Newsletter platform and Substack competitor Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard, and most recently Instagram Threads, among others. Now, the company is making good on that promise — with its own newsletter, to start.
Over the past few days, Ghost has announced that it has achieved two major milestones in its plan to become a federal service. Most notably, it has created its own federal news service, making it the first federal Ghost service on the Internet.
Users can follow the newsletter through their favorite federal app at @index@activitypub.ghost.org, though the company warns that there will be bugs and issues as it continues to work on integrating the platform with bar activitythe protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated applications.
“Having multiple Ghost instances in production successfully running ActivityPub is a huge achievement for us because it means that for the first time, we are interacting with a wide range of products. Not just theoretical native applications and tests, but the real world social web,” the company said in announcing the news.
Additionally, Ghost’s ActivityPub GitHub repository is now fully open source. This means that those interested in tracking Ghost’s progress toward federation can follow code changes in real time, and anyone else can learn from, modify, distribute, or contribute to its work. Developers who want to collaborate with Ghost are also invited to participate following this move.
The company had previously detailed the benefits of integrating ActivityPub as an alternative to closed platforms, such as Substack and others.
By offering a federalized version of the newsletter, readers will be able to choose how they subscribe. That is, instead of just following the newsletter via email or the web, they can also track it using RSS or apps powered by ActivityPub, like Mastodon and others. Ghost said it will also develop a way for sites with paid subscribers to manage access via ActivityPub, but that functionality has not yet been launched with this initial test.
ActivityPub integration has become increasingly common in the media space, as writers and publishers struggle with declining traffic from sources like Google and Facebook while AI technology summarises their work, either through paid content deals or plagiarism. Several sites, including The Verge, MacRumors, and MacStories (and soon TechCrunch), have recently adopted a new feature that will add their reporters’ addresses to news articles when they appear in the fediverse, for example.
The ghost himself has it too. attracted Several prominent users have added it to their platform, often because Substack’s lax moderation policies mean it has increasingly become a home for hate speech. Casey Newton, formerly of The Verge, Left Substack This year due to moderation concerns and He immigrated To Ghost instead. Another newsletter, Garbage day, also left Other popular publishers that work with Ghost include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever, and Tangle, to name a few.