Can you be friends with your competitor?

About this episode

Murat Çorlu is the founder of Synaps Media – a managed Ghost host built, in his words, as "a calmer way to run Ghost." He's also a direct competitor to Magic Pages, and a friend, which is exactly why Jannis wanted him on. Murat traces the path from a 2015 SaaS for news sites (Synaps News), through a Mastodon-hosting detour after the Twitter exodus, to going all-in on managed Ghost hosting – and why he intends to keep the team small and the service affordable on purpose.

The heart of the conversation is two competitors deciding the Ghost market grows by cooperating, not cannibalising: helping publishers leave Substack and WordPress, closing the internationalization and payment gaps that lock people out, and contributing upstream. Murat tells the story of the theme editor he built and open-sourced – which Ghost then shipped a native version of – plus his wishes for Ghost 7, ActivityPub and fedi.pub, and what it's really like to run a hosting company as (almost) one person.

Chapters

• 0:00 — Welcome — meet Murat and Synaps Media
• 0:29 — Who Murat is: a Turkish engineer in the Netherlands
• 1:33 — Before Synaps Media: the 2015 Synaps News project
• 2:14 — The Mastodon detour after the Twitter exodus
• 4:25 — Finding the Ghost hosting niche
• 6:16 — The joy of hosting publishers
• 8:21 — "A calmer way to run Ghost"
• 10:49 — Friends with your biggest competitor
• 18:19 — Growing the market, not stealing customers
• 22:39 — What's missing: internationalization
• 27:22 — The theme editor — building and open-sourcing it
• 32:55 — Ghost ships a native version (with Hannah)
• 35:46 — Contributing to Ghost Core, and talking to the team
• 40:40 — Ghost.org vs Ghost Pro confusion
• 50:16 — Meeting John and the core team
• 52:17 — Wishes for Ghost 7
• 55:34 — ActivityPub, and fedi.pub
• 56:49 — Running a hosting service solo — fun or risky?
• 58:47 — Staying small and affordable
• 1:03:02 — Working with a team
• 1:07:58 — Wrap-up, and see you in Hamburg

Links & mentions

• Synaps Media — Murat's managed Ghost hosting — "a calmer way to run Ghost"
• Ghost — the open-source platform both hosts build on
• fedi.pub — Murat's tool for public profile links for a Ghost ActivityPub handle
• The in-Ghost theme editor — the open-source theme editor Murat built, picked up by Magic Pages
• muratcorlu.com — Murat's personal site
• Vellumine — Chris's search & analytics tool for Ghost (episode 3)
• PayGlue — André's payment middleware for Ghost (episode 6)
• Indiecon — the Hamburg publishing festival Jannis and Murat are both heading to

Transcript

Jannis: Hi and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast where we sit down with the people building hosting and publishing on Ghost. I'm Jannis and today I'm here with Murat, the founder of Synaps Media, which full disclosure is a direct competitor to Magic Pages. Murat is also running a managed hosting service for Ghost and I've been looking forward to this episode for a long time. Murat, welcome.

Murat: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jannis: My absolute pleasure. Murat, can you introduce yourself quickly to the people who don't know you yet?

Murat: Yeah, I'm Murat Çorlu. I'm a Turkish man living in the Netherlands since more than nine years with my family, with my ten years old son, with my wife. I'm a software engineer with more than 20 years experience and since almost three years. I left my regular job and started working on Synaps Media and here. I am.

Jannis: Murat, to start off, can you take us back to the time before Synaps Media? What was going on in your life before that and what did you see in the Ghost ecosystem that made you decide that the world needed your version of a managed hosting provider for Ghost?

Murat: The story of Synaps Media is actually tied to a very long time ago, the roots of that story. During that 20 years of software development experience while working on different companies in Turkey and the Netherlands, I was always working on site projects. It was always the ideal situation to have my own project working on my own work. And in 2015, when I was in Turkey, I started to work on a project named Synaps News. It was about SaaS managed service for news websites.

So you could create a news website like you create a blog without thinking about all of the hosting hassles and there were specific features for journalists. So the name comes from there and actually if you compare with the current situation, even the general idea is very similar. At that time, we had to move to the Netherlands and I had to start working in Philips at that time. Eventually, I had to stop on working on this project. Then a few years later, when the Elon Musk drama happened in Twitter, many people were trying to use Mastodon. And at that time with my friend, we started to work on another managed hosting service for Mastodon and that time the name was Synaps Media.

It was five years ago. We also worked on it, but we missed the wave of people going from Twitter to Mastodon. And even though we finished the project and we didn't have any customers. And then three years ago, I had a chance to for the first time in my whole career to work on this project by full time because I was able to collect some money for the first time in my whole life. And the situation in the Netherlands had a lot comparing to Turkey and yeah, multiple circumstances helped me to consider that, yeah, let me stop working in a salary job and try something at least for one year.

And then in the beginning of 2024, I started working on Synaps Media. And in the past, when I was working on side projects, I was always trying to find a very smart idea that no one talked about and will find a super genius idea. But then in the meantime, when I was getting old, I noticed that this is not very important. It doesn't mean that a successful project will always need a super new idea. I was already using Ghost as my personal blog and a couple of more blogs. I was hosting websites since maybe more than 10 years of my friends. And I really liked Ghost, the experience of hosting it. And at that time I checked the other hosting services. I also noticed magic pages.

Jannis: I remember when you signed up for a trial and I thought, wait, I know that guy from.

Murat: The Ghost Forum. Maybe I tried to hide myself, but I couldn't take the success that at that time you were only giving a lifetime option and Ghost Pro was the prominent one as of now. And I also didn't find the other options very clear and good enough. And I thought, yeah, this is a good niche. It's a nice ecosystem to be inside. I was already active in Ghost Forum sometime while I was working on the project. And I like the people and the main idea that motivates me, providing a hosting service like for Ghost and for publishers. It's a very motivating thing because I check the websites that are hosted in Synaps Media regularly. And I feel like a part of those publications.

