Today, open source publishing platform Ghost announced that it will soon join the Fediverse with ActivityPub integration baked-in to its feature suite. The announcement includes a handy explanation of what ActivityPub is, the benefits that provides to publishers on Ghost, and a deep dive into where these features will be found in the near future.

One of the main points Ghost wants to hammer home is that this isn’t a passive integration that will simply share your post across all ActivityPub-supporting services but instead a re-thinking of Ghost as a Fediverse client.

Full-Featured Fediverse Client

We’ve spent the past 10 years designing a great writing experience with Ghost. Now, for the first time, we’re going to work on designing a great reading experience, too. Which is cool because it turns out that people who write a lot also tend to read a lot.

Moving forward, Ghost will feature a series of feeds in the Dashboard. This is similar to Substack’s Discover feed, except rather than just Substack Notes and newsletters, Ghost users will be able to follow profiles across Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, or any other Fediverse service. For a lot of publishers on Ghost, this will likely end up being a replacement for their existing Fediverse account since it can house both their posts and their organization’s social interactions.

ActivityPub Subscriptions

Ghost is also making ActivityPub a first-class citizen in the subscription flow. When clicking on the Subscribe button on a Ghost newsletter, you will now be able to subscribe through email or through ActivityPub. This is exciting for several reasons, one being the fact that your email inbox no longer has to be inundated with content that you eventually want to discuss on social media anyway.

ActivityPub is a lot like email, and Ghost already supports email subscriptions. This means we can use the same interface to support both. Your audience enters whatever address they’re used to subscribing to things with, and Ghost figures out the rest.

A lot of people have made comparisons between federation and email, and Ghost’s elevation of ActivityPub subscriptions to the same level is an exciting moment. By treating these two protocols as equals, users will find it easier to decide what kind of content belongs in their email inbox vs the kind of content they want to interact with on social media.

What’s Next?

After Ghost completes federation, it will be another major injection of users into the Fediverse. If done right, this may be one of the keys in bringing major publications over to ActivityPub-based services. They’re also working closely with ButtonDown, another newsletter platform that is working on Fediverse integration themselves.

Ghost’s ActivityPub integration is currently in progress, but the goal is to build in full public view, and invite users to be part of the process. You can sign up on their announcement page to get updates, get early access, and send feedback as things progress.