The private beta begins

Friends, pugs, the time has finally come. The beta has officially begun! More on that in just a moment. Here, hold my squeaky chew toy.

The past few days have been a bit slow as the whole Ghost team made their way home from Scotland after a busy week of in-person collaboration. As mentioned in last week's edition, we got the chance to demo ActivityPub in front of everyone and talk about where things are going. More than 30 of us work full-time on Ghost, but only 4 have been working on ActivityPub so far!

So what has everyone else been working on? You'll have to wait and see.

Q&A: "Seriously, who is writing this damn newsletter?"

What's new with ActivityPub?

The big news is that we just sent out invitations to the very first 3 publishers to be onboarded for beta testing.

How did we select the 3? First we asked everyone to promise to give us 8% of their revenue, or else. Then, when that predictably failed we ultimately just selected 3 of the private beta applications with the smallest audience sizes.

There's an old saying in software development that if you aren't embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you shipped too late. So, in this case, let's just say we're shipping extremely on time.

To our first 3 testers: Thank you and also I'm sorry.

We expect to be slowly adding more people to the private beta with each passing week, before eventually opening the beta to everyone subscribed to this newsletter once we're confident that we can handle the traffic.

Outside of beta preparations, we made some further iterations on the UI side of things, where you'll be pleased to hear that the inbox view is continuing to become more... inboxy.

We're nowhere near done with this yet, but with each passing week it feels a little closer to a client you'd actually want to spend time reading in.

We also just started testing cross-compatibility with WordPress, which we're super excited about. A lot of the underlying concepts developed by Matthias in the official WP ActivityPub plugin are very similar to what we're working on.

Anyway. That's all for today.

Remember! You can, in fact, already follow and respond to this very newsletter directly on the Fediverse from an ActivityPub-enabled platform (eg. Mastodon) — by following @index@activitypub.ghost.org

So, with a spring in our step, a little luck, and more attention-seeking behavior than Kevin Hart at an NBA playoffs match — we proceed into Q4.

It's like my great aunt Margery always used to say, "When life gives you lemons, make sure to knit them into a sweater for your pet rock."