We now push settings & posts

Happy Friday, furry friends. Having secured the details of our roadmap for ActivityPub last week, this week we're back to shipping. Sometimes it feels good to git push -f and then immediately go home for the day. So what if a few airlines, hospitals and governments are affected. We're kernel pugs now.

What's new with ActivityPub?

Our first order of business in making Ghost work with Mastodon is to make it possible for people to find, follow and receive posts from this newsletter. We had this half-working a few weeks ago, but everything was hard coded.

The eagle-eyed among you already noticed that while the @index@activitypub.ghost.org user existed - the profile information wasn't up to date, and our last newsletter did not show up in your feed when it was published.

This week, we solved both of those issues:

1. Ghost now syncs its settings (Publication icon, title and description) to our new ActivityPub server, which in turn makes that data available on the network.
2. Ghost now sends a webhook to the ActivityPub server when a new post is published, which in turn is then delivered to everyone following.

So, now when you open this publication in Mastodon you should see the correct meta data as well this very post that you're currently reading:

Apparently we already have 165 followers! Big thanks to those who put your faith in an empty profile for the last couple of weeks, we're glad that we can now share new posts with you.

Keep in mind, though, that if you reply on Mastodon we won't see your replies, because we haven't built that feature yet. So instead, hop on over to the web edition of this newsletter and leave a comment.

(See what we did there?)

Answering your questions

You ask. We ramble.

This might be a noob question, I apologise in advance — but how do we make sure we don’t fall in the algorithm trap with Activity Pub?

Each platform could implement their own feed algorithm, effectively leading us back to current issues and “enslave” us to algorithms (except we’d have to understand more than one).

Instead of something akin to email, we’d have a large social media, just more complicated.

Unless I’m mistaken, it looks like it’s up to each platform to make these choices

This is not at all a noob question. In fact, it's a very good question.

First: You're absolutely correct that it's up to each platform to make these choices, and we will likely end up with many different algorithms.

The big difference is that users will also have the ability to make choices, which is how we collectively escape the enslavement trap.

Say you subscribe to a YouTube channel with very niche videos about the inner workings of ball bearings (or something equally niche). You, the viewer, have a high chance of not seeing any new videos from this channel - even though you subscribe to it - because the content just isn't suited to the YouTube algorithm. Equally, the creator of videos about ball bearings is unlikely to grow, because their videos are rarely promoted to new people.

The problem here is that neither person (the viewer, or the creator) can do anything about it. That's just the way YouTube works.

In the Fediverse, if you (the viewer) happen to be using a client app with an algorithm that doesn't work for you... you can simply switch to a different app.

Equally, the creator has a much higher chance of having their work reach new people because while ball bearings may not be a hot topic in 1 algorithm, their content could still spread far and wide on other platforms with different algorithms, or no algorithm at all.

Closed platforms are all about lock-in and control, because this gives them monopoly power to behave however they please; typically to maximize their revenue at your expense. You can make lots of friends, as long as you never leave. A bit like a cult.

Open standards are all about optionality, which in turn promotes good behavior in platforms because it's very easy for their users to go elsewhere. If you don't like how the establishment is treating people, you and your friends can just go hang out at a different place down the street. A bit like a pub.

Being able to choose is worth a great deal.