I'm helping them and they are very nice things to be part of. I have now the customers from all around the world, more than 45 countries, I think. I mean, multiple languages. Sometimes I go there and just use translate and try to read what is it about? And it is a perfect feeling. And I already started to get that feeling in the beginning while hosting a few friends' websites. And then in the 2025, I first announced this publicly in Ghost Forum, then announced in multiple places. And since then, I'm fully working on Synaps Media. It was one of the best decisions that I had in my career. Hopefully it will be even better in time.

Jannis: Yeah, I love that. And I think while you have a lot more experience in the hosting field or in the software development field as well, I think we come from a similar way of very quickly seeing that joy that it brings to host other publications. Because it's similar to me, like whenever I check some of the websites we host, I end up just scrolling on them for hours sometimes, just seeing all the cool different things that people are doing, everything from those little passion projects. And I always bring up the example of David, the beekeeper from Scotland that we host. I had no idea about beekeeping before I checked out his website.

And then we have some other really cool projects that are more news focused, that reach thousands of people, tens of thousands of people every month. It's not only like a project that we do to also make a living, but hosting is a project where we see that it gives so much back and that it enables so many other people to do what they really like.

Murat: It has a social effect in the people's lives, both for publishers and also for readers. And this is a nice effect. I mean, for example, if I could make work on a social media project, you can also consider them as content creators, like the people tweeting in Twitter or X, but it doesn't necessarily mean they are sharing nice things. But the ghost publishers who have something that were to share, they think, were to spend some time on it. It's not just, yeah, I'm eating somewhere now, it's like an Instagram share. They spend some time to write a structured article or share some photos or share some podcasts now. They are results of some effort and it is nice having publications like this.

Nowadays we try to see some contents that have some effort in it, especially in AI times. Some people are just giving their prompt to AI and creates articles just for getting visitors. So in general, I met with very nice people, very special, how can I say, interesting people with Synaps Media and also with other ghost websites in Magic Pages and Ghost Pro as well. They are creating very interesting stuff and I feel very good to be part of this whole community and ecosystem. It's a nice feeling to work on this project. Cool.

Jannis: On the Synaps Media website, the first thing that stands out is your title there. It says, a calmer way to run ghost. Can you explain a little bit where that calm framing comes from and what you are calm against? What is the meaning behind that?

Murat: Yeah, from the beginning, my intention with Synaps Media was trying to simplify all of the frustration points of a ghost publisher, not just about the ghost, the regular hosting itself, but the things around it, like the domain connection, having an email with the same domain that you publish your ghost website. Some stuff like finding and editing a theme regarding your expectations. When I was using ghost, even though I was mostly happy, I already noticed there are many frustration points about publishing in ghost. In Synaps Media, one of my mission that I had in mind, I tried to provide some solutions for all of those frustration points for the publishers.

I mentioned this in multiple places. I'm trying to make ghost a platform like having a social media account, the mindset of this. When you open an Instagram or TV account, you don't think about the storage. You don't think about how much visitors you will have. You don't think about how many TV you can send a day. So that's a good peace of mind. But in most of the hosting services, even though that makes sense for a hosting service, there are some limits that many publishers don't understand at all. For example, if you talk about one gigabyte bandwidth limit per month. For many people, it doesn't mean anything. All means mostly reducing the noise about publishing a ghost website.

I cannot say it is the most silent place yet, but step by step, I'm trying to remove the frustration points, the places that people hit again and again. And sometimes I'm doing this with special features with the Synaps Media itself. I'm doing by contributing directly to Ghostcore. This is my target with Synaps Media, and I'm doing my best for reaching that point. That's the meaning behind the title.

Jannis: Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I already mentioned in the beginning that we're also direct competitors, yet I personally don't think we ever treated each other that way. We're in touch quite frequently. We also met in Amsterdam earlier this year, and we also regularly bounce ideas off each other. So most people would probably look at the Ghost ecosystem and come to the conclusion that our community is so small that the whole thing has to be a zero-sum game. Basically, when Synaps Media grows, Magic Pages cannot grow. And when Magic Pages is successful, Synaps Media cannot be. How do you see that? Do we have enough room for multiple hosting providers in the market? Or is the Ghost market too small compared to, let's say, the WordPress market?

Murat: Firstly, I want to share something about this communication between us. I really like direct communication in my whole life. About Ricky positions in the working life, I was always eager to directly talk with the person that we are talking about or having difficulties about communication and directly ask the hard question. So it was the most easier communication style for me. And luckily, I'm now living in the Netherlands. This is the Dutch style communication.

So I'm living in my heaven. And I should also give the credit to you because this communication started with your attempt. When I first announced the Synaps Media in Ghost Forum in, I think, 15 minutes or 30 minutes, you directly wrote to me from Ghost Forum's direct messages. And it was a very warm welcome. And you said, yeah, I was already expecting this because of your message something. It was the trial that gave you away before that. Yeah, maybe. Maybe it was obvious because of my questions in the Ghost Forum.

But it was very nice. And when I tell the friendship between us to my friends or some other people, they always surprised at how come your biggest competitor, you can be friends with that. But I really liked it because this is easier for me. We could act like strangers to each other, even though we accept and we respect what we do and prefer to not talk because we are competitors. But this is stressing. This adds stress to the general communication. Then one year later, we start complaining from each other. That's not a good way. And as you already mentioned, the Ghost Ecosystem is already small. The main target we should focus on to gain more publishers on Ghost itself, not specifically Synaps Media.

If someone moves their website from Substack to Magic Pages, that's a good news for me as well, because that's a chance. The chance of having these publications in Synaps Media in the future is more than having it from Substack. And when the ecosystem grows, then the attention and the focus will be more on the whole product and the things around it. So I never targeted to take customers from Magic Pages or Ghost Pro.

