It's a live demo, what could possibly go wrong?

Welcome back to another week of pug-themed mischief as our quest for Fediverse integration continues in flamboyant style. Last week we achieved 2-way 'likes' between Ghost and the Fediverse. This week, things get more social.

You see, this newsletter was just sent to you live, on stage at Fediforum. John is doing a short demo of all the ActivityPub progress that we've been documenting in this newsletter, and what better way to do a live demo than with a bit of... dogfooding?

Unlike the iPhone 16 event, we actually have new things to show off!

What's new with ActivityPub?

Replies. Replies are what's new with ActivityPub. We're on a fucking hot streak right now, gang. Week by week, the pieces are falling into place. Now rub my belly while I tell you all about it.

Ghost now ingests replies via ActivityPub, so when you publish a new post with Ghost and people comment on it via Mastodon — you'll see it pop up in your notifications panel, and appear in line with the post in Ghost Admin.

The extra fun thing about this is that as soon as we finished building it we realized that a whole bunch of you have been replying to our posts this whole time! We had no idea. But now we do.

There's something very interesting happening at this stage of the project.

You see, it's easy to talk about ActivityPub in terms of the engineering. Understanding the mechanisms behind the technology, after all, is a pre-requisite to building something with it. But as we start to see real interactions happening with this newsletter, there's something else worth talking about. The feeling of it. The "vibe" — if you will.

For the past decade the experience of publishing articles on an independent website has been a tale of two halves. First, you push publish in Ghost. Then, you share the link [some other place] so that people can see and respond to it.

But now, seeing human faces pop up inside Ghost... liking, responding, interacting with what we publish right here in this newsletter....

It's different. It has a different quality to it.

It feels alive.

If all that sounds too wishy-washy to you, that's ok. We'll be back with expletive-laden diatribes about the inner workings of event queuing soon enough.

We just want you to know there's something special happening here that goes far beyond the technology.

And you're part of it.