Building ActivityPub @index.activitypub.ghost.org.ap.brid.gy

Everyone loves a SWEET right 🍬

Analytics **suite — it's been a long day ok

04.08.2025 14:57 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

It's finally here!

Ghost 6.0 is the biggest update we've ever made — and it includes federated publishing for everyone, with ActivityPub ❤️

We also shipped a brand new native analytics sweet, and passed a pretty cool milestone. Independent publishers […]

[Original post on activitypub.ghost.org]

04.08.2025 14:53 — 👍 28 🔁 70 💬 7 📌 1

🕶️

03.08.2025 21:26 — 👍 11 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 0

SAME

03.08.2025 17:39 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Big week next week. BIG.

03.08.2025 03:04 — 👍 6 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0

Good news: Update activities work now - so when you update a post in Ghost, it'll be updated in the Fediverse, too.

Not long to go now 🤞

22.07.2025 08:20 — 👍 10 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 1

just 1 more bug I swear

14.07.2025 08:50 — 👍 6 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

Hi fediverse 👋

01.07.2025 15:35 — 👍 15 🔁 3 💬 3 📌 0

The longformers Ghost<>WordPress<>Flipboard<>Fediverse

01.07.2025 14:44 — 👍 9 🔁 7 💬 1 📌 0

Original post on activitypub.ghost.org

The Lever is a nonpartisan, reader-supported investigative news outlet that holds accountable the people and corporations manipulating the levers of power.

Founded in 2020 by David Sirota, an award-winning journalist and Oscar-nominated writer who served as the presidential campaign […]

30.06.2025 18:50 — 👍 2 🔁 6 💬 3 📌 0

You can now follow Casey Newton, and his essential newsletter at the intersection of technology and culture, right here in the fediverse, on @feed@platformer.news

26.06.2025 10:54 — 👍 16 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0

Original post on activitypub.ghost.org

It's official, @tangle_news@readtangle.com is now available in the fediverse!

Tangle is one of the most successful Ghost publications in the world with over 300,000 subscribers. It's a non-partisan politics newsletter that gives you a 360-degree view on the news. No spin. No clickbait. Opinions […]

19.06.2025 08:33 — 👍 3 🔁 7 💬 1 📌 0

Ghost Ghost is a proud non-profit organisation building open source technology for fiercely independent, professional publishers.

btw if you enjoy our unhinged newsletters and you're a senior engineer with 4 paws and a love of JavaScript, we're hiring!

🌍 Fully remote since 2013
📅 4 day work week
💸 Competitive salary
🧑‍💻 Equipment paid for

https://careers.ghost.org/

16.06.2025 11:04 — 👍 6 🔁 9 💬 0 📌 0

Surfacing discussions If someone replies to a reply, and nobody is around to see it. Did it really happen?

16.06.2025 10:48 — 👍 9 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 0

Ramping up for expansion Ghost 6.0 is coming soon

06.06.2025 11:32 — 👍 16 🔁 10 💬 3 📌 0

Slightly delayed on this week's newsletter, sorry about that! But it's a good one. You can now send, receive, and navigate @mentions in Ghost

29.05.2025 08:51 — 👍 7 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

Metabolizing mentions We got those pesky little @ symbols doing the things they're supposed to

29.05.2025 08:46 — 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0

Moderation preferences Hello again! We're back with a quick incremental update this week as we continue on our quest for fediverse feature-completeness. Let's get into it. Last week, we introduced domain-based blocking to complement user blocking, and we improved how ActivityPub notifications are displayed to make it easier for you to spot conversations when people respond to your posts. ## What's new with ActivityPub? Following the last couple of weeks of work around blocking controls, we just rolled out a new moderation screen within ActivityPub preferences. Now you can track, edit, and update lists of blocked users and domains in one place. Another quick improvement: If you unfollow someone, we now automatically purge their past posts from all your feeds. This is expected/usual behavior across most social apps, but it's not default behavior in ActivityPub. Now it works the way you're used to inside Ghost. ## Magic Pages ActivityPub beta In addition to our ActivityPub open beta available on Ghost(Pro), there's now an independent community social web beta running on Magic Pages. Jannis, always ahead of the curve, figured out how to get everything up and running even before we'd finished writing our self-hosting documentation! It's very cool seeing the service running for the first time in multiple places. ## Next up: Mentions An obvious thing that's been missing from our social web beta is @mentions. Next week, we're hoping to change that.

