Recently, Ghost announced that their new ActivityPub offering is available in public beta. The company has been famously public with documenting their development, soliciting feedback from the wider community about how their integration should work. We took some time today to explore the beta, and showcase what the system can currently do. Keep in mind, these are still early stages for the platform, and there’s a lot of development happening behind the scenes.

The New Timeline

The first big change you’ll likely notice is that Ghost’s dashboard now incorporates a timeline under the Home tab. The layout is simple and minimalist, and breaks out into several different sections: Inbox, Feed, Notifications, Explore, and Profile.

Inbox vs Feed

One interesting design choice involves how content is split up between views. Long-form articles from your subscriptions show up in the Inbox, but general statuses instead land in the Feed. This seems like a good design decision, since Ghost is trying to straddle the line between being a social reader, and a general microblogging platform. You can easily keep track of your subscriptions and reading list, while also being able to move at a much faster pace on the timeline.

In our testing, we followed a variety of different actors from across the Fediverse, including our ActivityPub-enabled WordPress site. Happily, our articles showed up in the Inbox without a hitch, and clicking on one opened up a clean reader view. This all happens without navigating away from your position in the Inbox or the Timeline.

Clicking on profiles also renders a social view for any Actor recognized by Ghost’s platform. There are still a few hiccups here: remote profiles can be a bit slow to load, and posts don’t always show up right away. Given that this is still a beta, it’s very likely that Ghost will continue to focus on performance improvements.

Social Interactions

So, what does the experience of using Ghost’s social dashboard feel like? Honestly, it’s pretty slick. It’s hard to measure exactly how well the design nails the overall experience, considering I just set my own Ghost site up two days ago. As more interactions come in, this will be easier to measure.

Publishing

A form for status updates sits at the top of the feed, and it’s minimalist and unobtrusive. At the moment, it’s not particularly fleshed-out: hashtags, mentions, polls, visibility scopes, quote posts, and attachments don’t currently exist. This is something that I really hope to see improve in the short term, given that most of the Fediverse supports these basic features.

Notifications

Notifications are also pretty simple here, but they look nice and can stack together when multiple people perform the same interaction. It might be nice to have the ability to filter notifications and view them by type, but this is a pretty decent start.

Commenting and Discussions

One really nice affordance Ghost makes involves how comments work. Prior to this new development, Ghost historically did not natively support comments, and the main workaround most people relied on was to integrate Disqus or another third-party commenting system. Now, social commenting is supported in several places: on the feed, in side discussions, and on article entries themselves.

One slight annoyance here is that the commenting system technically supports threaded conversations, but doesn’t do the best job at showing which parts of a thread have replies. You kind of just have to click in to a section and hope to see some responses.

Search and Discovery

Currently, search and discovery are pretty limited. Ghost offers an Explore tab that highlights a number of featured accounts across the Fediverse, but it’s a short list. Search, on the other hand, just lets you look up people through their ActivityPub handles. It works, but it would be nice to be able to pull in remote content the way other Fediverse platforms do.

The biggest opportunity here involves Ghost’s expansive user base. There are a huge amount of Ghost publications out there. As more people and organizations opt into the beta, it would be great to see a similar design to how Ghost’s publication explore page works.

Things We’d Love to See

This is more of a “wish list” than it is a set of defined expectations, but we think there are some things Ghost could do to really shine.

• Privacy Scopes / Settings: some people will inevitably want to make some or all of their posts private, or choose not to be searchable on the network. Right now, this new timeline and integration lack any sort of configuration.
• Profile Customization: Currently, Ghost doesn’t really let you customize your Social Web profile. Sure, you can see it, and it’s populated with data from your publication. However, some people are going to want to set an avatar and a header that don’t necessarily match their publication settings.
• Rich Interactions: it would be great if the publisher modal could support hashtags, mentions, quote posts, polls, attachments, and visibility scopes. These are general baseline features supported by most Fediverse platforms to some degree.
• Mastodon API: An increasing amount of Fediverse platforms leverage the Mastodon API to make use of the many, many Mastodon apps out there. In lieu of an official Ghost mobile app, this would be a great way for people to stay tapped in to the Social Web with very little friction.
• Identity Migration: I would love to move my whole Fediverse identity onto Ghost at some point. The WordPress-ActivityPub plugin has recently started supporting this, but being able to “move with your feet” is a great feature.
• Discovery / Explore: Let us find existing Ghost publications that have ActivityPub enabled! Let us subscribe directly through the protocol!
• Template / Theme Support: From a design perspective, I would love to find a way to incorporate my status updates into my blog’s theme. This is something we’ve been experimenting on with WordPress, and it would be cool to see more publishing platforms support this.

The Bottom Line

Overall, the future is looking really bright! Ghost has done a phenomenal job in talking about their progress and findings in their ActivityPub Newsletter, and their product is really starting to take shape. I ended up migrating my personal blog over for testing purposes, but I think I’m going to stick with it. What Ghost is promising in slick, polished, and works incredibly well. If they can focus on smoothing the rough edges, it will be a huge win for Fediverse publishing.

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