Instead, I'm always focusing on the friction points of migrating from other platforms to Ghost. Many people migrated from WordPress to Ghost in Synaps Media. There are many difficulties. And in every migration, I'm trying to make it a Sumutri experience. And hopefully, we are also talking with you about this. Hopefully we will be able to find a better migration tool for Ghost that can work for all Ghost Pro, Magic Pages, and Synaps Media, and others that will help having more WordPress or Substack users to Ghost.

Instead of focusing on this, fighting each other, or acting like, yeah, this is the way. I think like Yannis is the main blocker for me to gain enough money, that doesn't make sense. That's not real. Even with that friendship, maybe with the help of that friendship, I had a very nice amount of customers in one and a half years. I think you helped a lot because you mentioned the Synaps Media's name and gave link multiple times in directly Magic Pages blog posts and your social accounts. I also try to give my compliments to you in multiple pages. Even sometimes my customers ask, what do you think about Magic Pages? I say nothing wrong with Magic Pages.

I don't think you will not be happy by going there for sure. There are small differences and you can just decide what to choose. If you go there, you are always welcome if you want to go back or yeah, it doesn't matter. So that's, I think, the kind thing. I think that this is also a need in the broader markets, not just for Ghost. If people can consider about the real effects of being harsh competitors with others and trying to tackle others, that doesn't help. Even if financially helps, it doesn't help mentally, it doesn't help motivationally. If I get more customers because of tricking people or because Magic Pages had bad times, I will not feel good.

So it will not be a good feeling. I will not feel it as a success. That's, of course, a view of the life, how can I say? I'm not trying to be rich with Synaps Media. I don't have a plan to be a billionaire or something, even if it will be possible. Probably I will stop somewhere. I always intend to keep Synaps Media small. It's also in the part of the Mission of Ghost team I see in their website, they also intend to keep the team small. And I really like to see this in the Mission of Ghost. I also share that even smaller. My best scenario is in a few years, four or mostly five people, and then just stopping there, not trying to add more features or something.

I don't want that. I want to keep small. And I'm very happy to have a competitor like you. It's a very big chance for me. It was very helpful. It is still helpful. Yeah, you just invite me to your podcast and you will publish this in your Magic Gaze website. That's very nice things. And hopefully we are giving a good example for other people that it doesn't need to be a harsh competition to be successful. We can consider both projects are successful, even though we are competitors.

Jannis: And I think you mentioned one sentence that we have talked about a couple of weeks ago as well, which is that the goal should not be to get customers from, let's say, Ghost Pro, which is always the big player because they have roughly about 30,000 customers probably. We don't know exact numbers. We can only guess based on the numbers that they publish. It would be the easiest way for us to target them and just to say, hey, come to us, we're cheaper.

But you said something back then. And also now in your answer here, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it's the core of who I think you are as a person as well, because you said the goal isn't to steal from each other. The goal is to increase the market, to show people that are on Substack, that there are aspects of Substack that are, let's say, ethically questionable and that they might have a better time on Ghost and whether that's on Ghost Pro, whether that's self-host on Ghost or on Synaps Media, on Magic Pages or anywhere else, that doesn't matter. And I think that this is such a core belief that you hold that makes you the person that you are running Synaps Media.

And I think we should take that as a Ghost community as the goal, that we don't cannibalize each other, but that we show people the amazing things that Ghost can do, the possibilities you have with Ghost as a software, and to rather expand our entire market rather than fight the little battles in between.

Murat: Yeah, I would like to give a real example about this. One of my first customers was a person from Venezuela. And actually, he was a customer of Magic Pages before. I remember he couldn't make the payment to Magic Pages because of the Paddle was not working in Venezuela. He couldn't make the payment and he tried Synaps Media because I used Stripe and it accepted the payment. Now he is still in Ghost because of that. If he could also manage to make payment to me or other services, then, yeah, he will not be able to use Ghost. He will probably go to Substack or WordPress.

But now, even for Magic Pages, he is a potential customer. So if he wants to switch to Magic Pages, it's very easy between the Ghost migrations. So I think that's a clear sign. Having more options in the market, it adds value to the whole ecosystem. There are many people in Ghost Pro, very happy about Ghost, but maybe they are not able to afford the prices of Ghost Pro. Instead of losing them to other platforms, having other managed services adds value to the Ghost ecosystem. Yeah, there are some feature differences or something. People may think if you like each other that much, why don't you merge Synaps Media and Magic Pages? Why you are still competitive?

We even talk about this, maybe you can remember. I do, yes. But I think still having more options, even though we are repeating some stuff with Magic Pages and Synaps Media, still adds value to the ecosystem. Mostly, with Synaps Media and Magic Pages doing the same thing, but there are small differences and that those small differences can make some real difference for some customers. So instead of merging them to a single product and losing some people because of some of the features that you or. I am giving, it's not preferable.

So for a healthy ecosystem, for Ghost in general, I think having more hosting options, easier self hosting opportunities, I mean more local, maybe hosting providers, etc. These will help for sure. I don't think Ghost is the main product here, not the hosting services. If Ghost becomes better, then it doesn't matter how many hosting providers we have. Think about WordPress. I don't know how many WordPress hosting services are there, but all of them earn enough money for them. Some of them are billion dollar companies. That's a good sign that growing the market is the right act instead of fighting each other in a small niche market.

Jannis: When you think about Ghost, are there any areas that you hear in your day-to-day life, in your support chats and everything, where people say, OK, maybe Ghost isn't right for me or maybe they outgrow Ghost? Are there any particular areas that you see that we as a Ghost community and the Ghost Core team need to address to keep more people within the Ghost ecosystem?

Murat: Yes, my customer base is from many countries and especially from Eastern countries, from Asia or Middle East. The people from them complains about the lack of translations or internationalizations in Ghost. Currently, if someone wants to use Ghost for their publication, even though it is a local news or something, they need to know English just for Ghost admin. Ghost admin can only work in English. So this is a real blocker because, for example, I'm coming from Turkey and I already worked in the news publishing area 10 years ago. I would really like to offer my service to the many news websites. There are more than 10,000 news websites in Turkey, the local news website, but only maybe 5% of them can use an English admin panel for their publications.

