Gone surfing

It's the start of a new week and time for a fresh round of updates from your favorite neighborhood intergalactic pugs. Here, hold my miniature kong.

Last week we covered the opening gambit of our social web beta, along with our new onboarding guide. This week, we're diving headfirst into some of the changes and improvements that have been made based on your feedback, and how we're going to address your most requested feature.

What's new with ActivityPub?

This week is a veritable grab bag of news, mostly centered around bugfixes and improvements, of which there have been many. Since the launch of the beta, our little team has been carefully watching all the feedback coming in, investigating reports of things that aren't working, and responding as quickly as possible.

In the past seven days, we shipped 47 different fixes and improvements, addressing a combination of things you noticed and things we noticed while we were fixing the things you noticed. Many of the fixes were small, like how sometimes you couldn't see the "following" list when viewing a profile. Others were more substantial, like a permissions bug that meant the ActivityPub screens weren't visible to administrator users.

In the meantime, the number of users in the beta is still rapidly climbing!

Thanks to some work from the Threads team, we also made significant progress in interoperability. You can now follow Threads accounts from Ghost, and their posts will appear in your feeds.

There's still a long way to go, though: Profile pictures don't work, and posts from Ghost don't yet show up on Threads. These are things that still need to be resolved by the Threads team.

How to find people to follow

In our last newsletter we encouraged everyone to reply using ActivityPub to help Ghost users discover each other – and you did! There were over 50 replies, and last week's replies became a fantastic way to find and follow Ghost publishers.

If you're ever reading a post on the social web inside Ghost and you see someone interesting in the replies, you can click on their username or profile picture to reach their profile, and follow them.

This is the backbone of organic discoverability: following the rabbit hole of other people responding and engaging with content you're interested in, which often leads to unexpected finds.

Back in the olden days, we would call this "surfing." [cries in millennial]

We're also using your replies to find more people and publications to add to the Explore section inside Ghost – you can expect to see some updates there this week.

What's coming next

Outside of bugfixes and general improvements, there are two main things on our pug radar screens right now.

The first is announcing the social web beta more widely, which we plan to do this week. Initially, we only announced the beta to subscribers of this newsletter to give us a little time to monitor how it was all going. Now that we're reasonably confident no servers will melt, we'll promote the beta on all of Ghost's official channels.

The second is username customization. We know @index@www.site.com isn't the prettiest, and what you really want is @name@site.com.

We're working on it! The easy part is allowing the username to be changed. The hard part is making sure you don't lose all your followers when you do.

Hopefully, we'll have some good news to share on this front in the next couple of weeks.