Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’
Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’
Interoperable social media is having a real moment
They’re not done yet. Just announcing (and the verge reporting on it).
Their announcement (here) is quite forceful though, interestingly. The article described it as a manifesto.
See also a recent post here about their survey on integrating activity pub: https://lemmy.ml/post/14734757
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Small detail that I think is actually quite meaningful:
The article is written by editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. Nilay does not usually write a whole lot of articles, as he's the boss, and the articles he writes are often more commentary (like the famous 'welcome to hell' article for Elon, or his running joke on Brother printers). Within The Verge its usually more David Pierce as a true fediverse believer than Nilay.
Futhermore, earlier this week Nilay posted on Threads a response to Ghost's survey about federation: "Curious how you approach federation for paid newsletters! (Because we want to figure that out too)" https://www.threads.net/@reckless1280/post/C51n5gmvvCJ
Yea the paid subscription question is the big one here. Ghost’s announcement stated that they think it will be easy to integrate that with ActivityPub, which I’d interesting because no one has done it while I think there’s been a good amount of demand for some sort of solution. If ghost sort that out for the ecosystem it could unlock the fediverse for some other platforms. Nebula comes to mind especially.
I ran across this exchange with Ghost CEO John O'Nolan on the Product Hunt announcement:
Levelsio:
Wow great work, do you think payments will start to also go this way with Ghost in the future? As ActivityPub is decentralized, maybe having some decentralized type payments fit into the future
John O'Nolan replied:
yeah! I think crypto is actually starting to get interesting for the first time now, because most people are no longer interested in it. Generally that signals the end of the hype phase and the beginning of practical utility - so I’m very interested in exploring how decentralised payments could work in Ghost in the future. There are all kinds of interesting and legitimate and interesting usecases which Stripe (mostly Visa/Mastercard) refuse to support
Oooh. Crypto and fediverse … The odd couple!
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I suspect it’s more complex than that. If they want any fediverse account to be able to subscribe, which they do, then how do they distribute content only to subscribers and not everyone on their instance?
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If they want to actually read the article, they’ll have to log in and give them money.
Yea, that's the most straightforward for sure ... but requires leaving the fediverse. I suspect that there are plans/dreams of being fediverse "native" and enabling the full content/publication to be read from ones fediverse account.
paid newsletters
Baffled those exist.
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