So this is a real blocker, I think, for Ghost to reach more markets in the more countries. People mostly complain about it and I'm always considering to find a way to add internationalization to Ghost admin. Even the official teams, Cathy from the Ghost community, made a lot of effort for adding internationalization to many parts of Ghost. The public parts are mostly internationalized, thanks to her. But the translations of the official themes are still waiting for a last touch. I don't know what is waiting, actually.

But yeah, so these are the most important, let's say, complaints about Ghost. And also, for example, I have some customers from Korea. There are some quirks about the URLs in Korean websites in Ghost, especially when you migrate from WordPress. It generates very ugly URLs. That doesn't make sense at all. Last week, one customer from Korea was complaining about this. He said, this is the biggest issue that. I have with Ghost. When I hear that kind of feedback, I always note them down and either consider working on Ghost Core, the code base itself, for fixing them, addressing them in snaps media with a site hacking it or patching it. Yeah, there are more, I think, but this is the biggest issue that I see in general.

Jannis: Yeah, interesting. On my side, internationalization is not that much of a blocker in the sense of translations. But what comes up quite often and where people actively leave Ghost is sometimes the lack of payment providers that people say, OK, I want to have paid memberships. But I live in one of the most common countries is South Africa, for example. Stripe doesn't exist there. They can't use paid memberships with Ghost. India still has problems with Stripe, even though Stripe has, let's say, a beta version or a preview version that they use there.

But what I heard from my customers is that it's really complicated to get that because you need special licenses for your business and everything. So. I would also fault that into that. It's the fact that Ghost is very focused on, let's say, the Western world, very focused on English speaking countries. And there is very little effort to expand a little bit. And I think this is definitely something that both the Ghost core team and also we as a community need to maybe bring more effort to for, I don't know, Ghost 7 maybe.

Murat: Yeah, that is really that payment providers is also, for example, Stripe doesn't work in Turkey. Same problem. There are many publications in Turkey that. I would really like to suggest, Ghost. But, yeah, the payment feature they were not able to use at all. They are stuck with the advertisement based thing, which is very sad and ugly. And as I said, internationalization is also another thing. Yeah, as you said, the Ghost seems like a product for Western countries only. That is maybe enough for the core team.

But I think it is killing the bigger potential that we have. I think more than two of three of the world doesn't know English and maybe don't able to use Stripe. So having solutions for those countries would help a lot, Ghost in general.

Jannis: Yeah, absolutely. You also mentioned that sometimes you contribute your ideas to the Ghost core. Sometimes you solve them in Synaps Media, especially if it's stuff that you can add on top. One project of yours that really shows that and that really has an arc, so to say, an arc of how you had the idea and how it ended up now is the theme editor. And maybe to give some context, before, I don't remember when it was, but let's say last year, definitely, until last year, you were not able to edit themes within Ghost itself. You always had to click on a download button, download a theme, a Ghost theme to your local computer, open a code editor, do whatever edits you want to do, upload it back to your Ghost site and then see the finished product.

You thought that it was annoying and you built a theme editor that lives directly in Ghost that Magic Pages then has picked up. We have made it available to our customers because you've open sourced the whole thing and now Ghost has shipped a native version that was directly inspired by your efforts. It's not the same one, it's a re-implementation, I would say, but can you walk us through that a little bit? What made you decide to build a theme editor specifically and how was it from your perspective that Ghost then picked up that idea and it's now part of what everybody, like all the tens of thousands of Ghost installations all over the world can actually use?

Murat: Yeah, actually the same motivation, especially in the first year, almost all of the people that don't continue with Synaps Media, I was talking with people a lot, still talking. And the main problem for them was not Synaps Media itself but Ghost itself and they were complaining about the how hard to edit template because, as I said, most of my customers are from non-English countries and one of the first thing that they want to do is to change that subscribe world in the official theme.

But to change it, as you said, you need to download a zip file, open it and most people don't have a code editor, they are trying to open that handlebars file in either Word or, I don't know, Notepad and then zip it again and upload it again. That's annoying, that was an annoying procedure and people were complaining about this a lot. And since unfortunately, at least until the beginning of this year, there were many PRs in Ghost Core waiting for months or even years to get attention.

So I was not eager to directly open a PR for this because it would be a very huge PR but I intended to give a solution at least in Synaps Media and I started to work on it. Normally, my idea was making it a file manager or something inside the Synaps Media panel but then I noticed that I need to make a huge effort and it will be not that efficient. You will leave the Ghost admin, come to the Synaps Media panel, make some changes and then return back and check the result.

So I was considering to somehow make it in Ghost admin itself as monkey patching the UI with a backend, with a sidecar project but then authentication and the file system storage options that it's not always file system, Ghost can't work with S3 or something. All of things came up and then I realized that actually my career as the web development, I'm a more front-end guy than the backend. I followed all of the improvements in the browser world. Luckily, in the last years, browsers improved a lot so we can do very advanced stuff directly in browsers. I thought that this can be done in client-side directly and made some POC and with the help of cloud, I made an implementation in a few hours and I'm quite surprised that it's working very well because I was expecting it will be slow or it will crash because of huge themes or something.

But it worked very well and since I reached that point, it's just a client-side solution. It was making so much sense to make it open source, to open this to everyone and you also contributed a lot in the first week.

Jannis: I remember, I think it was a Saturday, I woke up and I had breakfast and then I received an email from your blog that I'm subscribed to on the newsletter and it was about the theme editor and I was standing in my kitchen and reading this and thinking, what the hell, this is so amazing and I just dropped breakfast, went to our living room where my laptop was and tried it and then messaged you and thought like, this is amazing and then I contributed a little bit but I still remember that moment because it was really that light bulb moment where I thought it is amazing that someone like you who's more front-end guy, I'm more in the backend, that you looked at things and you found a way to basically add this as a, for the lack of a better word, plugin or an overlay to Ghost without interfering at all with it and just the way to get there was absolutely stunning to me.

