Bugs, breakthroughs and BlueSky

Hello again, our four-pawed Fediverse friends. It’s time for your weekly dose of doctor-prescribed decentralized debauchery. Did you miss us? No? Fine.

Last week we officially started the ActivityPub private beta and sent invitations to our first 3 publishers to start testing things out. This was the first big milestone we've been working toward for months, and it felt great to get there! 🚀

This week, we're building onwards and upwards. Then backwards. Then upwards again. Hopefully.

What's new with ActivityPub?

After sending out the invitations last week, and with a little help from Cesar Millan, we successfully onboarded our first 3 publishers and got them up and running in the Fediverse. We're not going to share their handles here just yet, because we want to start things off slow. As we get a little further into the beta, though, we'll start highlighting Ghost publishers who you can follow.

Do you know what happened next, dear reader?

Bugs. Bugs happened next!

This is, of course, fantastic news. We know there are bugs, and our team could easily spend several more months working on ones we notice, but without any outside input, it's very difficult to prioritize them. We might spend weeks working on something that Real People™️ don't notice, while inadvertently ignoring something that's driving them crazy.

So, while we're pretty embarrassed about the state of the app at the moment, having outside input on where to focus is incredibly valuable.

In other news, we fleshed out the profile viewer so you can discover and browse through user data and activity for your account, as well as others:

Expanding federation to BlueSky

Another cool thing that happened last week was that we enabled a bridge to BlueSky — an alternative decentralized social network which doesn't use ActivityPub, but instead uses its own alternative protocol.

The "bridge" we set up makes it so that BlueSky users can also follow this newsletter directly on their network, in the same way people on ActivityPub platforms can, by following @index.activitypub.ghost.org.ap.brid.gy

Separately, we've also launched an official @Ghost.org account on BlueSky for anyone interested in keeping up with general Ghost news and updates.

It's great to see multiple different technologies and platforms working hard to make a better, healthier open web.

Coming up next week: We're overhauling how ActivityPub replies work.