Ramping up for expansion

Welcome back, intrepid subscribers! We’ve survived another week of midnight deploys, questionable snack choices, and philosophical debates about unit tests. Pull up a chair while we unpack our latest neuroses.

Last week, we got @mentions working in Ghost. Finally, you can click a name, stalk someone's profile, and then ping them relentlessly if you so choose. One small tap for man, one giant heap of database load for mankind.

What's new with ActivityPub?

About a year ago, we kicked off this whole adventure with a duct-taped prototype and a tweet that basically said “hold my beer, we’re federating Ghost.”

For those of you who've been here since the very first newsletter – thank you!

We came from pretty humble beginnings...

To what is now a pretty extensive social web integration, today:

Along the way, there have been trials and tribulations (most of them related to databases), an obsession with pugs that frightens normal people, some wonderful collaboration, and relentless optimization for the only KPI we really care about — your comments.

The team working behind the scenes on ActivityPub at Ghost grew from 3 to 8 in 2025, and now we're ramping up our work to launch things officially in Ghost 6.0 in the next month.

We're excited, but nervous. You never get everything done that you hope to, before launching a first version, but launch you must.

This launch, though, feels bigger than most, because ActivityPub is more than a protocol or a fancy feature; it’s a statement that the open web still matters.

Federating Ghost means publishers no longer have to choose between owning their work and reaching an audience. You post once, on your own domain, and it travels everywhere—the network effect without the lock-in.

That's the dream.

While centralized networks are coming apart at the seams as battles rage between the most powerful people on earth who own them, the fediverse represents an alternative path.

It's an answer to the question: What if nobody owned this? The same question that Tim Berners Lee posed to the world, 35 years ago.

Back then, the model was about connecting information – documents – using funny-looking syntax. www followed by dot notation and slashes. Today, it's about connecting individuals – people – using funny-looking syntax. This time, @ symbols.

Will it work? It's not clear yet.

That part is up to all of us.

Networks succeed when people use them. The more participants there are, the greater the incentive for new people to join. And vice versa. It's a flywheel that's incredibly difficult to get started, and nearly impossible to stop once it has momentum.

So, as we prepare to launch 6.0 over the next few weeks, we leave you with just one request for the open social web: Participate!

Use what we've built to follow one another, comment on each other's newsletters, reply to notes, repost things you love, share what you're thinking about or working on, tag people with @mentions.

We have a real opportunity, now, to create the web we want – but the most tempting mistake is to wait for everyone else to join, before getting involved.

Those early adopters you're waiting on, to get things going and make it interesting?

If you're reading this: It's you.