Murat: I'm also very happy about that work because it really helped people, even helped me a lot. I'm really happy to have this feature in Ghost Admin itself. It's very practical, it's very useful. And I was not expecting actually but the good part that John also noticed that and liked the idea and in a very short time, I think in three or four weeks, they implemented very similar version directly inside Ghost Admin with HANA and since then we are working, I think it's like a feature something we were using like 10 years.

I think many people already forget the previous version like downloading and uploading again because this is the way that it should be. This is possible with open source even though I didn't open a PR, they just noticed and made the idea and also gave the credits, not acted like it's just their idea. So these are all nice stuff and recently I also added same style with a PR this time for redirects YAML and root YAML files that I think it's also very nice because a few weeks ago, I was helping to migrate a WordPress site to Ghost and they had to play with redirects file a lot to redirect all URLs to new ones. And every time you download, edit and upload, download, edit and upload, now you are able to edit inside the panel.

It's not that much impressive because we already have theme editor but still good thing. Yeah, that really shows the general picture of my intentions about working on Synaps Media and trying to contribute in Ghost Ecosystem and how things works in open source communities. That was a nice idea. Hopefully we will have more of in multiple places. There are more places like, as you said, the payment providers. That's a bleeding issue for many people. The translations, even maybe the email adapter thing. John was very clear about not having it in Ghost Core, but I don't know. I don't know the reasoning yet. I see a good improvement this year about the communication between the community, the open source contributors and the core developers.

Hopefully this will help in future to work together on more controversial features for the sake of improving the ecosystem. Not, of course, talking about Synaps Media and Magic Pages for Ghost Pro itself. These are all about how and where we will be in five years for Ghost in the market. What kind of people will able to use it and what kind of people will not able to use it. This is about that, I think.

Jannis: Yeah, I think I agree with you that this year, the communication between us as open source contributors and the Ghost Core team has improved a lot. Thank you Ghost to Stephen and Austin, the new platform engineers that are working on that a lot in the recent weeks now. I think what we need, at least from my perspective, is a way to communicate about those bigger things. Because I sometimes have the urge to contribute something bigger than a small bug fix or a small improvement to the Ghost Core. And it's a lot of effort to do that. Sometimes you write thousands of lines of code and in the end the communication is very nice.

But we're not really going to merge that into the Ghost Core. So this is the one thing that I'm personally still missing, to have that communication somewhere openly where everybody can contribute to get feedback and to say, hey, this is my idea. What technical limitations do you see? What are the guardrails? What are the internal discussions that the Ghost Core team has had about this before? Because usually right now, the answer that I've received so far was add a PR, a pull request, and then we're going to discuss that pull request. And that's great on the one hand, but on the other hand, it means that a volunteer, in this case, is writing thousands of lines of code just to hear in the end, that's great, but we're not going to merge that.

So I think we're on a great track and we still need a bit more communication about those bigger things to make that more streamlined because we always compare the Ghost Market to the WordPress Market. And I think what the WordPress Market does really well is that hosting providers dedicate development resources to the WordPress Core as well. And this is where I at some point want to get to that. We say, okay, the Ghost Core is not just developed by the team of the Ghost Foundation, but Magic Pages is contributing to that with ideas. Synaps Media might be contributing. Open source contributors outside of a commercial provider are contributing, and that somehow we still have the Core team or something else that can coordinate that and say, okay, if you want to do that, let's bring everybody to the table and discuss that.

Whether that's asynchronous in a written forum of some way, whether we can jump on a quick call with someone, I leave that open to the decision makers on that. But that's, I think, what would help us to get more really cool ideas like your theme editor into the Ghost Core, where maybe the Core team cannot focus on that right now because they have other things that they need to focus on. But we as individual contributors or as other providers in that sense can contribute things, but we need the explicit go ahead for some of those things.

Murat: Yeah, I think that you made a very good effort on you as Magic Pages in general, made a very good effort on making this whole picture better. I think I don't remember the whole history of the other many hosting providers in the past, but none of them were that much visible in the ecosystem until you. And I think that helps a lot that even for Ghost team, I think they probably become more aware of self-oasters more than before because it's not just a few people. At least 1,500 people is living in Magic Pages and there are more and they are open people. They are not just trying to get some money from their pool. They are very kind. They are very open for contributing to the Core.

So this is, I think since a few years, this started to change the picture about the ecosystem. I think Ghost team also should consider about the general view of Ghost in the public view. So. I want to give an example. I'm following a Turkish publisher who used Substake since years because he's not earning money from his publications. It's just free, but he has 70,000 members. He made members. Two years ago, he was complaining about some problems in Substake in his personal blog, and I said, did you consider Ghost? He said, yes, I checked it, but it was too expensive for me.

So he's a technical guy. Actually, he is not a software developer, but he was talking about technical world and he was not aware that Ghost is an open source product and there are different hosting providers at all. But I'm able to understand that. A few months ago, a person started a trial on Synaps Media. Then a few weeks later, I got a message from her. She said, the price that I'm now seeing is different than I saw in your homepage. Why is that? She said, I said, what do you see? And at the end, we noticed that she started on Synaps Media, but ended up creating a trial on Ghost Org accidentally.

Because if you go to Ghost Org, there's a getting started button. And when you press that, you automatically start a GhostPro account. So it's very confusing for the people to understand the difference between GhostPro and the Ghost software itself. You need to be very careful in the Ghost.org to understand this is an open source product and actually I can self-host it or there are different sourcing providers. It's not the same in WordPress, for example. WordPress has separate websites, WordPress.org and WordPress.com. In WordPress.org, there is a hosting section that they list big hosting providers other than their official hosting.

