Ghost, the open source alternative solution on Substack’s newsletter platform, is considering joining fediverse, the social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, most recently, Instagram Threads, among others. According to a Position by Ghost founder John O’Nolan, the company — which is structured as non-profit — is considering merging Ghost over ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers fediverse.
O’Nolan said the most requested feature in recent years has been his software’s federation. “It seems like there are a lot of possible ways to do it. Curious to hear how you’d like it to work?’ he asked inside a post on Threadswhich was distributed to Mastodon through Threads’ own integration with ActivityPub.
The survey asks users if they use ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon or Threads and how they would expect the ActivityPub feature to work in Ghost if it were to be added. He also asks how the federation would personally benefit Ghost users. Survey respondents are invited to optionally provide an email address if they wish to be contacted for further information in the future.
Image Credits: Ghost
While the launch of an investigation isn’t necessarily a commitment to Ghost’s federation, it’s another signal that points to the wider reshaping of the web now underway.
After billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, internet users faced the downsides of trusting centralized platforms: With a change in ownership, Twitter was rebranded as a different type of platform called X, with revised ethics and long-term ambitions. (Musk wants X to be an “everything” app for transactions, creator content, video, shopping and more, and has a more hands-on role in content moderation.)
For those unhappy with Musk’s changes, having a portable social identity suddenly seemed like an idea that had more value. That is, if you don’t like the way the Mastodon server (or other federated service) is running, you can take your profile and move it elsewhere, fans in tow.
With Ghost, however, the idea could be to merge the accounts of authors who use Ghost to publish their content. Their posts, which would also be published on the web and to their newsletter subscribers, could also exist on fediverse, where others could read, like and reply to the post from their preferred app. These responses could also be sent back to Ghost, where they could exist as comments.
Assuming Ghost went this route, it would be similar to how WordPress merged with ActivityPub after acquiring an ActivityPub blog plugin. When enabled, WordPress blogs can be followed by people in apps like Mastodon and others in the federated community and then receive responses as comments on their own sites.
After seeing O’Nolan’s post, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput rushed to help with the ActivityPub integration, which O’Nolan accepted.
Ghost has gained attention as a rival to Substack in recent months for the same reason that some have fled X: People disagree about how the platforms should be moderated. Substack has gone on to promote free speech, as Musk does on X, but that has also led to the platform used by pro-Nazi publicationsas analyzed by The Atlantic late last year.
As a result, one of Substack’s most high-profile writers, Casey Newton, formerly of The Verge, left Substack and migrated in Ghost instead.
“I don’t know of any major consumer internet platform in the US that doesn’t expressly ban praise of Nazi hate speech, much less welcome them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions,” Newton wrote at the time.
Besides Newton, other notable Ghost users they include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, The Lever, and David Sirota’s Tangle, to name a few.
Today, Ghost is installed over 3 million timeswhich would make a healthy addition to the wider fediverse and approx 13+ million users in total, about 1.5 million of which are active monthly. (This number does not include Threads’ 130+ million monthly active users, as it is not yet fully integrated into ActivityPub.)
