support this work.

And you'd want go through all that because it's worth the following at the end of the day:

• Own Your Content
• Memberships & Monetization
• Email Newsletters & List-Building
• Scalable & Adaptable

Ghost isn’t a new kid on the block that's a response to anything current, but it represents an exit to private capitalist owned platforms and the media barons behind the curtain. Just as open-source redefined how we build software, Ghost and similar models can redefine how we build communities, tell stories, and support local journalism and organizing.

I'll be writing and documenting my journey from here on out with Ghost, to provide digital organizing signals. If this interests you, let's connect. If you'd like to get D.O.S. content like this in your inbox, subscribe below:

D.O.S.

Digital Organizing Signals is a new media project by Eddy Hernandez, an abolitionist, artist, and worker focused on creating content and tools that are for communities not corporations.

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Changelog: 
- 12/10/24 docs(explore): added changelog and platform exploration notes
- 12/13/24 docs(ghost): more screenshots of ghost