So I think it will be helpful. It's not about asking this for a gesture for Synaps Media or Magic Pages. Because if that guy from Turkey would automatically understand that, yeah, okay, GhostPro's prices are for professionals that earn money from their members, then these prices make sense. But I don't earn money from, even Stripe doesn't work in Turkey at all, but I still like Ghost. If he could understand that, yeah, okay, there is Magic Pages and it's affordable even for me, then we could have it in the Ghost ecosystem. He is still using Substech.

I think these are maybe small but very important details about how we show and tell the general picture. Hopefully, we will have better communication with John and the core team in the future and fine-tune that kind of things. I think it will give a huge impact on the ecosystem. Hopefully, we will go there.

Jannis: And just to give perspective to that, it happens quite regularly. Just yesterday, I talked to someone that sent a support request to us and said, hey, I just paid $35 to Ghost. Why do I still have to pay for Magic Pages? And then I explained the difference to him and we also have an article actually on our blog that goes into all the different ways. What is Ghost as a software? What is the Ghost Foundation? What is Ghost Pro?

What are the different hosting providers? And he then read through that and then understood it. And then the big question was, okay, I did not want to host with Ghost Pro. I wanted to host with Magic Pages. How do I get my money back? And unfortunately, the question is, you probably won't. The way is to cancel the Ghost Pro site and to continue your site here, because he actually set up his entire site manually on Magic Pages and also has very little ways of transferring that to Ghost Pro, even if he wanted to, because they don't import backups from other hosting providers.

So it's not a one-off thing. It does happen quite regularly. And I think that, or to turn it around from Ghost Pros or the Ghost Foundation's perspective, I understand why it is the way it is. I understand why the focus is very much focused on the marketing sites to get to that Get Started button. But it does hurt the Ghost ecosystem in a way, as you described, that people don't realize that Ghost is more than just Ghost Pro. Ghost is a community. I'm absolutely certain that there are more self-hosters of Ghost than there are customers on Ghost Pro. And there are different hosting providers. And truthfully, even if we add up all the customers on the other hosting providers, we will not reach the level of Ghost Pro.

But it is a growing number. Since the last, I would say, three years or so, the number of Ghost sites on other hosting providers is growing. And it is a very fair question, I think, to ask where that's going to go. Because in the end, Ghost is more than just Ghost Pro, as you pointed out. Yeah.

Murat: Yeah, hopefully. Things will be more clear and more communication channels will be opened up in the near future.

Jannis: Yeah, definitely. I also think that none of us are complaining about this. I think both of us understand where it historically came from. And I think we're both thinking about the way forward and that we want to contribute to that ecosystem, to that community even more. And yeah, let's see when we find a way to do that.

Murat: Maybe it was a remark here because it was last year in January or December, I think. I also had direct communication with John by writing as an email. And I directly shared my concerns about the open source view of the Ghost. He accepted all of the concerns that I had, and he said he is aware of them. And he's planning to address most of the issues. So it was a very nice conversation. So maybe when we talk about this, people can think about that we don't have any communication with the Ghost Core team or John at all.

But we are able to directly communicate with John. This is not about just incidental communication. This is about the general view, general roadmap of the Ghost. We don't have any communication or synchronization about that kind of things. We maybe will not have at all. I'm not able to request to get more information about the Ghost Pro plans or something. But at least for the open source part and how we describe the Ghost software, I think this is an important part. And you can talk about this. We can discuss about this if they want. Hopefully that will be the case. I'm hopeful about this. I consider myself new in the Ghost ecosystem since few years.

It's more than 10 year old software, but still I hope I'm able to add good value to the Ghost ecosystem. Hopefully it will be even more in a good way. And then maybe we will be able to have better communication channels between all hosting providers. So for example, when we are talking about hosting providers, we don't mention anything like the Midnight. We know the name, but I don't know the people behind it. Other than two of us, I think there is no one in many services presented in the Ghost community forum sharing updates or getting questions or something. That's actually a bit sad because they seem to work, they seem to have some customers and they are also part of that whole Ghost experience.

Some people start Ghost publications in Midnight or Digital Press and they decide if Ghost is good or not because of that experience. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. So if we can able to communicate with each other, maybe this can be a call to those providers. Please share things in Ghost community forum or even in your blog. I don't see a blog that they share about the region or the roadmap or something. We are mostly talking about the three providers, but this is because we are the most visible service providers now. And this is not about blocking any others.

So it will be better to have more service providers active in the Ghost community, Ghost ecosystem, but not just about sharing an advertisement or something. Please come and introduce yourself, try to get the trust of the community and please try to contribute to committees and share your concerns, etc. Then it will be a better, healthier ecosystem at all. So then maybe we can come together with all hosting providers and think about increasing the general experience of Ghost for more people. Now we are only three, unfortunately.

Jannis: And that call also goes from my side. Whenever I start this podcast, there is one line in the beginning that says that this is a podcast where. I want to speak to the people building, hosting and publishing on Ghost. And it's usually very easy to find people that are building on Ghost, so tools in that sense, like Chris from Vellumine or Pay Clue last week, André. It is also very easy to find people publishing on Ghost because. I have a repository of 1,500 customers that I can use for that.

But it is very hard to find the people hosting Ghost because there is realistically more. I can interview Mariia Sviatoslav from the Magic Pages team. I can also reach out to Ghost Pro. I'm absolutely sure that one of their team members would come on the podcast, but that doesn't show us the entire diversity. So if there is another hosting provider listening and you want to come on that podcast, my door is wide open. And. I would love to have a similar conversation with you because you are also part of the Ghost community. And I think what we've established is that it is not a zero sum game here. We are trying to expand our market. We are trying to build an ecosystem altogether.

And. I would love to just have that diversity represented on the podcast here as well. And on that note, I also think we joked about it before in our preparation. If anyone from the Ghost Core team, be it John, be it anybody else, is listening to this and you want to jump on a call with us or meet up anywhere in Europe mostly because we're both in Europe. Let us know because I think we're both very happy to do that and would just also love to just bounce ideas back and forth and see where that goes.

