Refreshingly honest updates from Ghost

Whoever is writing the content for the Ghost ActivityPub site is doing an amazing job of being brutally honest, informative and also hilarious. It’s hard to nail that trifecta, but they’re doing it well.

Just 2 more tables, come on.

There were even more positive comments on last week’s edition than our first one, and only one email asking if “everything is ok” — so we’re taking that as a clear sign that none of you know how to spot a cry for help. It’s been a busy week of building

Building ActivityPubGhost

Here's one thing I don't get about how Ghost are approaching ActivityPub though.

They seem to be hell bent on building a full ActivityPub client with the ability to follow a publication from inside Ghost’s UI, and then to read updates from there, when I assume that 99.999% of their customer use cases are "we want to push into the network / let readers bring their ActivityPub identities to our content".

Surely none of their customers are thinking, "I want to read mastodon, I'll fire up Ghost". There’s a myriad of very good ActivityPub clients out there. The Ghost backend is a publishing platform, not a consumption one, and their current approach seems to miss that.

It felt like Substack started to go off the rails most when it started down the path of being more than just broadcast. I hope Ghost doesn’t follow them there.