We do this not because it's easy

We begin this week's edition of pug activity with some good news: Almost everyone who uses Mastodon received last week's newsletter via the Fediverse, as well as by email!

Although our follower count has quickly risen past 5,000 — more than double what it was a couple of weeks ago — we've been doing a much better job of batching and delivering new posts.

To celebrate, we've been working on some limited edition merch.

Before you wonder whether we're wasting time on t-shirts instead of building important ActivityPub features: Rest assured that we are in fact both wasting time on t-shirts and building important ActivityPub features.

We lowly product managers quickly become bored while back-end bugs are being fixed, and in order to justify the importance and relevance of our roles we have to quickly pivot to demonstrate that we, too, are capable of delivering critical Business Value™️

Also, the internet is a very serious place in 2024 and sometimes it's nice just to have a little fun.

Here are a few designs we've been playing with using for a one-and-done limited edition run.

What's new with ActivityPub?

If you're unwilling to be distracted by merch, then I suppose we'll have to get to some actual substance. FINE.

This week we continued to work on scaling issues around post-delivery within the ActivityPub service. The last 2 weeks were an unplanned deviation from our intended feature roadmap, but we've made pretty dramatic improvements that will continue to pay dividends as we start testing with more people.

The really good news is that, for now at least, we're finished with the performance and scale work. In the next newsletter we should be back on track with implementing features.

Coming up next, on that front: Liking posts, and notifications.

Answering your questions

Yannick wants to know:

So I am wondering what made you decide to go for a more social media like user interface. I understand that this might be the only option to rightfully display all the kinds of activitypub posts. You could argue it is more like a 'default' view that most people can understand and get used too. But at the same time it seems a bit like this subtracts a bit of this vision that I really feel you guys have by doing this experiment.

Totally understand why you have this impression, because we've been leaning on the social-feed style designs in the past few newsletters! However, we actually intend to ship two views: Inbox, and Feed.

We're going to include both views, because we're not sure which will work best yet. On the one hand: The inbox view is more suited to long-form content, reminiscent of email, RSS and read-it-later platforms. On the other hand: The feed view is much more easy to work with for compatibility with all the different content types across the Fediverse. Not everything is long-form content, so the feed view handles things in a way more reminiscent of Tumblr, LinkedIn or Facebook.

The cool thing is that both views can work on top of the same back-end, so we can offer some user preference and then see how things go. If one view totally dominates in usage then we'll retire the other. If it's a pretty even split, we may just keep both available.

A side question: you seem to not use the word 'Fediverse' on purpose, any reason for that? (I think it is confusing and nerdy/gatekeeper'ish for newbies)
We do use it sometimes, but also think it can be confusing and nerdy for newbies.

How do you decide on how to present Ghost's ActivityPub features to the end user? What discussion did you have on that topic?
With something as open-ended as ActivityPub it's both a blessing and a curse that there really are no best practices to follow. So, we kind of make it up as we go along and then throw in a load of questionable pug-based images and wait to see what people comment to gauge how we're doing.

PS I am almost Gen-Z (born in 2000) and this feels like writing a letter to my grandmother.
*hopelessly sobbing into our avocado toast*