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Happy Monday! This week's edition comes to you a little later than usual, hot on the heels of a bunch of different work we're excited to tell you about. So grab your favorite sweater and a cup of coffee as we dive back into all that's bold and beautiful from across the open social web. Last week we shared Pixelfed's crowdfunding campaign with you. They're doing great, so far, and every little helps. If you haven't already backed the campaign, please consider doing so! It makes such a huge difference to indie teams doing their best to go up against giant corporations with minimal resources. ## What's new with ActivityPub? First and foremost, ladies and gentlepugs, we have achieved a great innovation within the hallowed halls of social networking. A technical feat so staggering you'll be forced to steady yourself like an FAA employee who just got back from vacation. Are you ready? Forget AGI. We have achieved the unfollow: 0:00 /0:09 1× Yes, it's true. For the past 6 months you could follow people in Ghost, but it was pretty much an until-death-do-us-part situation. Not ideal in those cases where you find out that your casual acquaintance Nigel turns out to hold some rather extreme views that are only now coming to light and you realize you made a huge mistake. Oh Nigel. Unfollows are kind of interesting because, on the face of it, they seem simple: Just stop following a person and getting new posts from them. Under the hood, though, there's a little more work to do. For instance, after you unfollow someone, you probably expect to stop seeing their posts in your feed — which means we need to figure out how to go and find all their posts that are _in_ your feed, and then remove them. What's hard about that? _[All together now]_ The database! Unless you've stored things neatly then it's hard to query, retrieve, process and delete the right things. So this is the first little feature-release we're getting out as a result of shipping our new database architecture. More of that on the way. This also feels like an opportune time to remind a few of you that if you don't like AI generated images of pugs, you should feel free to unfollow _us_! AI pugs make us happy, if they don't make you happy then that's totally ok. We can like different things. * * * In other news, John spoke at FOSDEM 2025 this weekend and gave a more detailed look into what we've been working on with ActivityPub. The official video hasn't been released yet by the conference, but as a subscriber to this newsletter we're sneaking (read: leaking) you an early copy. Shh. Unfortunately, the video has a few issues. John is mostly not on the screen, there's a bit of footage missing around the 20-minute mark, and the end of the Q&A is cut off. You can see the slides and hear all the audio easily enough, throughout, though! So what's coming up next? **Reposts.** Helping your most voracious visions go viral across an ultimately infinite plane of existence via technologically tenuous means of mass multiplication.

Happy new year! After resting our paws for the past few weeks, we're back with some fresh ActivityPub updates looking back on 2024, and looking ahead to 2025. Last year was big, and this year is shaping up to be even bigger. Strap yourselves in and switch on the flux capacitor as we explore two-way time travel to start this year's journey around the sun. ## What happened in 2024? At the start of last summer, we announced that we would start working on ActivityPub support for Ghost to bring long-form publishing to the largest decentralised networking protocol on the web. We kind of knew what we were getting into, having explored ActivityPub support for the first time back in 2018, but building any software always brings up new discoveries and surprises as you try to ship something actually that works. Things were pretty basic to start. As we touched on in our last newsletter of 2024, the biggest challenge in working with ActivityPub is that all the data out there is abstract and inconsistent. It's hard to plan out exactly how an app is going to work, because there are a huge number of federated platforms out there with disparate data. An ActivityPub product could be a photo-sharing platform like PixelFed, a microblogging service like Mastodon, a reddit-esque community like Lemmy, or a video network like PeerTube. Somehow, we have to try and account for working with all of them — and the best way to do that is to just start building and see what happens. So we did! Things progressed slowly at first as we figured things out, but, after a few months of work, we got things into shape enough to start getting a handful of people beta (honestly: alpha) testing the first version of what we'd built. The real breakthrough of the year was when we split the UI into one screen for long-form published content and a separate social feed for everything else — which also allowed us to create an interface for publishing short-form content. Suddenly, we could see a path to your personal website becoming the single source of your identity on the social web. 0:00 /0:08 1× As we started to figure out the shape of the app, we also got a sense of which parts of it were going to scale easily, and which would be more of a challenge. So, with everything we'd learned, we started to map out an architecture that would allow us to support millions of users with tens of millions of posts. The main bottleneck, as long-time subscribers will know by now, is the database. Finishing up 2024, we managed to get ActivityPub to a place where we now know what to do. What remains, now, is to do it. ## What's coming in 2025, and beyond This year we're going to ship ActivityPub to everyone, in a flagship Ghost 6.0 release. We're excited, but also daunted. There's a long way to go between where we are now, and where we need to be. Over the next couple of months we'll continue to add people to private beta, before opening things up a public beta that anybody can enable in Ghost Admin using a simple toggle switch. After that, we'll focus on your feedback, bugs, and requests to get things into the best shape we can to become a part of Ghost core. Importantly, we're not going to get every single feature we'd like into the first version of ActivityPub. If you've been following this newsletter for a while, then you already have a pretty good sense of what it's going to look and feel like at launch. Long-term, we're looking at ideas around integrating RSS, federated comments, ActivityPub-based member authentication, and paid content in the Fediverse — but to begin with, things are going to be relatively minimal. It's more important to get real people using ActivityPub than anything else. We're at the beginning of a significant shift in the history of the internet in more ways than one, and we're feeling both optimistic and excited for the future. After two decades of restrictive networks and centralized platforms, there are a lot of very motivated people focused on one thing: Bringing back the open web. Hope you had a great start to 2025. We're excited to share it with you.

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