Phantom, open source alternative to the Substack newsletter platform, is considering joining fediverse, the social network of interconnected servers that includes apps such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. According to a mail from Ghost founder John O’Nolan, the company, which is structured as a non-profit organization – is considering federating Ghost over ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers fediverse.
O’Nolan said the most requested feature in recent years has been to federate its software. “It seems like there are many potential ways to do it. Curious how you’d like it to work? he asked in a post in threadswhich was distributed to Mastodon through Threads’ own integration with ActivityPub.
The survey asks users if they use any ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon or Threads, and how they would expect the ActivityPub functionality to work in Ghost, if it were added. He also asks how federation would benefit Ghost users personally. Invite respondents to optionally provide an email address if they also wish to be contacted for more information in the future.
Image credits: Ghost
While the launch of a survey is not necessarily a commitment to the Ghost federation, it is another sign pointing to the broader reshaping of the web that is underway.
Following billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, online users have experienced the downsides of relying on centralized platforms: with a change in ownership, Twitter was remodeled to become a different type of platform called X, with revised ethics and long-term ambitions. (Musk wants X to be an “everything” app for transactions, creator content, videos, shopping, and more, and takes on a more independent role in terms of content moderation.)
For those unhappy with Musk’s changes, having a portable social network identity suddenly seemed like an idea that had more value. That is, if you don’t like the way your Mastodon server (or other federated service) is running, you can select your profile and move it somewhere else. followers in tow.
With Ghost, however, the idea could be to federate the accounts of writers who use Ghost to publish their content. Your posts, which would also be published on the web and to your newsletter subscribers, could also exist on fediverse, where others could read, like and respond to the post from their preferred app. These responses could also potentially be distributed to Ghost, where they could exist as comments.
Assuming Ghost went this route, it would be similar to how WordPress federated with ActivityPub after the acquisition of an ActivityPub blog plugin. When enabled, WordPress blogs can be followed by people on apps like Mastodon and others in the faith world and then receive responses as comments on their own sites.
After seeing O’Nolan’s post, Renaud Chaput, CTO of Mastodon came over to help with the ActivityPub integration, which O’Nolan accepted.
Ghost has gained attention as a rival to Substack in recent months for the same reason some have fled X: people disagree about how the platforms should be moderated. Substack has been dedicated to promoting free speech, as Musk does on X, but that also led to the platform. being used by pro-Nazi publicationsas The Atlantic detailed late last year.
As a result, one of Substack’s most prominent writers, Casey Newton, a former contributor to The Verge, left substack and my degree to Ghost instead.
“I don’t know of any major US consumer internet platform that doesn’t explicitly ban praise of Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to open a store and start selling subscriptions,” Newton wrote in that moment.
In addition to Newton, Other notable Ghost users they include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever and Tangle, to name a few.
Today Ghost was installed. more than 3 million timeswhich would constitute a healthy addition to the broader fediversity and its approximately More than 13 million users in total, of which around 1.5 million are active monthly. (This figure does not include Threads’ more than 130 million monthly active users, as it is not yet fully integrated with ActivityPub.)
