Zen and the art of ActivityPub maintenance

Another week, another update from your friendly ActivityPugs. Can you believe January is almost over already? The beginning of each year feels like some sort of time warp where our simulation overlords start messing with the settings.

Last week, we recapped everything that happened in 2024 and looked ahead to what's coming up in 2025 — including Ghost 6.0.

What's new with ActivityPub?

For the next couple of weeks our updates are going to be a little more brief than usual as we work hard to transition over to our new database architecture. After that, you can expect us to be back with more details about features and visible progress.

We made good progress this week moving over the first few pieces of the app to the new DB schema, and next week we hope to have the first piece of that working in production. This will start to unlock several critical (basic) features we've been blocked on for a while, like making it possible to easily unfollow people and delete existing posts.

In the meantime, we're still working away to improve the reader experience of articles and posts when you open them inside the Ghost ActivityPub client.

This week, we added an outline view with an integrated table of contents to help you navigate longer pieces like a breeze.

As usual, we've also been fixing bugs reported by beta testers, and inviting more people to join the private beta to try things out. If you're using Ghost(Pro) and you'd like to be one of the first people to try ActivityPub, you can apply here for a private beta invitation.

Just to reiterate, because people often ask, Ghost's ActivityPub work is all open source, and will be available to self-hosters, too. We're just focusing on running it on our own network, first, while we're still in active development.

While we're busy over here hitting the AP engine with a plasma gun, let's bring back a section of the newsletter that we haven't had for a while! The Q&A.

Got questions about ActivityPub, the Fediverse, Ghost, pugs or anything in between? Drop a comment on this week's newsletter and we'll answer as many as we can in the next one. Or take a long nap. Hard to say. We're unpredictable.

Hope you have a great week!