A few months ago, I wrote about wanting to get back into writing more as a personal hobby. I have all these ideas for things I want to explore - the fun, weird, interesting aspects of life - but as quickly as that motivation came, it left. In large part, I think that was driven by the writing experience my previous platform - Squarespace - had to offer.

Don't get me wrong, Squarespace was great. As a low/no-code site builder, it taught me a lot about how to build visually aesthetic websites while keeping accessibility in mind. Blogging has never been about making money for me - I've not earned a dime in the decade and a half I've been writing, but with the cost of Squarespace steadily rising year over year, I had to ask myself if I was really getting my money's worth. The answer to that question was a resounding NO.

Want to do some code injection? Can't! You have to go to the middle subscription tier. Want to write a newsletter and simultaneously have it published as a blog (or vice versa?) Think twice! You first have to write the post, then manually copy/paste it into the newsletter builder, and hit send. And here's a second catch - you only get three free letters to send before, you guessed it, there's yet another monthly subscription. And the list of restrictions goes on and on and on...

But the writing experience - oof, that was particularly bad. It was clunky, hard to format, and worst of all felt sluggish. In comparison, it takes me about a 1/3 of the time on Ghost to get up and writing. And as someone who really should take notes more often so I don't forget what's rattling around in my head, that's pretty important to me.

When I began researching what platform I wanted to move to next, a fairly big decision after being with one for 11 years, WordPress naturally felt like the most obvious choice. However, given the drama surrounding Matt Mullenwag, Ghost was the only option that made sense. After going through the support documentation, one section that stood out to me was where Ghost effectively spells out that migrating from Squarespace is a manual process that can't be automated. That was large deciding factor for me - wanting to have greater flexibility and ownership over my own content in the future without the headache of closed platforms getting in the way.

But really, what excited me most was Ghost's commitment to adopting ActivityPub as a protocol. If you know me, you know I'm of the opinion that closed ecosystems are slowly dying in favour of the open internet slowly coming back to life. That and it's half the cost than Squarespace with all of the features already made available.

So aside from a three day process to move everything over, the experience has been overall terrific, and I'm super stoked to start exploring paid newsletters and podcasting - all things built natively into Ghost. I did run into some issues with moving my domain name over, but that's largely due to my own lack of understanding in this area than it is the fault of Ghost or Squarespace.

So, by the time you read this, I've already made the move, and I can't wait to hear your feedback!