Through my Hacker News feed, I found a post to some interesting statements on Twitter saying that “Substack is now officially powered by Ghost!” The original message was posted by John O’Nolan, Founder/CEO of Ghost. It was quickly corrected by Substack Co-founder/CEO Chris Best.

Substack is not “powered” by Ghost. Instead, a specific site using Substack was built using Substacks theming API, which is compatible with themes built for Ghost. This means the developer who implemented the Substack theme basically ported the Ghost theme for Substack. All of this was done legally using best practices (according to Chris Best).

What I find funny is all of the responses to the original post, even those posted after the corrections were stated in the same thread. People are congratulating Ghost and have completely made the assumption that Substack is now Powered by Ghost, which is not true at all.

If you see such a claim by an individual on Twitter, of all places, do you not question its legitimacy? I’m surprised John O’Nolan made such broad claims causing these misunderstandings.