Substack Rival Ghost Federates Its First Newsletter

After teasing support for the fediverse earlier this year, the newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost has finally delivered. "Over the past few days, Ghost says it has achieved two major milestones in its move to become a federated service," reports TechCrunch. "Of note, it has federated its own newsletter, making it the first federated Ghost instance on the internet." From the report: Users can follow the newsletter through their preferred federated app at @[e-mail], though the company warns there will be bugs and issues as it continues to work on the platform's integration with ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated apps. "Having multiple Ghost instances in production successfully running ActivityPub is a huge milestone for us because it means that for the first time, we're interacting with the wider fediverse. Not just theoretical local implementations and tests, but the real world wide social web," the company shared in its announcement of the news.

In addition, Ghost's ActivityPub GitHub repository is now fully open source. That means those interested in tracking Ghost's progress toward federation can follow its code changes in real time, and anyone else can learn from, modify, distribute or contribute to its work. Developers who want to collaborate with Ghost are also being invited to get involved following this move. By offering a federated version of the newsletter, readers will have more choices on how they want to subscribe. That is, instead of only being able to follow the newsletter via email or the web, they also can track it using RSS or ActivityPub-powered apps, like Mastodon and others. Ghost said it will also develop a way for sites with paid subscribers to manage access via ActivityPub, but that functionality hasn't yet rolled out with this initial test.

Medium has a better business model than Substack

[brunes69]

Difference between Medium and Substack:

- With Medium, you pay one monthly subscription fee. You then can access all paid-for content on the site. Medium then pays publishers based on who read their content. You can also direct a portion of your monthly subscription to directly support some authors, in addition to them being paid based on your reads. This model encourages people to seek out new authors and new types of content, because it does not cost you more to do so.... while at the same time, encouraging authors to keep publishing high-quality content that actually gets read, otherwise they don't get paid as much.

- Substack, on the other hand, is the same old tired subscription model of magazines, just moved online. You pay for a subscription *for one author/publication*. Want to subscribe to 20 different paid authors? You need to pay for 20 subscriptions. This model *DISCOURAGES* checking out new authors because it costs you money, and *DOES NOT* incentivise constant quality content because people tend to "lock in" to their subscription.

Re:

[Entrope]

Authors on Substack often make some of their pieces free to read, and you can at least sometimes get a free article from behind a paywall. I don't know the exact conditions for Substack to offer the latter -- whether it's just registering and "the first hit is free" or something more complicated -- but there are several mechanisms to read authors' work before paying.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Entire substacks are often free or with optional subscription, which is how it should be. I'm baffled why people willingly paywall their articles and limit their reach, just to enforce payment unnecessarily. Hint: if your content is good, people will donate if they can afford it. Exclude them now, and they likely won't pay in the future when they are able to. Another downside, is that much of the content would be of much greater value to the world, if it could be shared with anyone. Limiting the readership

Re:

[fabiomb]

or... you can have your own blog for A LOT LESS, publish free to everyone and stop thinking magically you are gonna get paid for writing stuff (only), i'm on my 22 year doing it and it's still fantastic (and i even use my own CMS since 2002), just saying, with these models, Medium, Substack, Ghost, you always depends on a third party to have your own content online, I still prefer to have absolut control, a VPS is cheaper, installing it with Wordpress is trivial.

Re:

[FictionPimp]

My favorite is to just use a static site generator and GitHub. Github hosts your site for free and you just point DNS at it.

Re:

[FictionPimp]

And then there is me. I go find an interesting article to find it requires a medium subscription, so I close the tab and move on.

The "fediverse"???

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

From one of the links above:

Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others.

Fediverse - Never heard of it.
Mastodon - Never heard of it.
Pixelfed - Never heard of it.
PeerTube - Never heard of it.
Flipboard - Never heard of it.
Instagram Threads - Heard of it. Know what it is. Don't care about it.

Gen Xer here. Yeah, I know I'm not a kid anymore, but I have reached the age where sometimes the Slashdot articles talk only about stuff I've never heard of and I really don't care to know what those things are. Get off my lawn too. Also never heard of Ghost, but I have heard of Substack. I suppose Ghost is what the other programs probably are, just some Zoomer or Millennial re-inventing the wheel because everything that was around before they started writing code sucks and is crap.

Re: The "fediverse"???

[brickhouse98]

Thanks for the very useless comment. Cheers.

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

Gen Xer here, I find that the appearance of a "federated", that is, decentralized, services that are interoperable is a major improvement over the situation from a decade and more ago.

Also, thank you for keeping your lawn tidy.

Gen Xer here

[storkus]

No, you're definitely NOT there! Everyone knows you're just imaginary! (FWIW, so am I)

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

Pssst! Don't give us away!

Re:

[Junta]

For anything federated, marketing dollars go into you hearing about the nonfederated stuff, the federated stuff tend to be more grass roots.

In many cases it's likely a GenX sentiment, maybe elder millenial implementing something the way they'd imagine it if the 90s computer industry mindset persisted: interoperable instances that are peer to peer rather than some central business authority gobbling up each concern entirely. For example, Mastodon is essentially Facebook, but a network of hosted instances in

What??? Was Re:The "fediverse"???

[kiore]

Young whippersnapper! I'm 66 & I've definitely heard of the Fediverse, I feed my post-a-day to it & I also have a Mastodon account on someone else's server. Oh, I have Threads as well.

I've heard of Pixelfed & PeerTube but have never been there.

The only piece of your purported ignorance we share is Flipboard, but I'm sure a 30 second Google would reveal all I need.

How interesting!

[heptapod]

What's their policy on Nazi content? Are the crusaders for free speech absolutism or no?

fediverse choice is

[SethJohnson]

So as an independent publisher, you could choose to use this obtuse platform in the hopes that you might derive a couple sheckles at some point far down the road from someone who is an edge case media consumer. Or, maybe just throw together a website and be done with it.