19.05.2025 08:31 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Blocking domains If you thought slashing tariffs by 115% to ease global tensions around an impending recession was good news, just wait till you hear what we've got in store for you this week when it comes to ActivityPub. Last week, we shipped the ability to block individual users with ActivityPub, so you can limit interactions from people you would rather not engage with. We also touched on the idea that thoughtful moderation can't be achieved with a single feature, but rather is something that requires a collection of tools. ## What's new with ActivityPub? Building on that collection, this week we shipped support for blocking _domains_ with ActivityPub. Domain blocking is a powerful way to limit entire servers in the fediverse, rather than just a single user. Now, if you get spam or abuse from `@bob@spam.com` , `@sally@spam.com`, and `@bot@spam.com`, you don't have to go and block each user manually. Instead, you can block the entire `@spam.com` domain to limit interactions from all users on that server. 0:00 /0:11 1× Once a domain is blocked, you'll no longer see posts or notifications from any of those users, and they won't be able to interact with your profile. In the upcoming week, we'll also add new setting screens to allow you to easily look up all your blocked users and domains and make changes to it if needed. ## Notifications improvements A small but significant design improvement also went out last week, making it much easier to spot when someone sends you a reply using ActivityPub. While follows, likes, and reposts are useful signals that your content is getting engagement, we wanted to highlight even more clearly when you get a reply or comment on something you've posted – so you never miss out on a conversation. If you visit the explore section, you'll also see that this week (for the first time since this newsletter started) we are no longer the most popular user of ActivityPub on Ghost! 404Media have overtaken us and moved into the number 1 slot as the largest website sending out all their newsletters with ActivityPub, and they've been getting some great conversations going in the replies on their posts. If you haven't already followed, they're a great example to take a look at. By the way, we're tweaking and updating the list of sites featured in the Explore section each week. Our sorting is based on a combination of popularity and activity. People using ActivityPub the most are the most likely to get featured! Finally, we know there are still some issues with custom usernames and Bluesky sharing. We haven't gotten to the bottom of it just yet, but we're working on it.

12.05.2025 11:23 — 👍 5 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0

Notifications screen in Ghost just got a lil refresh, now it's easier to pick out replies among all the activity 🎨

08.05.2025 10:18 — 👍 3 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

Blocking users Welcome back, intergalactic explorers. Pull up a chair and join us on a Monday morning social web detour. Your todo list can wait. You've got the entire week still ahead of you! Last week, we introduced brand new preferences for ActivityPub, the ability to edit your social web profile, and dedicated sharing settings for Threads and Bluesky. Each week, Ghost publications in the fediverse become a little more unique. It's lovely to see! ## What's new with ActivityPub? This week, we shipped our first set of moderation controls: The ability to block users from interacting with you, if you don't want them to. If you've spent any amount of time in the Fediverse over the past 6 months, there's a good chance you've come across _Nicole_ in your mentions. But you can call her the Fediverse Chick. Nicole (not her real name) is a not-so-convincing spam bot with hundreds (thousands?) of profiles across different Mastodon servers, and uses the @mention feature to promote her warez. The same warez. Every time. The good news: Now you can send her out the airlock. When a user is blocked, they can see your public posts, but they can no longer interact with you. Any requests they make to follow, like, reply, repost, mention, or interact with your profile are automatically rejected. Being able to block users is important because healthy communities grow on the principle of consent. Every participant should be able to decide who can reach them, who can’t, and when the conversation is over. In an open, federated environment like ActivityPub—where posts can flow in from thousands of independent servers—bad-actors, drive-by harassment or spam aren’t hypothetical edge-cases; they’re statistical certainties. Robust user-level moderation tools turn that reality from a deal-breaker into a manageable nuisance. They allow you to publish publicly without surrendering your personal boundaries, so you can curate a meaningful experience. That being said, the astute pugs among you will have noticed a shortcoming in this argument. _Nicole_ is so famously persistent because the spam doesn't just _come_ from a single user. You can block her, but invariably she'll pop up again a few weeks later with a new username on a new server. In reality, it doesn't take just one feature to facilitate thoughtful moderation; it requires a collection of tools that can be used together in concert. User blocking is our first step down this road, but there's much more yet to come. Our long-term goal is simple: Each Ghost publication should be able to define its own social atmosphere. That means putting the dials and levers of moderation directly in the hands of publishers, whether that’s blocking a single nuisance account, muting an entire server, or setting up automated filters. Your publication, your rules, your community.

05.05.2025 10:26 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

Good morning social web! Newsletter is going out shortly. Need some inspiration for an unhinged intro this week. Any ideas?

05.05.2025 09:04 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Sent newsletter.

Realised 15 seconds later that there's an image missing from the newsletter.

The empirical laws of thermodynamics indicate that these events occurred in precise accordance with ancient prophecies of our forefathers.

28.04.2025 09:56 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Images, profiles, and preferences They say you are the sum of the 5 newsletters you spend the most time with, and, since you're reading this one again – it's probably time to start getting worried. Last week, we shipped the glorious ability for you to change your ActivityPub handle, so you're no longer stuck with `@index`. Hundreds of you are now rocking brand new social web identifiers, and looking good doing it. ## What's new with ActivityPub? The big news this week is that you can now upload images to notes, comments, and replies on the social web. Now, when you want to share a quick photo, receipts for your argument, or a dank meme: You can. ### Editing your profile As well as being able to change your social web username, you can now also edit the rest of your social web profile. By default, we set up your profile with the title, description, and icon of your Ghost website. Now you can customize them for the social web, and add an optional cover image. ### Sharing to Threads & Bluesky As discussed last week, Threads and Bluesky require additional steps to display content. Rather than having you figure out what those steps are and then perform them manually, we've simplified the process by turning it into a button you can click. You can find these new buttons on the new **Preferences** screen and, once enabled, a shortcut link to view your profile on those services. 0:00 /0:07 1× That said, this is kind of like a beta of a beta. Betaception, if you will. If you enable Threads/Bluesky sharing and _then_ change your social web handle afterwards, Threads/Bluesky aren't particularly good at handling that right now. Sometimes things break. We've reported these issues to their respective teams, and hopefully they'll be resolved soon enough. Nice. Coming up next, we'll deal with the Fediverse Chick. IYKYK.

28.04.2025 09:46 — 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

TFW u added image uploads to notes

25.04.2025 09:01 — 👍 7 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Custom usernames We've been shipping hard in the last week, and we've got more ActivityPub updates to share for those of you who are trying out the beta! Last week, we recapped the top feedback we've received so far around what's working well about ActivityPub; and what isn't. This week, we're addressing the request that has been sitting firmly in the number one spot. ## What's new with ActivityPub? Up until now, all users of ActivityPub in Ghost had a simple, fixed username of `@index@domain.com`. And, if your domain included `www` then the username would be `@index@www.domain.com`. Now, the `www` prefix has been automatically removed from all usernames, and you can customize the `@index` part to anything you like! This a first step to give you more control how people see and interact with your profile in the Fediverse, and you can expect more settings like this to be added as we go. ### What about _multiple_ usernames? One of the other common questions we've had lately is whether Ghost will allow multiple staff users within a website to have separate usernames. The answer to that is: Yes, that's that plan. But we're not there yet. Eventually, we're hoping to make it so that you can have a publication-level profile like `@index@404media.co` that contains all posts, from anyone on the site — as well as staff user profiles like `@jason@404media.co` and `@sam@404media.co` that represent posts and interactions from those individual authors. This part, though, is still a way off. Making it possible to support multiple users within a single Ghost install is a significant piece of work, and there are many other things we're hoping to get working first. Like, for instance, support for @mentions and being able to add images to replies! (Foreshadowing)

