Still seems pretty uncertain. I saw a chat between ghost CEO and some activity pub dev trying to convince him to federate … this was around the time of Newtons move off of substack … and the vibe was about the same then … “cool idea, unsure about viability, how would it work?”
Seems it’s such a common almost meme-ish user demand now that the request hasn’t let up. Given that Wordpress has done it I’d guess the idea is probably a no-brainer … just do it!
Problem though is the kinda-literal elephant in the room … mastodon. The only fediverse platform mentioned in the article. Federating with it requires implementing a “user” actor where everything is organised around users like on microblogging platforms. It’s what Wordpress did and what Ghost will too.
Which is a shame because us group based platforms get left behind, mastodon controls the fediverse, and the utility of grouping things, which makes a lot of sense for things like multi-author blogs, gets forgotten.
Not a bad option, but what are the potential advantages over using the Pages feature of Misskey forks, or simply Wordpress?
Substack itself didn’t even present a correct UI to me on mobile so I never bothered with it when it was initially popularized. Still seems to have the issue, too.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I consider wordpress open core at best these days.
A lot of really basic features like lightboxes that should be in core are in their “jetpack” SaaS plugin. This by default sends automattic a whole bunch of telemetry, which I assume they are now selling to OpenAI, and puts ads in your dashboard for other commercial SaaS features.
There’s also the fact that they don’t allow forks of open source plugins in their plugin repository.
That’s really good to know, thanks, I’d assumed they were a shitty blob company until I heard they were adding federation, but I guess that intuition was correct. Sounds almost Threads-tier.
Not a bad option, but what are the potential advantages over using the Pages feature of Misskey forks
Didn’t know that Misskey forks have this Pages feature. Found this https://darnell.day/hey-tumblr-and-medium-fediverse-lovers-its-time-to-misskey which explains a bit about it. Is Misskey still actively developed ? Is there an overview of the forks ?
FediDB is really the best way to look around for servers. Totally being actively developed, there’s way too many forks IMHO, but I’m sure the project maintainers would disagree for the time being.
Misskey.io seems to have range banned a lot of stuff so it’s not a good demo instance. You can’t translate the Japanese posts while logged out, either!
It is actively developed. Some forks are Firefish, Foundkey, Sharkey, IceShrimp
This is Ghost, the open source blog software. Color me surprised.
Ghost is a creepy name. They should change it.
It’s doing quite well and you’re the only person I’ve ever seen take offense to the name, so I guess you’ll just have to cope with spooky newsletters 👻
It is a great step forward, but the barrier to entry is relatively high. You can sign up to substack for free and they take a cut of your profits (that most writers don’t draw enough attention to earn.
Meanwhile ghost charges $9 a month, billed annually.
That’s a significant barrier to anyone that can’t afford to see if their writing will be popular and as long as that remains it will struggle to gain traction in the same way.
And yeah, I know you could host your own too, but again a price point and a technical barrier.
I like ghost, the interface and the ecology, but the truth is that it isn’t going to attract the sort of vibrant, young community it needs if you have to stump up $108 just to see.
I think one of the great things about 2000s/early 2010s internet was the proliferation of free to use platforms like livejournal, blogger and WordPress. Sure there was a lot or jank, but I found some of my favourite writers back when they were scratching their name into the internet.
Very valid points. Medium and Substack will remain popular due to how easy it makes it
