Ghosts' ActivityPub integrations are half-assed and abandoned
If you're wondering what Ghost is, it's a FOSS platform used to publish blogs (including this one). They have an official site, but you can also just run the software on a self-hosted server (as I am).
I've been running this software since before this was announced, so I can't be super disappointed, and indeed Ghost remains "the best open source blog and newsletter platform", as they claim, but I must say, I did get my hopes up, and I remain a little disappointed.
What's wrong?
I expected things to federate over ActivityPub in a way that is easy to interact with through platforms like Mastodon. Instead it seems the intention was always their internal social platform.
When I heard ActivityPub integration was being added I expected:
- Full text in the Fediverse post.
- Comments to federate back to the blog. Instead you can only see the comments from a logged in Ghost account, through the Network tab, or by following the blog account in the fediverse. They're not visible in the blog posts themselves.
- "Tags" in the sidebar to be added to posts in the fediverse. Super disappointing, considering this is the only way to discover things in most of the fediverse.
- Being able to mention fediverse users, if not in the blog itself, at least in the metadata, along with tags.
- Maybe being able to embed posts from the Fediverse
Instead, here's what my posts currently look like in the fediverse:
Really nothing more than a title and a link. You can also make "posts" from the Network interface, which is cool, but that's not anything I couldn't have done from my Mastodon account.
Instead I've been using Mastofeed to grab my posts from RSS to share to my personal account. At least it includes the proper hashtags and a short intro.
These features would be fairly trivial to implement after everything they've already achieved, which makes me believe they actively don't want them. They want them only to be viewed from within the Network interface of Ghost.
The future of ActivityPub Integration in Ghost
Well, there doesn't seem to be one. Nothing has been shared to say that they are "complete", however the dedicated blog for the effort had its' last post ~6 months ago, after several months of weekly updates:
