Not sure if this has already been posted since it’s kind of old news (early 2024), but I think that’s exciting. I’m currently looking into blog software with nice webgui and I might wait for this to become real. Looking at the announcement page, they seem to take it seriously and there’s continuous merged PRs since April until recently regarding AP on their GitHub.
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Just curious but is Ghost like an alternative to Wordpress or Squarespace?
Wordpress has become an all-purpose CMS known security vulnerabilities via unsafe plugins.
Ghost has APIs instead of plugins for nearly everything, so it eliminated a lot of security and maintenance headache that way.
Ghost focuses on just a few features centered around independent content creators: blogging, email newsletters and subscriptions.
So features for sending bulk emails and accepting payments are built in, but you won’t find native support for other things like podcasts or recipe markup.
Ghost meets my need, and I love not dealing with 30 plugins at risk of being exploited if I don’t upgrade them promptly.
It’s simpler/more lightweight than WordPress, but generally yes (don’t know squarespace)
What is the use of federating a blog? Just commenting?
I look at it like this: ActivityPub is to RSS as a GUI is to a CLI.
Meaning, you could already use the tools (RSS or the CLI) that are there to do the task, but someone has created something (protocol, AP or application, GUI) to make that task easier. In the case of RSS and AP, that task is generally getting content in front of the user. With RSS I have to go hunt down RSS feeds and whatnot, but with AP I just interact with stuff and wait for the people I interact with to interact with stuff, and then I get content.
I think that’s a pretty good analogy in this case
And you would be able to see blog posts in a fediverse feed and subscribe to a blog that way.
People can follow and comment to my WordPress from the fediverse. My posts are long enough that they don’t really look right on Mastodon (and images all show up as attachments rather than inline), but nice for shorter format blogs
Mostly commenting though the Fediverse, yes, but they also develop the possibility to follow other Fedi users and have a timeline when logged in.
I think most current blog commenting systems have some drawback (closed platform like discuss, limited to WordPress, or something that requires email confirmation, captcha or something else) so the ability to comment from another service is a huge factor for me.
I’m working on adding ActivityPub to my Hugo blog right now. I support RSS, but I figured AP support means that you can get it into your Mastodon feed or even Lemmy feed making it easy to follow. Additionally, commenting (assuming it doesn’t get taken over by spammers.)
I would love to know how you get on with this.
Federated as opposed to using a Wordpress hosting service etc that can be turned off by someone’s business decision.
You’re confusing federation with self hosting.
Somewhat, but I’m thinking of the future of federation as a torrenty mesh of peers with no actual hosting “service” that can be turned off. That’s how I picture the Cortex in the Firefly universe. When Simon as a boy is excited about getting a “source box” I imagine it’s a participant as opposed to just an endpoint.
There was a good talk about this at FOSDEM at the weekend!
Were FOSDEM talks recorded?
yes, although they are not all available yet. Here is the link to the videos from the room that hosted the Social Web track. https://video.fosdem.org/2025/ud2208/
Perfect thank you!
Here is the Ghost talk from FOSDEM 2025 https://video.fosdem.org/2025/ud2208/fosdem-2025-4673-networked-journalism-bringing-long-form-publishing-to-the-fediverse.av1.webm
I signed up for early access, but tbh based on the signup page it’s hard to have a lot of confidence in anyone who thinks really light gray text on a white background is a sensible idea.
Agreed, but given ghost has theming, I’m not too concerned about that.
I also signed up, but I’m not sure if it applies to selfhosting.
This looks a lot like Writefreely.
I never tried writefreely, but I was under the impression that it’s really focused on, well, writing. Maybe it’s not used that much, but I would like to have the ability to easily upload pictures and include them in the articles with some formatting options etc.
You can do that but only under paid accounts.
The people who make writefreely are saying that they are working on making image uploads possible for self-hosted instances, not just their own at write.as. Currently if you are self-hosting you can insert an image but it must be hosted elsewhere and inserted via a markdown link.
