PubPub is great! This was often heard often from various people in our circle. We had not used the platform and we had not much information other than it is cool and the fact that lots of respected organisations used it to publish. Aparently, the internet and a few people nowadays mention than things have changed lately. If you’re not familiar with PubPub, it’s been a pretty popular publishing platform, especially among academic communities, research groups, and teams working on collaborative projects. For years, it offered a free space for real-time collaborative writing and publishing, which (as some folks have told us) was been pretty great. But as perviously mentioned, things have gotten… complicated.

What’s Going On with PubPub?

Knowledge Futures announced some months ago that PubPub Legacy users must migrate to PubPub Platform by January 2026, with an annual hosting fee of $3,500. We asked around, and the perception seems to be that this fee is prohibitive for many smaller communities, academic projects, and independent publishers who previously relied on the free service. As one community organization noted, “This hosting fee will be prohibitive for many of the smaller communities currently using PubPub: including us!”. In addition, there have been reports about various technical issues, including broken links, disappeared public pages, and documents becoming inaccessible after platform updates. Some communities found that “dozens of pubs may not be accessible, without and easy way to identify which ones”.

For communities that don’t migrate, PubPub will automatically archive their content, making it “accessible to readers in perpetuity” but no longer editable. This means publications conceived as “living documents” that would be updated over time become static, essentially turning into “zombies or ghosts (pun intended - see below): they remain, but are out of your control, no longer living, growing or changing”. While PubPub promises a self-hostable version, one might note that “there is a lot of work to be done in terms of documentation and development before the current PubPub Legacy code published on GitHub under a GPL-2.0 license will be ready for self-hosting”, making this option unrealistic for most communities.

We were aware about some of these issues from some folks that weren’t thrilled with what was happening at PubPub, but we didn’t realize just how big of a problem it was until one of our long time Subscribers reached out and asked if we knew of any alternatives. Our first reaction? “Hmm, migration sounds tricky… is that even possible?” But you know how it is with us when the call is to find solutions related to open source infrastructure. We started digging around, researching, and basically going down a rabbit hole. What started as “let’s see if this is doable” turned into some intensive work from one of our colelagues, lots of back and forth with the team that requested the migration, and way more trial and error than we’d like to admit. The good news? We actually figured it out and got an almost full migration! After all that problem-solving, we managed to create a process that moves almost everything from PubPub to Ghost.

Ghost is Pretty Neat for Publishing

When we were trying to figure out where to migrate our Subscriber’s content, we looked at a bunch of different platforms. Ghost kept coming up as ideal for teams focused in writting, and after working with it extensively the alst couple of years, we can see why. This might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many platforms seem to forget that writers just want to… write. Ghost has this clean, uncluttered interface that doesn’t get in your way. People describe it as having a “calmer” feel compared to other platforms, and honestly, that’s spot on.

Good Performance & Plug and Play

You know how some websites just feel sluggish? Data shows that 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and Ghost sites typically perform well within this threshold without you having to mess around with caching plugins or hire a developer to optimize things. And there is more: email newsletters, SEO optimization, membership management and paid subscriptions. it’s all built in. Another cool ‘feature’ is the sustainability of the project. Ghost was set up as a non-profit foundation specifically so it can’t be bought out by some bigger company and turned into something else. It seems that they’re in it for the long haul, which is reassuring. The [Ghost Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(blogging_platform) is a non-profit organization that has no investors, no owners and 100% of revenue is reinvested into the product and community. Unlike WordPress (which is great, but tries to be everything to everyone), Ghost is laser-focused on publishing and blogging. If you’re primarily focused on creating and sharing content, it’s just a really good fit.

This PubPub Migration It’s Not Perfect, But It Does the Job Well

We’re not going to sugarcoat this because migration between any two platforms is never 100% seamless. Here’s what you should expect for now, even though improvements in our workflow might fix these issues soon:

• Tags Need Some TLC: the automated process handles most of your content beautifully, but tags often need some manual love and reorganization once they’re in Ghost;

• Co-author Info: if you have posts with multiple authors displayed, you might need to adjust how that shows up in Ghost;

• Custom Layouts: any fancy custom page layouts will probably need to be recreated rather than magically transferred over;

• Comments and Discussions: comment threads usually need special handling.

The good news? Your PubPub content including all your articles, pages, images, and basic formatting, comes through fine. And honestly, we’re getting better at this process by the time.

This is an Add-On Service

This whole PubPub migration thing is actually part of what we call our Add-On services. Basically all the extra support you might want beyond our regular Managed Hosting. Think of it as the difference between getting a great apartment and getting a great apartment with a concierge service.

We do things like:

• Data Migrations (like this PubPub to Ghost thing we figured out);

• Training Sessions for you and your team;

• Onboarding Support to help you hit the ground running;

• User Support (which is different from tech support. It’s more like “how do I actually use this thing effectively?”);

• Custom Integrations and helping you streamline your workflows (when possible).

We launched these services as an addition to our Managed Hosting packages back in December 2024, and honestly, we’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the response. Turns out our hypothesis was right, even though open source software is fantastic for avoiding vendor lock-in and gives you tons of digital sovereignty, just having a good hosting provider isn’t always enough. Sometimes you need techies who really know their way around this stuff to help make the transition smooth. Right now we’re keeping our Add-On services pretty limited while we make sure we can do a great job for everyone. We’ll open things up more widely later this year. Make sure to follow us on our Mastodon profile or register for our newsletter to be the first to know.

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Got questions about moving from PubPub to Ghost? Just reach out! We’re always happy to chat about this stuff, whether you end up working with us or not. Sometimes it just helps to talk through your options with someone who’s been down this road before.