Recapping your feedback

We're back once again for the renegade master, D4 damager, power to the people. And if Fatboy Slim doesn't float your boat, we'll just have to stick to ActivityPub updates instead.

Last week, we shared bugs fixed, Threads compatibility improved, and a terrible tale about how we managed to gain several thousand ActivityPub followers and then lost almost all of them. This week, we've got more fixes to report, and we're going to go over the top feedback we've received from the public beta so far.

A quick reminder, in case you missed it: Anyone on Ghost(Pro) can now enable the ActivityPub beta under Settings → Labs. More details: here.

What's new with ActivityPub?

We continue to hunt down bugs and assassinate them with the conviction, cloaking, and clicking noises of a predator in pursuit of aliens. In the past week, we knocked off around 30 of them. Many were things you reported; a few were nefarious little bastards we tracked down ourselves.

We're also still making continuous performance improvements each week. Since the beta began, you should have noticed Ghost profile pages and notifications, particularly, come up more quickly when navigating to them.

While the more minor issues typically get fixed right away, after a month of the public beta being out in the wild - it feels like a good time to do a quick recap of the top 3 pieces of feedback we've been hearing from you, as well as our thoughts on each.

So, in order of feedback we're hearing the most, here's what's been coming up:

You want to change your username

By far, the top request is that people want to change their username from @index@www.site.com to something else. Including, and especially, without the www.

We agree, and we're working on it this week. Hopefully, we'll have some more news to share in the next newsletter!

Confusion about posts not showing up on Threads / Bluesky

Probably the next most common thing we've heard is that many of you are confused about why your posts aren't showing up on Threads / Bluesky. And for good reason. It is, in fact, confusing.

To make your Ghost site show up on Threads: You have to first interact (as in: like, reply or follow) something on Threads. Eg: Inside Ghost, search for @ghost@threads.net and press Follow. Now, your site will also show up on Threads.

To make your Ghost site show up Bluesky: You have to first search-for and follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy inside Ghost. Now, your site will also show up on Bluesky, but with a different (weird) username.

We're going to replace the entire above process with two buttons: "Enable Threads" and "Enable Bluesky" - which you can just... click.

You want a more comprehensive search function

Many people have requested a more comprehensive search function, and are confused about the lack of username autocomplete, or why - when they search for keywords like "news" or "pugs" - nothing comes up. This problem exists across almost every ActivityPub product out there.

The problem with the search function, as it exists today, is that it's not actually a search function. It's an address bar (like your web browser) where you can type in an address and then go to that address.

Browsers can't autocomplete against every web address in the world because they have no idea what every website in the world is. If you type "news" or "pugs" into a browser address bar, that goes to an external search engine - like Google - but the Fediverse, for now, does not yet have a search engine.

There are several projects out there working on this problem, but it's one that's probably going to take a bit of time to solve.

In the short term, though, we're going to make some design updates to help make this a little clearer — at the very least.

What else?

Outside of the top 3, we've heard your feedback about adding more publishers to the Explore section, making the app faster, and adding support for @mentions and image uploads to Notes.

We're tracking all these things, and the team is iterating quickly based on all the messages we receive in the "Beta feedback" thread located in the bottom-right corner of your screen:

Got more feedback for us? Things not mentioned here?

Hit that button and let us know!