The story so far

Happy new year! After resting our paws for the past few weeks, we're back with some fresh ActivityPub updates looking back on 2024, and looking ahead to 2025. Last year was big, and this year is shaping up to be even bigger.

Strap yourselves in and switch on the flux capacitor as we explore two-way time travel to start this year's journey around the sun.

What happened in 2024?

At the start of last summer, we announced that we would start working on ActivityPub support for Ghost to bring long-form publishing to the largest decentralised networking protocol on the web.

We kind of knew what we were getting into, having explored ActivityPub support for the first time back in 2018, but building any software always brings up new discoveries and surprises as you try to ship something actually that works.

Things were pretty basic to start.

As we touched on in our last newsletter of 2024, the biggest challenge in working with ActivityPub is that all the data out there is abstract and inconsistent. It's hard to plan out exactly how an app is going to work, because there are a huge number of federated platforms out there with disparate data. An ActivityPub product could be a photo-sharing platform like PixelFed, a microblogging service like Mastodon, a reddit-esque community like Lemmy, or a video network like PeerTube.

Somehow, we have to try and account for working with all of them — and the best way to do that is to just start building and see what happens. So we did!

Things progressed slowly at first as we figured things out, but, after a few months of work, we got things into shape enough to start getting a handful of people beta (honestly: alpha) testing the first version of what we'd built.

The real breakthrough of the year was when we split the UI into one screen for long-form published content and a separate social feed for everything else — which also allowed us to create an interface for publishing short-form content.

Suddenly, we could see a path to your personal website becoming the single source of your identity on the social web.

As we started to figure out the shape of the app, we also got a sense of which parts of it were going to scale easily, and which would be more of a challenge. So, with everything we'd learned, we started to map out an architecture that would allow us to support millions of users with tens of millions of posts. The main bottleneck, as long-time subscribers will know by now, is the database.

Finishing up 2024, we managed to get ActivityPub to a place where we now know what to do. What remains, now, is to do it.

What's coming in 2025, and beyond

This year we're going to ship ActivityPub to everyone, in a flagship Ghost 6.0 release. We're excited, but also daunted. There's a long way to go between where we are now, and where we need to be.

Over the next couple of months we'll continue to add people to private beta, before opening up a public beta that anybody can enable in Ghost Admin using a simple toggle switch.

After that, we'll focus on your feedback, bugs, and requests to get things into the best shape we can to become a part of Ghost core.

Importantly, we're not going to get every single feature we'd like into the first version of ActivityPub. If you've been following this newsletter for a while, then you already have a pretty good sense of what it's going to look and feel like at launch.

Long-term, we're looking at ideas around integrating RSS, federated comments, ActivityPub-based member authentication, and paid content in the Fediverse — but to begin with, things are going to be relatively minimal. It's more important to get real people using ActivityPub than anything else.

We're at the beginning of a significant shift in the history of the internet in more ways than one, and we're feeling both optimistic and excited for the future. After two decades of restrictive networks and centralized platforms, there are a lot of very motivated people focused on one thing:

Bringing back the open web.

Hope you had a great start to 2025. We're excited to share it with you.