Murat: Yeah, it would be great to have a meeting with John in person, even better together, three of us even more. That would be a great conversation that will be very helpful for all of us. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I noticed that John's message that I'm in Amsterdam, come and meet with me in the same day, even though I'm in the Netherlands, coming to Amsterdam for me takes more than two hours. So it will be better to be informed earlier.

So I will really want to have a meeting with John, also with other Ghost Core members. It's a part of our life since years. So we are eight hours at least working on Ghost. And these are the people, the core of the team that are making Ghost. So it is an exciting and honorable thing for me to contact with them, talk about the difficulties that they have that I can help anything. So, yeah, I would really like to have direct communication with John or other team members. It will be great.

Jannis: Yeah. And I also love Amsterdam as a city. So whenever anybody is in Amsterdam next time, let me know. There are flights from Salzburg, which is close by here. And there's a night train to Amsterdam. I would love to just join that. John, the location is Amsterdam then. We already decided. Or next week in Hamburg, since you're also coming to the Indiecon conference. So if somebody is spontaneous, hit us up and we're both in Hamburg next week.

Murat: I don't know when you will publish this podcast, if it will be before that.

Jannis: That is very true. It will go out on Thursday. So one day before Indiecon starts.

Murat: I think it's enough for John. He is already deciding in the last day.

Jannis: Yeah. So we've already talked about quite a few topics more. I want to ask you one last question. We already touched upon that a little bit. Let's look ahead in the Ghost ecosystem. Let's imagine we have Ghost 7. We're currently on Ghost 6.61. So for Ghost 7, are there any wishes other than more options for translations and internationalization? Anything that you're missing that you say, you definitely want to see that in the Ghost ecosystem.

Murat: Other things can be more opportunities for theme designers and theme developers. I think one of the things that people are getting trouble when they meet with Ghost, coming from WordPress world, is lack of theme options enough and customizing them. There are some new projects that I see for making UI-based theme designers. These are nice, but even making a nice looking design with AI or something, it's not easy. It looks like easy, but generally you end up with an AI slop.

So better would be to increase the options, opportunities for theme developers to make it easier. I think the team development is not that difficult comparing to WordPress or something, but the limitations about what a theme can do about showing and fetching data or something. If we can have more options, more customization options, I think it will attract more designers and then we will have more options. Also, for example, the official theme list is the same since years. Having more bulletin teams in Ghost itself will be very helpful. Yeah, with the internationalization thing, then it will open up bigger markets, way more people, then it will help growing the ecosystem very quickly.

Hopefully we will have that kind of improvements in time. I don't know their plans. This is one of the things that we want to at least get an insight that, yeah, what is the general vision for Ghost 7 or Ghost 8? It will be great to have that kind of things. And we can focus the supporting ideas of this target instead of just about personal things. Yeah, the important part of having new Ghost publishers coming from other platforms, and I think Ghost seems like an alternative to Substack, but this limits Ghost, I think. We should not limit Ghost software with the capabilities or features of Substack. There is a bigger world in publishing area.

I'm not expecting to have WordPress plugins or WordPress themes in Ghost. Hopefully we will not have that kind of things because that was the main pain point of WordPress already. But at least the flexibility and customizability of WordPress is one of the key things people love WordPress. I think we have many things to learn from that in Ghost. Also, borrow some ideas. I also like the Activity Pop social web service as an idea, but it also now seems like a half-baked feature. It's not still there completely. There are many things to do in this area. Hopefully they have some plans to do because we also don't know that.

I think it will be great to make it more mature with mentions, hashtags, and maybe different timelines, and a public profile page. I made a Fedi.pop just because of the lack of this. I think it can be easily done in a Ghost core to make a public profile page of Activity Pop account. Hopefully it will be there in some time. These are the main expectations that. I have for the future of Ghost.

Jannis: Yeah, cool. They all make a lot of sense, I think. Let's see where we end up with Ghost 7. Murat, thank you so much for taking the time for coming on the podcast. I have one last question that I ask every guest. You might already know it. Is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't? Anything that you want to say that we didn't touch upon? Anything that's on your mind right now?

Murat: I thought maybe you would ask running hosting service by a single person. Is it fun? Is it risky? Actually, you are not a single person anymore, but it was the case since the beginning of the year. Many people were asking this question to us. What happens if you just disappear tomorrow?

Jannis: It always turns very dark. The question is, what happens if you hit by a bus? That is what it always comes in. How fun is it for you? How fun is running Synaps Media as a single person for you?

Murat: Yeah, actually, it's going good so far. And I can happily say, especially in the last few months, I started to get less need for the support request because I think it reached a certain level of maturity in the platform. We didn't have any downtime since one year, I think. And it's going well. But for me, I'm not planning to be the only one forever for the system because. I want to be able to go to vacation or something. And. I want to be able to have the right for being sick for some time.

So hopefully, when I reach to a financial situation that I can afford for another team member, a full-time team member, I will definitely look for that. I understand the concerns, but in the meantime, people should understand the advantages and disadvantages of working with a small team or even a single person team. Yes, that's a risk. In the meantime, this is the key of providing that much quality service in that affordable price. If you will have 50 people, if you will need to pay salaries for 50 people, then yeah, the main cost of service will be not the servers, will be the salaries.

So this is also a preference. But. I want to keep affordable because this is what the GOS ecosystem needs. There are a huge amount of countries in the world that cannot afford to pay $40 per month to have a GOS website. I'm talking with the people from the Far East countries, and they say people here are just trying to self-host because that is the only option for them. Otherwise, it's too much, too expensive. When you try to self-host, it's not a very nice experience if you just want to publish some articles. Being affordable is important, and to be affordable, the team size should be reasonably small. As I said earlier, my ideal future expectation is like being 45 people at most, even though if.