21.04.2025 18:58 — 👍 11 🔁 8 💬 2 📌 0

Recapping your feedback We're back once again for the renegade master, D4 damager, power to the people. And if Fatboy Slim doesn't float your boat, we'll just have to stick to ActivityPub updates instead. Last week, we shared bugs fixed, Threads compatibility improved, and a terrible tale about how we managed to gain several thousand ActivityPub followers and then lost almost all of them. This week, we've got more fixes to report, and we're going to go over the top feedback we've received from the public beta so far. A quick reminder, in case you missed it: Anyone on Ghost(Pro) can now enable the ActivityPub beta under **Settings → Labs**. More details: here.**** ## What's new with ActivityPub? We continue to hunt down bugs and assassinate them with the conviction, cloaking, and clicking noises of a predator in pursuit of aliens. In the past week, we knocked off around 30 of them. Many were things you reported; a few were nefarious little bastards we tracked down ourselves. We're also still making continuous performance improvements each week. Since the beta began, you should have noticed Ghost profile pages and notifications, particularly, come up more quickly when navigating to them. While the more minor issues typically get fixed right away, after a month of the public beta being out in the wild - it feels like a good time to do a quick recap of the top 3 pieces of feedback we've been hearing from you, as well as our thoughts on each. So, in order of feedback we're hearing the most, here's what's been coming up: ### You want to change your username By far, the top request is that people want to change their username from `@index@www.site.com` to something else. Including, and especially, without the `www`. We agree, and we're working on it this week. Hopefully, we'll have some more news to share in the next newsletter! ### Confusion about posts not showing up on Threads / Bluesky Probably the next most common thing we've heard is that many of you are confused about why your posts aren't showing up on Threads / Bluesky. And for good reason. It is, in fact, confusing. **To make your Ghost site show up on Threads:** You have to first interact (as in: like, reply or follow) something _on_ Threads. Eg: Inside Ghost, search for `@ghost@threads.net` and press _Follow_. Now, your site will also show up on Threads. **To make your Ghost site show up Bluesky:** You have to first search-for and follow `@bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy` inside Ghost. Now, your site will also show up on Bluesky, but with a different (weird) username. We're going to replace the entire above process with two buttons: "Enable Threads" and "Enable Bluesky" - which you can just... click. ### You want a more comprehensive search function Many people have requested a more comprehensive search function, and are confused about the lack of username autocomplete, or why - when they search for keywords like "news" or "pugs" - nothing comes up. This problem exists across almost every ActivityPub product out there. The problem with the search function, as it exists today, is that it's _not_ actually a search function. It's an address bar (like your web browser) where you can type in an address and then go to that address. Browsers can't autocomplete against every web address in the world because they have no idea what every website in the world is. If you type "news" or "pugs" into a browser address bar, that goes to an external _search engine -_ like Google - but the Fediverse, for now, does not yet have a search engine. There are several projects out there working on this problem, but it's one that's probably going to take a bit of time to solve. In the short term, though, we're going to make some design updates to help make this a little clearer — at the very least. ### What else? Outside of the top 3, we've heard your feedback about adding more publishers to the **Explore** section, making the app faster, and adding support for @mentions and image uploads to Notes. We're tracking all these things, and the team is iterating quickly based on all the messages we receive in the "Beta feedback" thread located in the bottom-right corner of your screen: Got more feedback for us? Things not mentioned here? Hit that button and let us know!

14.04.2025 20:02 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

You think you're following us, but you might not be It's a new week and, once again, time for a fresh round of updates from your ever-frantic bunch of Fediverse explorers. Last week we explored some Threads compatibility updates, how to find and follow people across the Fediverse, and the progress of the social web beta launch. This week, we've got more fixes and updates to share, as well as a painful and embarrassing story that we wish had never happened. Oh, what's that? Delicious scroll-bait? Yes. Yes, it is. ## What's new with ActivityPub? Speed and bugfixes, mainly. We closed another 44 issues in the past week as we resolved problems that we noticed, and you reported. We also announced the social web beta on the main Ghost changelog, causing a second wave of publishers to turn on Fediverse sharing for the first time. Fediverse Observer is now tracking 500+ Ghost servers in the wild, but the real number is over double that! More publishers in the beta means more interesting accounts available to follow, and one of the most common pieces of feedback over the past few weeks has been that you're looking for more accounts to follow. Good news: We've refreshed the list of accounts on the **Explore** page and there are now hundreds of Ghost publishers just 1-click away for you to discover. We'll continue to refresh, update and refine explore over time, so keep checking back. It's a bit of a chicken/egg situation. We can only do interesting things with Explore when there are enough interesting publishers to populate it. So, the more publishers start using the social web beta, the more updates we'll make. ## Threads compatibility Following on from last week, and thanks to the team at Threads, we've made more major steps forward in sharing content between Ghost and Threads! Following and receiving notes (short-form content) now works in both directions: Notes from Threads show up in Ghost, and Notes from Ghost show up on Threads. 💡 ****Note:**** You have to interact with Threads in some way to enable this connection. Once you follow, like, or reply to something on Threads from Ghost, then Threads will index the Ghost profile. They do this so that anyone who doesn't __want__ to have their profile show up on Threads, doesn't have to. https://www.threads.net/fediverse_profile/index@activitypub.ghost.org There's still a long way to go, but this is already a huge jump forward compared to just a couple of weeks ago! ## Fixing the most painful bug Here's a fun (_read: not fun_) story for you, of how we fixed the most embarrassing bug. Every now and then, over the course of developing our ActivityPub service, we've noticed that our follower count seemed... off. In particular, sometimes it would just drop out of nowhere, but then eventually it would always go back up again. At first, we assumed that it was a bug in our code for counting followers. Later we thought it might be an issue with all the database drama we were working through. Then, a couple of months ago, we noticed that our own Mastodon profiles were repeatedly unfollowing this newsletter - without us clicking "unfollow". After a lot of digging, we eventually discovered an issue with a niche synchronization service in the depths of our codebase that was accidentally triggering Mastodon instances to unfollow Ghost, en-masse. In October 2024 we had ~**6,000** followers here. By March of 2025 we were down to just **800**. Worst of all, because of the nature of the bug itself, there's no way to recover them. They're just... gone. The only good news is that this bug only existed for Ghost instances with a large number of followers, which was literally just 1 instance: _Ourselves._ We found and resolved the issue eventually, but there are a lot of people out there right now who think they're following us and have subscribed to receive updates but, in fact, no longer are. Ouch. So, if we can ask you a favor this week: Please share and repost this newsletter so that we may hopefully reach and regain some of our lost Fediverse companions. We miss them.

