Ghostan open source rival to Substack’s newsletter platform, has confirmed that this year it will officially join fediverse, or the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like MastodonPixel powered, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram threads, among others. Last week, the company advanced its plans by topography their users about how they want the federation to work.
Founder John O’Nolan had explained in a post on Threads that there are many potential ways Ghost could leverage federation in its software, but I wanted to know how users would expect things to work.
According to some answers, the hope was that the Ghost blog and newsletter authors would become fediverse accounts, while each of their posts would be federated into fediverse. This would allow users to follow Ghost authors from their preferred app, as well as like and reply to their posts from fediverse. These responses could then be posted on the author’s site as a blog comment. Ghost said it expects to add tens of millions of users to fediverse when the integration is complete. In total, fediverse is expected to reach between 170 and 200 million users this summer, if Instagram threads are included in the total.
This setup is similar to how Federated WordPress with ActivityPub, the protocol that drives fediverso, after acquiring an ActivityPub blog plugin. When enabled, WordPress blogs can be followed by people on apps like Mastodon and others in the faith world and then receive responses as comments on their own sites.
Ghost’s announcement last week sparked a flurry of activity, including disclosure by Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput. who offered to help with ActivityPub integration.
Monday, ghost officially confirmed its plans to federate its service in 2024 and detailed how it would work.
The company explained that Ghost editors will “soon” be able to follow, like, and interact with each other the same way they normally would on a social network, but from their own website. Additionally, they will be able to follow, like and interact with users on other federated services such as Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Buttondown, WriteFreely, WordPress, PeerTube, Pixelfed and others.
Meanwhile, an ActivityPub-powered feed will be integrated into Ghost so users can follow people, posts, and topics of interest across the web. You will also be able to subscribe to these sites through ActivityPub, in addition to RSS. And when Ghosts authors publish, their posts will appear on networks like Mastodon and others.
Ghost’s announcement detailed the benefits of an ActivityPub integration, noting that each platform could design how it wants to present its content while still being compatible with other services. Readers will also have more options for how they want to subscribe to an author’s content: via email, RSS, or ActivityPub subscriptions. Private access for sites with paid subscriptions can also be managed through ActivityPub, but Ghost hasn’t yet shared exactly how this would work, only that it will do its best to “create a seamless experience.”
“And, because this technology is completely open, you maintain full control of your subscribers,” the blog post states. “When you publish a new article online, your distribution comes from your own website instead of having to rely on third parties.”
Ghost has generated increased interest in recent months as more high-profile authors have made the switch.
In particular, Casey Newton, former member of The Verge, left substack and my degree to Ghost instead over concerns about how Substack moderated, or rather did not moderate, some of the content on its platform. Garbage day left also. Other popular publishers include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever, and Tangle, to name a few.