I have, let's say, 50,000 websites, that doesn't matter. I will try to make the system stable and sustainable enough with that small team. Generally, there is a misconception that when the customers are increased, you need to increase the people. Generally, teams don't increase people because of the customer counts. They increase because of the new areas that they want to enter. If you stop yourself somewhere to not enter every possible area, just because you can, then you can keep the team small and you can give a very nice service with an affordable price.

Jannis: I think it's actually a good sign of a good service, especially hosting service, when you can sustain growth with a small team, because it means that your growing customer base that you have doesn't need you as a support. In my experience, at least, the people that need support are always new customers that come in that have questions. The people that are on magic pages for three years, they don't reach out because their website is set up, their website is working, their emails are running, everything is running smoothly for them. There are literally people I haven't heard in three years from them, which is good on the one side.

On the other hand, you're always losing touch a little bit, but I think it's a very healthy sign if you can sustain growth as a hosting provider with a small team, because it means your overall system is good, and the people that need support and the people that want that support are new customers that come in. So that was a perfect example for that.

Murat: Yeah, indeed. We don't know how many people works behind the very popular hosting providers because we generally don't need to contact with them at all. For example, I was using Linode, it was a popular VPS provider, now it's part of Akamai. Yeah, I use it for maybe 10 years, and in total 10 years maybe I need to communicate with their support maybe a few times. So if they could reveal that they were only two people, yeah, that could be possible, because there is a system that is already running, and if you don't need that much support, yeah, the systems that we are creating are actually like a machine that we are programming or something, and it works, it should work by itself.

During today we are not always checking servers and trying to fix the things, so most of the time it just works. We are trying to fine-tune stuff, add new features to make the Ghost publisher's life easier, or contributions to Ghost ecosystem, or write documentation. So I think that probably your routines are similar. This is how we work, and it's quite reasonable to have a single-person hosting service, but as I said, whenever. I have enough financial sustainability for just because of the Synaps media's income, then I will definitely have a second team member.

Jannis: And I think the difference between us is that you anticipate that, and I always said, no, I'm just going to stay just me, it's just going to be me, and then at some point I realized, actually, I would also like to just have some downtime at some point, and looking back, Spataslav is now with us for nearly seven months. He started in February this year, and it's been literally the best decision I've made in Magic Pages so far, because now they're with Mariia, there are three people actively thinking about it at the moment, and I had a look at our roadmap and our change log in the last year, and while the overall things that we changed went down, it was a lot more impactful, like things that we added, compared to, let's say, a year ago.

I can only confirm, it's perfectly viable to run a hosting service as a single person, it's a lot more fun to do it with somebody at your site.

Murat: Yeah, it's also visible, I should say, that in the last three months I followed your blog, of course, and I'm really surprised how come you can manage to write all of this stuff and publish new features and things, but of course you are now three people, this is not fair, I'm on the one. I cannot compare myself with you anymore.

Jannis: And Spataslav is really good at finding those things. When our support chat is very quiet, he just goes through the documentation and just says, that's not right anymore, that was written three years ago, that doesn't even exist anymore. And he then has really developed great skills at updating those things. And I think this is one of the use cases where AI has a great place in our, let's say, tech stack, not in writing the articles, but in finding the gaps. So. I have a little, going a bit off topic now, but. I have a little self-hosted LLM server down in a storage room and sometimes I just tell it to look at our source code for our customer portal, for our backend, and look at all the articles we have published on Magic Pages and find the gaps, and then we just have a list of gaps.

And this is what we use right now to basically update our documentation and add things that weren't there before, that weren't documented at all.

Murat: Actually, the biggest challenge for me about being a single people working on the whole service is scattering between the different disciplines of the project. The writing, the articles about the feature, the documentations, or then social posts, or then the implementation itself, backend and frontend, and system monitoring. Monitoring the external services like Mailgun, like Bani CDN. There are many roles. Normally, big companies are giving dedicated person per role, but as a single person, you try to handle all of them by yourself. Sometimes this becomes exhausting, and for example, especially for the documentation and marketing material, let's say, I would really like to have a supporter for this, because it's a different mindset than just writing the code.

There is no good relation between how you develop the feature and how you explain it to the non-technical people. So having this context switching becomes sometimes very hard and tiring. And lack of feedback is also another issue about being alone. Nowadays, AI helps a little about this, but especially when talking about how to implement a feature, not technically, but there is an issue, and. I want to fix it, how should I fix it? In that case, generally, the suggestions of AI, for example, doesn't make sense. He is just trying to make you happy, so he doesn't really criticize.

But when you have a team member who knows the details about the project and the history of it, then you're really able to get very good points. Probably, I can imagine when you talk, three of you, about something, a feature that you consider to add or not to add. It would be very nice to have that conversation with some team members who already know the old details, your customer base, everything. That is what I'm expecting in the future.

Jannis: And even more, not only to know the context of Magic Pages, but every Thursday we have our weekly team meeting, and yesterday we had a very good discussion about feedback loops, for example, and everybody just brings different perspectives. I bring the technical perspectives, Vatoslav, from the more support perspective, but also from using Ghost actively. Since he started working here, he has also built his own personal blog, and then Mariia from a really community perspective and the marketing perspective. That is an amazing balance that you just have three different perspectives on the same topic, and that has led to some really great discussions that we've had in the last couple of months.

Yeah, I can imagine. Murat, I can already see that this will be the longest episode of the Magic Pages podcast so far. Sorry. Don't be sorry. It's been incredible fun. I will enjoy editing that episode. I hope that people will enjoy listening to it. I am very much looking forward to seeing you next week in Hamburg for the podcast in a couple of days, and we should do this again at some point. I don't know, maybe in a couple of months, in a year, to just get an update where Magic Pages is, where Synaps Media is, and to see how Ghost has developed in the meantime.

Murat: Yeah, why not? It will be great. And thanks you very much for having me in this conversation, and hopefully people will like that conversation. Two competitors talking about hosting services for Ghost. Yeah, I'm certain they will. Yeah, it was a nice conversation.

Jannis: Yeah, it's been a pleasure, and see you soon, Murat. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.