Do you like the way I like that?

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Confucius said: "There is one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life - reciprocity."

That's not the start of a Confucius joke, he really did say that. Last week we managed to ship inbound likes from the Fediverse. When you publish a post and someone out there on Mastodon likes it, you get a notification and it shows up in your Ghost dashboard.

But, if there's one thing we can take away from our main man Confucius' dope bars in his timeless diss track, it's that a social contract is a two way street. If you like Ghost publishers, it sure would be nice if they could like you back.

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What's new with ActivityPub?

Now when you're following other people or publications in Ghost and they publish something you like, you can hit that little heart icon and yeet some reciprocity back out over the Fediverse to let them know.

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Whenever you like a post that data will make its way over to Mastodon and the author there (or anywhere else) will receive a notification to let them know. It's the exact same thing as last week, but in reverse!

So, we now have both inbound and outbound likes wired up and working, and overall this is feeling really good.

The code scaffolding we've built for bi-directional likes will now be repurposed to deliver other features like replies and boosts. Each piece of work is creating the foundation for what comes next.

We are edging ever closer to a private beta where you, our very patient subscribers, will be able to try this out for yourselves. What's left on the todo list?

Replies, and user profiles 💅

Answering your questions

Mark Stosberg, a Mastodon influencer, asks:

In the FAQ for this project it says: "Ghost is going to be flexible, but generally focused on long-form, rich content.".

There are specialized apps for consuming ActivityPub content of specific types, like Mastodon for short content and Pixelfed for photos.

Are you expecting that Ghost content will be primarily be consumed in ActivityPub apps built around long-form, rich content, then? Right now I'm not finding many (any?) active mobile apps for iOS in this niche.

There is indeed a major app working on this functionality that you should definitely check out: Flipboard!

A few weeks back, John appeared on Flipboard Founder Mike McCue's podcast, Dot Social, to talk about the Fediverse more broadly as well as this exact subject. Here's a link to the episode

Separately, Reeder — one of Web 2.0's most beloved products — just shipped a brand new version with support for Mastodon and several other types of feeds — so it looks like they might be expanding into this area, too:

Clearly there is a reader being built into Ghost-for-web. Is that the plan for that to work as a mobile reader as well, or are separate long-form mobile reader apps on the roadmap as well?

No plans so far, but hey — that's a cool idea.