Building ActivityPub
Building ActivityPub
Ghost is federating over ActivityPub to become part of the world’s largest publishing network.
Looks like it's really happening!
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How big is the ActivityPub network?
Because it’s decentralised, we don’t have an exact total. Based on data we have about the largest ActivityPub platforms, particularly Meta/Threads, it’ll be between 170-200million users by the summer of 2024. Ghost will be adding tens-of-millions more to that total.
Are you working together with anyone else on this?
Yes! Our friends at Buttondown are also building ActivityPub support right now, and we've received kind offers of help from teams at Mastodon & the ActivityPub spec authors.
Nice that Buttondown is also into it.
Don't Ghost and Buttondown do the same thing?
Ghost is for writing blogs and Buttondown for sending newsletters, isn't it ?
Ah, my bad. I use neither. I thought both were for sending newsletters
Ghost was originally just for blogging, but they recently decided to take on Substack directly so now they do both. I think Buttondown originally came out of Mailchip being shitty and then they were also taking on Substack so I think this move is that if they team up together and also with the fediverse they have a shot at directly competing with Substack (in the VC minded way I assume)
Ooh, thanks for the explanation. As someone that understands and has some insight, does this excite you?
Well the part that excites me is that Ghost is one of the biggest newer CMS's started after Wordpress. Ghost is also open source so at least the work they do can be reused into the future (unlike say Threads or Flipboard) and we will suddenly have the ability of a lot of large parts of the web to be able to switch on federation without much effort. Look at all these large entities that use Ghost. Everytime one of these big players joins the fediverse there is this overflow effect onto little community players who might have chosen to use Ghost or WordPress or Flarum etc a long time ago and suddenly without the individual sites having to do much they can grow a whole new audience. So in short, I don't use Ghost and am not personally super excited by the project, but I am excited to see who it ends up bringing in!
Not gonna lie, this is a really compelling post. Thank you. It feels like this could be the start of the Fediverse really gaining traction.
Thanks for the prompt! I am trying to talk more publicly about all this fediverse internet hubub thats swirling in my head lately. There is a massive seachange here that feels possible for maybe the first time in my adult life and I think it will only get there if we all really push for the fediverse to become what we desire in the world.