Blogging platform: Ghost will also be fully connected to Fediverse
The Fediverse continues to grow: this year, the blogging and newsletter platform Ghost will also be federated via the underlying ActivityPub protocol.
(Bild: mapush/Shutterstock.com/ghost.org)
The blogging and newsletter platform Ghost is to be connected to the so-called Fediverse later this year via the ActivityPub protocol. Authors will then not only be able to follow accounts on Mastodon, Flipboard, WordPress and other platforms directly, but content published on Ghost can also be subscribed to from there. Those responsible for Ghost see this as the only way to keep up with the ongoing competition for the attention of an ever-increasing number of people. The move underlines once again that ActivityPub is attracting more and more attention, especially in the USA, and could move away from its focus on the Twitter alternative Mastodon.
Email as a role model
On a dedicated page for the ActivityPub project, Ghost compares ActivityPub to email, the Internet's largest open protocol. Just as you can use it to communicate with people, regardless of which provider they have their email accounts with, ActivityPub enables cross-platform communication. Both "share users instead of competing for them". The advantage of ActivityPub is that each platform can determine how the content is displayed, while at the same time the protocol enables the networking of an ever-growing community. When the Twitter alternative of Threads is fully federated, there will be 170 to 200 million users, and Ghost will add tens of millions more.
Ghost has been around since 2013 and simplifies online publishing for freelance authors as well as entire publications. The service competes with Substack, among others, but there has recently been some discussion about the newsletter service. Because right-wing extremist authors were also tolerated there and earned a lot of money, some well-known users have switched from Substack to Ghost. The IT news from Platformer and the new media company 404, for example, are now published there, and The Atlantic also runs on Ghost. Just a few days ago, company founder John Nolan explained on Threads that the connection to the Fediverse was the most frequently expressed wish for further development. Now the company wants to fulfill this wish.
The Fediverse is a network of independent platforms that are connected via ActivityPub. The largest and best-known service in the Fediverse is Mastodon, which many users flocked to in the fall of 2022 following Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. This brought the Fediverse into the public consciousness. The Fediverse also includes the Instagram alternative Pixelfed, the Reddit alternative Lemmy and the microblogging platform Misskey. Accounts on Threads can now also be opened for the Fediverse in several countries, and a bridge to the short message service Bluesky is being worked on. The Flipboard magazine app is also moving into the Fediverse, and WordPress blogs can already be opened for it.
(mho)