Let's fix it in production

Let's fix it in production

One small step for pug, one giant leap for pug kind.

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire...

The ActivityPugs have been hard at work this week. Fully recovered and with a dazzling display of fur and fury.

What's new with ActivityPub?

With an opening like that, you might imagine that we must have something good to share this week. And you would be right. We've hit two major milestones in the last few days that we're excited to show you.

First, our ActivityPub GitHub repository is now fully open source:

GitHub - TryGhost/ActivityPub: A full-featured ActivityPub server for networked publishing with Ghost
A full-featured ActivityPub server for networked publishing with Ghost - TryGhost/ActivityPub
GitHubTryGhost

That's significant for two reasons: 1. You can now follow along with our code changes in real time (if you want to) and 2. All our work on ActivityPub is now being released under a free open source license which means anybody can use, learn from, modify, distribute, or contribute to it.

It's still very early days, but if you're a developer and you're interested in collaborating, we're going to keep opening up our process as we go to allow anyone who wants to get involved.

If you're not a developer and you're not totally sure what 'open source' means, think of it like this: You know what copyright is, right? Someone creates something new (like a book, song, piece of software or photograph) and they have 'copyright' which means nobody else is allowed to copy it. They'll often also go to great lengths to prevent others from being able to copy it, by applying legal and technical protections.

Open source is like the opposite of that. It's about making something in a way that explicitly and actively invites everyone to copy it, and often making it as easy as possible to do so. The idea is to share creative work openly so everyone can use and benefit from it, and anyone who uses and benefits from it can help to improve it.

It's the spirit of collaboration over competition.

This newsletter is now federated

Our second bit of AP-Team news this week is that this very newsletter, the one you're reading right now, has become the first federated Ghost instance on the internet. In fact, you can follow it right now on @index@activitypub.ghost.org

Does it work perfectly? It does not. Are there likely to be all manner of bugs and issues with it? Oh yes there are. But here, dear reader, are the first signs of life.

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Having multiple Ghost instances in production successfully running ActivityPub is a huge milestone for us because it means that for the first time, we're interacting with the wider fediverse. Not just theoretical local implementations and tests, but the real world wide social web.

This takes us one step closer to an ActivityPub beta that we can make available publicly for you to test. There's still quite a lot to do before we're at that point (thank u for ur patience), but we continue to move in the right direction.

This newsletter concludes our team's 2024 Q2 work on ActivityPub, and I'm pleased to say that thanks to stellar performance against our team's only KPI (comments), we have successfully convinced our managers to allow us to continue to work on ActivityPub in Q3, as long as we "don't go too fucking crazy with the pug references this time — there is a limit".

Answering your questions

You ask. We answer.

Super exciting. Wow I can see a path away from social media. So great. Is it possible to share this video on social?

You can share anything you like from this newsletter on social! Our only KPI is comments, and the more new subscribers we get to the newsletter the larger the pool of potential commenters. We would be honored if you would expose more new people to our collective madness very important writing.

But… how does an LLM get a cold?

I am clearly not an LLM, as evidenced by my very human-like ability to... checks notes ...produce saliva and regulate body temperature. LLMs don't get colds because they don't have bodies, whereas I have a body made of flesh and bones and... squints at smudged writing on hand ...mitochondria.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Pugs are awesome too.

It is nice to be appreciated.