07.04.2025 06:52 — 👍 11 🔁 30 💬 3 📌 0

Sup Threads

07.04.2025 06:09 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Gone surfing It's the start of a new week and time for a fresh round of updates from your favorite ~~neighborhood~~ intergalactic pugs. Here, hold my miniature kong. Last week we covered the opening gambit of our social web beta, along with our new onboarding guide. This week, we're diving headfirst into some of the changes and improvements that have been made based on your feedback, and how we're going to address your _most_ requested feature. ## What's new with ActivityPub? This week is a veritable grab bag of news, mostly centered around bugfixes and improvements, of which there have been many. Since the launch of the beta, our little team has been carefully watching all the feedback coming in, investigating reports of things that aren't working, and responding as quickly as possible. In the past seven days, we shipped 47 different fixes and improvements, addressing a combination of things you noticed and things we noticed while we were fixing the things you noticed. Many of the fixes were small, like how sometimes you couldn't see the "following" list when viewing a profile. Others were more substantial, like a permissions bug that meant the ActivityPub screens weren't visible to administrator users. In the meantime, the number of users in the beta is still rapidly climbing! Thanks to some work from the Threads team, we also made significant progress in interoperability. You can now follow Threads accounts from Ghost, and their posts will appear in your feeds. There's still a long way to go, though: Profile pictures don't work, and posts from Ghost don't yet show up on Threads. These are things that still need to be resolved by the Threads team. ## How to find people to follow In our last newsletter we encouraged everyone to reply using ActivityPub to help Ghost users discover each other – and you did! There were over 50 replies, and last week's replies became a fantastic way to find and follow Ghost publishers. If you're ever reading a post on the social web inside Ghost and you see someone interesting in the replies, you can click on their username or profile picture to reach their profile, and follow them. 0:00 /0:17 1× This is the backbone of organic discoverability: following the rabbit hole of other people responding and engaging with content you're interested in, which often leads to unexpected finds. Back in the olden days, we would call this "surfing." [_cries in millennial_] We're also using your replies to find more people and publications to add to the **Explore** section inside Ghost – you can expect to see some updates there this week. ## What's coming next Outside of bugfixes and general improvements, there are two main things on our pug radar screens right now. The first is announcing the social web beta more widely, which we plan to do this week. Initially, we only announced the beta to subscribers of this newsletter to give us a little time to monitor how it was all going. Now that we're reasonably confident no servers will melt, we'll promote the beta on all of Ghost's official channels. The second is username customization. We know `@index@www.site.com` isn't the prettiest, and what you really want is `@name@site.com`. We're working on it! The easy part is allowing the username to be changed. The hard part is making sure you don't lose all your followers when you do. Hopefully, we'll have some good news to share on this front in the next couple of weeks.

31.03.2025 06:24 — 👍 7 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0

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