While the launch of a survey isn't necessarily a commitment to federating Ghost, it is another signal pointing to the broader reshaping of the web that's now underway.

Again they are naming Fediverse services and not mentioning Lemmy! (ā•ÆĀ°ā–”Ā°ļ¼‰ā•Æļøµ ā”»ā”ā”»

which is kind of shocking because I feel like lemmy is one of the fediverse ā€œreplacementsā€ that most easily replaces.

I feel like most others donā€™t always ā€œscratch that itchā€ that some of there closed source rivals do. But honestly the only thing at this point imo that lemmy has going against it is the smaller user base and therefore lack of as niche of communities

Chozo
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Lemmy is still very much in its infancy. Itā€™s not even reached version 1.0 yet. While weā€™ve all been on here for a while now, its future is still very much uncertain and hasnā€™t seen anywhere near the adoption that Mastodon and other microblog Fedi platforms have.

Lemmy is still very much in its infancy.

Unlike the mentioned Intagram Threads?

The level of expected support for those is a lot greater.

ivy
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Not a bad option, but what are the potential advantages over using the Pages feature of Misskey forks, or simply Wordpress?

Substack itself didnā€™t even present a correct UI to me on mobile so I never bothered with it when it was initially popularized. Still seems to have the issue, too.

Steve
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One advantage over wordpress is that it avoids bringing its parent company, Automatic, into the Fediverse.

From Wikipedia:

In February 2024, Automattic announced that it would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress to Midjourney and OpenAI.

I mean with fediverse stuff there is no need to buy the data, you can just take it with no limitation

ivy
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Youā€™re not wrong in all likelihood, but Mastodon and Misskey and their forks all have a thingy to send an opt out of AI scraping request.

Yeah, i would hope they respect that but for some reason i doubt that.

jlow (he/him)
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I thought that was only about wordpress.com blogs not selfhosted wordpress, though?

Steve
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Thank you, thatā€™s an important distinction. I hope they can be trusted to live up to that. However it still feels l pretty problematic to bring them in and would be a lot of opting in to debate and implement. It remains a pretty big violation of user privacy and trust and it says here:

As if that werenā€™t bad enough, preparations for the sale went poorly, and it seems large categories of Tumblr posts that werenā€™t supposed to be sold were added to the mix anyway. That data includes:

Private posts from public accounts

Posts on deleted or suspended accounts

Unanswered asks

Private answers

Explicit posts

Posts from partner accounts, like ad campaigns where Tumblr doesn't own the rights. (Apple is specifically named here.) 
ivy
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Hell a lot of the time the data just ends up labelled ā€œdo not shareā€ but still ends up in shared databases or stolen ones

ivy
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Thatā€™s a dealbreaker for me, I may consider badgering people in my Wordpress RSS folder to ditch it, on a case-by-case basis. Even liberals are sensitive to AI stuff because it upsets them to see Journalism Infringed

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I consider wordpress open core at best these days.

A lot of really basic features like lightboxes that should be in core are in their ā€œjetpackā€ SaaS plugin. This by default sends automattic a whole bunch of telemetry, which I assume they are now selling to OpenAI, and puts ads in your dashboard for other commercial SaaS features.

Thereā€™s also the fact that they donā€™t allow forks of open source plugins in their plugin repository.

ivy
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Thatā€™s really good to know, thanks, Iā€™d assumed they were a shitty blob company until I heard they were adding federation, but I guess that intuition was correct. Sounds almost Threads-tier.

lemmyreader
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Not a bad option, but what are the potential advantages over using the Pages feature of Misskey forks

Didnā€™t know that Misskey forks have this Pages feature. Found this https://darnell.day/hey-tumblr-and-medium-fediverse-lovers-its-time-to-misskey which explains a bit about it. Is Misskey still actively developed ? Is there an overview of the forks ?

ivy
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FediDB is really the best way to look around for servers. Totally being actively developed, thereā€™s way too many forks IMHO, but Iā€™m sure the project maintainers would disagree for the time being.

Misskey.io seems to have range banned a lot of stuff so itā€™s not a good demo instance. You canā€™t translate the Japanese posts while logged out, either!

Dame
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It is actively developed. Some forks are Firefish, Foundkey, Sharkey, IceShrimp

lemmyreader
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Thanks!

maegul (he/they)
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Still seems pretty uncertain. I saw a chat between ghost CEO and some activity pub dev trying to convince him to federate ā€¦ this was around the time of Newtons move off of substack ā€¦ and the vibe was about the same then ā€¦ ā€œcool idea, unsure about viability, how would it work?ā€

Seems itā€™s such a common almost meme-ish user demand now that the request hasnā€™t let up. Given that Wordpress has done it Iā€™d guess the idea is probably a no-brainer ā€¦ just do it!

Problem though is the kinda-literal elephant in the room ā€¦ mastodon. The only fediverse platform mentioned in the article. Federating with it requires implementing a ā€œuserā€ actor where everything is organised around users like on microblogging platforms. Itā€™s what Wordpress did and what Ghost will too.

Which is a shame because us group based platforms get left behind, mastodon controls the fediverse, and the utility of grouping things, which makes a lot of sense for things like multi-author blogs, gets forgotten.

I wonder if there is cludgy workaround to make groups just another user for the rest of the fediverse

maegul (he/they)
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AFAIU, thatā€™s how lemmy federates content to mastodon.

If you didnā€™t know, you can follow lemmy communities (and other groups) on mastodon, but the appear as users constantly ā€œboostingā€ everything that happens in the community and so can quickly clog up your feed.

Mastodon now has exclusive lists though, which take everything that appears in the list out of your home feed, which is a nice way of managing it.

In fact, for a community I moderate, Iā€™ve got a mastodon list just for that community, which gives me a reverse chronological feed of everything that happens in the community ā€¦ which is actually useful and not quite available from the interface (as you posts and comments have to be viewed separately, which isnā€™t bad really).

lemmyreader
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This is Ghost, the open source blog software. Color me surprised.

It is a great step forward, but the barrier to entry is relatively high. You can sign up to substack for free and they take a cut of your profits (that most writers donā€™t draw enough attention to earn.

Meanwhile ghost charges $9 a month, billed annually.

Thatā€™s a significant barrier to anyone that canā€™t afford to see if their writing will be popular and as long as that remains it will struggle to gain traction in the same way.

And yeah, I know you could host your own too, but again a price point and a technical barrier.

I like ghost, the interface and the ecology, but the truth is that it isnā€™t going to attract the sort of vibrant, young community it needs if you have to stump up $108 just to see.

I think one of the great things about 2000s/early 2010s internet was the proliferation of free to use platforms like livejournal, blogger and WordPress. Sure there was a lot or jank, but I found some of my favourite writers back when they were scratching their name into the internet.

Dame
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Very valid points. Medium and Substack will remain popular due to how easy it makes it

AutoTL;DR
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This is the best summary I could come up with:


Ghost, the open source alternative to Substackā€™s newsletter platform, is considering joining the fediverse, the social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, FlipboardĀ and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others.

While the launch of a survey isnā€™t necessarily a commitment to federating Ghost, it is another signal pointing to the broader reshaping of the web thatā€™s now underway.

Ghost has gained attention as a Substack rival in recent months for the same reason that some have fled X: People disagree about how platforms should be moderated.

Substack has taken to promoting free speech, as Musk does on X, but thatā€™s also led to the platform being used by pro-Nazi publications, as detailed by The Atlantic late last year.

ā€œIā€™m not aware of any major U.S. consumer internet platform that does not explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions,ā€ Newton wrote at the time.

In addition to Newton, other notable Ghost users include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirotaā€™s The Lever and Tangle, to name a few.


The original article contains 678 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 73%. Iā€™m a bot and Iā€™m open source!

@jsomae@lemmy.ml
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Ghost is a creepy name. They should change it.

BreakDecks
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Itā€™s doing quite well and youā€™re the only person Iā€™ve ever seen take offense to the name, so I guess youā€™ll just have to cope with spooky newsletters šŸ‘»

Wraith, Spectre and Banshee were all taken.

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