Interoperable social media is having a real moment
Open platforms keep gaining support out there — newsletter platform Ghost just published what amounts to a manifesto in support of the ActivityPub protocol with plans to ship ActivityPub integration “in 2024.”
That’s a big shot of support for the fediverse — the network of open and interoperable social services that have all been gaining momentum over the past year. Ghost founder John O’Nolan recently said that federation over ActivityPub was the platform’s “most requested feature over the past few years” — a comment he made on Meta’s Threads, which itself is slowing beginning to federate.
The idea here is that all these networks will allow users to follow and share content between them, keeping you from needing to have multiple accounts and lists of followers and so on — you’ll just be able to get content and engage with it from any service across multiple different platforms. Ghost an makes explicit comparison to email in its manifesto:
Closed networks are in a heated zero-sum competition for users, so your reach is limited to people on the same platform.
Email, the web’s original open protocol, is used by more people than any platform or social network that has been invented before or since; because it shares users rather than competing for them.
The ActivityPub network works the same way: You get access to an audience of every person across any platform. Open networks grow larger because they don’t depend on the success of any one company.
This has long been the dream, and it seems like the platforms betting on it in various ways — Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Flipboard, and others — are where all the energy is, while attempts to rebuild closed systems keep hitting the rocks. Ghost itself is one of the bigger winners in the oops-Substack-has-Nazis newsletter migration, and letting authors on its platform more easily distribute their work is itself in stark contrast to Substack, which is reacting to its failing business model by making it harder to leave its own increasingly-social-network-like platform.
Ghost says it’s working with Mastodon and Buttondown, another newsletter platform, on ActivityPub support. The company also says it will be working to improve its reading experience as it prepares to let people follow other fediverse authors on its platform. Importantly, the project FAQ also says that paid content “should work fine” with ActivityPub as well — something no other platform has really tried yet, as far as I’m aware.
That’s the fun part about the fediverse — it’s a lot of old ideas about the web being open and interoperable, but there’s still a lot of new things yet to be invented on top of that foundation. At this point I’m not sure any social platform that launches without an eye towards federation stands a chance, really.
