Welcoming the WordPugs

Another week, another step toward Fediverse expansion! Things are moving quick around here and we've got more new things to show you.

Last week we showed off how you can now publish short-form updates on Ghost as well as long-form content, so you can reach your audience from a single, unified Fediverse address. Based on the responses, it seems like this was a lot more interesting to most people than queues. Point taken.

This week, we're talking about interoperability.

What's new with ActivityPub?

This week, we fleshed out ActivityPub compatibility with WordPress, so you can now receive, read and respond to posts published anywhere in the WP ecosystem. In WordPress-land, ActivityPub support is enabled with an official plugin developed by Matthias Pfefferle.

Once installed, new posts on your site are automatically published to the Fediverse and, as of today, they'll also show up in Ghost! For the nostalgic amongst you, we're really starting to get back to those 2008-blogosphere vibes now.

Here's a quick demo:

One question you might have is why we had to "add support" for WordPress. Isn't it all just ActivityPub? Why didn't this Just Work™️ like it already does with other platforms and content?

Well, it does all use ActivityPub, but there's nuance to the ways different platforms implement things. Platforms, like WordPress and Lemmy (an ActivityPub-based Reddit alternative), use 'Groups' for organising content.

Say you have two users, @jamie@example.com and @cameron@example.com, who both write posts on the example.com blog. You can follow each of them individually, but what if you want to follow all posts on the example.com blog by any author?

Groups are a kind of virtual user, like @index@example.com, which re-post any content by users within them. So when @jamie@example.com publishes a new post, @index@example.com re-posts it - allowing you to choose whether to follow an individual user, or a group of users. Cool!

So what we worked on this week was laying foundations in Ghost for being able to understand and work with groups, starting with WordPress and Lemmy!

In the future we plan to implement the same Grouping functionality in Ghost so people can follow an entire publication, or just individual users, too.

More design improvements

Each week, we're also continuing to iterate and improve on our client application for browsing and reading ActivityPub content in Ghost. Bit by bit, it's starting to feel less janky and more smooooth.

Here's another quick look at the latest refinements:

Alright! That's about it for this week.

The other big piece of work that's in progress is a major update to improve performance. We're storing lots and lots of data now, and we need to make some changes to get things really humming.

More on that next week.