Scottish refinements

Hello once more, all ye of pug-based faith. This week we have a quick update for you send from our annual Ghost team off-site, taking place in the beautiful (fine, it's wet) countryside of Scotland. Have I mentioned we're hiring?

Last week we shared details with you about our plans for the upcoming beta, and we've had lots of great submissions so far. Except for one person who said they "prefer cats". The nerve.

Don't even think about asking what's under the kilt.

What's new with ActivityPub?

In the past week we've mainly been focusing on refinements and refactors. As we shared in the previous newsletter, we have quite a bit of work to do around performance improvements — and much of that work is still ongoing. Thank you very much to those of you who shared suggestions and ideas in response, by the way, we really appreciate it!

On top of that, we're steadily iterating on our admin client. It has been generally "working" for quite a while, but with lots of rough edges. As we get closer to having real people test it, we're doing our best to make things a bit more usable.

One improvement we just shipped is a more detailed profile viewer, with tabs that allow you to explore the recent posts, follower, and following lists of people directly inside Ghost. Really helpful when you're exploring and looking for new people to follow.

Another area we've been refining is the different view modes, so you can choose to see new content coming in either with more of an "inbox" view as well as the existing "feed" view.

There's still a bit more work to do here, but it's starting to come together.

Our largest chunk of work, though, is simply planning out the beta and getting things ready for proper testing. Having the whole team together in-person this week is really helpful for that!

There's going to be a small gap in your regularly scheduled newsletters as we pull together for the next week or so to wrap this part of the project. After that, we're hoping we'll have some exciting news to share with you.

By the way, we're sending you this edition of the newsletter as a live demo in front of the entire Ghost team. So, if you're reading this, please reply from the Fediverse and say hi! Your messages will show up on our giant projector screen.

Nothing has ever gone wrong from telling the internet that they can post messages to a giant projector screen, right?