My ActivityPub thoughts and wishlist

Ghost released a public beta of ActivityPub! Alas, it's for Ghost Pro, and I haven't yet resumed my attempt to self-host it.

Fortunately, I have a demo site on Ghost Pro! (Yes, there's some irony in my most expensive & highest quality hosting setup being my throwaway demo site, but oh well.) So I had some fun kicking the tires a bit yesterday and today, and here are some first impressions.

🔒Only owners have access.

Editors can't access the site's ActivityPub section. So your social media team is going to need admin-level access. (Originally posted it was admins, but apparently it's owners!) Since sites have exactly one owner, this is going to be hard for a social media team to share. (The new 2FA isn't going to help with that, either...)

1️⃣There's just one handle, and it's @index.

Sites get a @[email protected] identity. The ability to be something other than @index is coming, and that'll be a good thing, because Mastodon (and maybe some other feed readers too) will display the handle as just @index, which is sort of weird and confusing.

⌛Things are a little slow

If I click on a user I'm following, things spin for a couple seconds before anything shows up. Maybe Ghost's AP servers are a little underpowered, or overwhelmed by everyone playing with the beta at once? If I click on a handle on Mastodon.social, that user's posts show up a LOT faster than in the Ghost reader.

🆕My posts show up automatically == cool!

I made a post, and it was visible to followers on Mastodon. That's pretty cool. (Note that it does need to be a public post. I was confused about that for a bit.)

📦The reader feels sort of siloed from the rest of the website?

If I am in the ActivityPub reader part of my site, there's no obvious way to get to the editor for a post I've made. If I'm in the regular post editor, there's no way to get over to ActivityPub.

↔️What happens in the Fediverse stays there?

Currently, there's no officially documented/supported way to get your ActivityPub likes and comments onto your regular Ghost posts. I worked out this afternoon how to retrieve a post's likes and comments from ActivityPub, so it's going to be possible for a theme to use javascript to pull that data into a post, but there's not anything baked in. (Separate post coming about my hack-ish solution.)

So, I can get likes and replies onto my website, but then what? How do I provide a link to like or reply to my content, for website visitors? I'm thinking about maybe trying to use something like Tootpick for likes and replies, which would at least cover users from Mastodon.

➕I need more recommendations

I followed everyone that the Ghost ActivityPub reader suggested I follow. My feed isn't very full. Now what? I need an easier way to discover more sites I'd like to follow. (In fairness, this is also a problem with Mastodon.)

❄️ No self-hosters... yet!

I'd love to put this post up for replies from the Fediverse, but I still need to get my own ActivityPub instance set up! The Ghost team has said that self-hosting directions are going to lag a bit, and that makes perfect sense, but I'm feeling a little left out in the cold here. Meanwhile, if you'd like to leave a comment, please do so below!

Or you can head on over to Mastodon and comment there! https://mastodon.social/@cathysarisky/114190918337436716