The social web lift-off

We're still catching our breath after the past few days, but our team of misfits is in high spirits.

Last week, we shipped a public beta for ActivityPub on Ghost(Pro) that anyone can now test out for themselves just by enabling the beta flag under Settings → Labs. After 8 months of work, much of it remarkably challenging, it felt really good to achieve the milestone we've been building towards.

This week we're going to do a little recap of the launch, and talk about what's next.

What's new with ActivityPub?

For the past couple of months, we've been slowly rolling out ActivityPub in private beta to a small handful of early adopters who suffered through a mostly-broken experience and provided us with lots of valuable data.

Last week, we opened things up for anyone using Ghost(Pro) to try, and the number of sites using ActivityPub in the wild shot up like a rocket.

Excitingly, all those new users got to experience an updated onboarding flow that the team iterated heavily on following all your kind feedback on the first version we shared in this newsletter a few weeks back.

We shifted the focus, bringing an explanation of increased distribution and reach to the beginning, with a more precise overview of the reader (and why you might want to follow others) toward the end. We also covered this in more detail in our social web beta onboarding guide.

You may have also noticed that outside of this newsletter, we're now using the phrase "social web" rather than talking about ActivityPub. This is an intentional effort, as we shift from developer preview → alpha → beta → general availability, to also shift the language we use to be less technical, and more friendly.

Ultimately, our measure of whether we've done a good job will be when people can use and understand the social web in Ghost without needing to understand the technology and protocols behind it.

Like how people who use email don't need to know what SMTP is.

One of the other fun things that shipped with the beta last week was that we included a feedback widget which invites people to reply to a Note directly inside Ghost to tell us how their experience is going. So we're using ActivityPub replies to an ActivityPub note to collect feedback about ActivityPub functionality using ActivityPub. Here, hold my turtles.

What's more, as you can see from the video, it's working!

We've had lots of great bug reports and requests, and the whole team is now actively working on issues coming up from your responses. So, keep sending em.

There are already far more requests than we can possibly deal with all at once, though, so we're prioritizing issues that come up more frequently and/or cause the most significant problems. For the next week or two, you can expect these newsletter updates to be heavy on bugfixes 🫠

In the meantime, if you're already using the social web beta — we'll leave you with a request: Reply to this article in your Ghost inbox, using your social web handle!

We'll use social web replies to this week's newsletter to find people to feature in the Explore section - so you can find and follow other Ghost sites, and perhaps discover some great new people and publications to follow and interact with.