Social web (beta)
One of the greatest advantages of centralized publishing platforms has always been that they have a network where creators can follow each other, massively increasing reach and distribution with a social graph.
Independent blogs and websites, on the other hand, have been like little islands on the web that people can only discover via links and (ever-diminishing) search traffic.
Last year we set out to build an open, decentralized system that would allow Ghost publishers to find, follow, and interact with one another for the first time – bringing network effects and discovery to independent publishing.
Today, we're opening a public beta for Ghost(Pro) users to take it for a test drive.
The best part? As always, we build open technology rather than closed systems, so this new functionality isn't limited to Ghost.
You can find, follow and interact with people and publications across Ghost, WordPress, Threads, Mastodon, BlueSky, Flipboard, Tumblr (soon), and hundreds of other platforms that make up the open network known as The Fediverse.
Now, when you publish something to the open web, it will also get published to the social web, where people can like, reply and repost your work – giving your website a built-in distribution mechanism.
For the first time, you get to see realtime feedback on your posts from people all over the world, without having to worry about algorithms suppressing links or demoting your content.
While most publishers we've talked to are excited about the ability to have followers and expose their work to a new audience, the secret to growth on all any network has always been to follow and engage with others.
With that in mind, we built a social web reader that allows you to follow and subscribe to other creators and publications right inside Ghost Admin.
This turns out to be a great way to keep up with your favorite beats, as a source of inspiration and reference for whatever you plan to create next.
From using and testing this with a small number of publishers for the past few months, it's been interesting to observe how this has shifted the way people are using Ghost. They've told us that with the connection to the social web, the product has come to life in a way that feels familiar, yet refreshingly new.
Keep in mind, though, this is a beta release! We're still actively working on building this, and there are a bunch of rough edges.
How to get access
To start, take a look through our detailed onboarding guide that covers everything to do with how this new feature works:
Ghost
Once you're ready to take things for a test drive, Ghost(Pro) users can open Ghost Admin and head over to Settings → Labs to enable the beta.
There are already several hundred sites and publishers that have enabled the beta and are actively following and connecting with one other, with more joining every day.
We're looking forward to hearing what you think!
What about self-hosting?
For developers who run Ghost on their own infrastructure: The new social web integration is being built as an add-on for Ghost that runs alongside the core platform as a separate service. It's all open source, MIT licensed, and is available on GitHub.
While in beta, we're actively making multiple breaking-changes every single week, so while it can technically already be self-hosted, it's not recommended.
We're running the beta on Ghost(Pro) so that we can deploy the service in a single place and iterate quickly based on user feedback, making any changes needed as we go.
Once we've stabilized the codebase and it's ready to come out of beta later this summer, then we'll also be shipping detailed self-hosting docs.
If you're interested in a behind-the-scenes look at how we're building our social web integration for Ghost using ActivityPub, you can subscribe to a dedicated weekly newsletter from the team working on it:
