This feature is in active development, and is not yet complete. We're welcoming early testers to give it a try and share their feedback, as we work on finalizing this experience for inclusion in Ghost 6.0.
Since 2013, Ghost has made it possible to publish content online with a website and RSS feeds. In 2019 we added support for delivering content by email newsletter.
Now, in 2025, we're taking our biggest step yet by making it possible to publish to the social web.
So, what's the social web?
The social web is a new piece of technology that allows creators and publishers across different platforms to follow, like, reply and interact with one another in real-time. If you've been writing things on the internet for a while, you might describe it as the return of the blogosphere.
In the same way that platforms like Medium, Tumblr and Twitter allow you to publish your own content as well as follow others – you can now do the same thing with Ghost. The big difference? The social web is an open protocol, not a closed platform.
The social web allows creators and publishers to follow and interact with one another across Ghost, WordPress, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Bluesky, Pixelfed, WriteFreely and many, many more. Your audience isn't limited only to people who use the same platform as you.
It's a lot like email.
People on @gmail.com can interact with others on @hey.com or @fastmail.fm and, as a result, email is the largest private messaging network in the world. In fact, email is the only technology that has more users than Facebook, because it isn't owned by just one company, but adopted by many.
The social web is the same concept, applied to public content rather than private messaging. Your Ghost website now has a public profile on @index@yourdomain.com which people on any social web platform can find, follow, like, reply, repost and interact with.
There are no billionaires in control, no algorithms that demote links to try and keep you scrolling, and no rugpulls from building your audience on a single platform only to watch it shut down and disappear later.
Just a simple, open connection to your audience and your peers.
Until now, most people who publish on their own website relied on external social platforms like Twitter to benefit from network effects for marketing.
Now, your website itself has network effects built-in, allowing your work to spread and be shared all over the internet.
But, there's a catch.
There's a reason this is a beta. We're kind of in the GPT2 era of the social web. It's an exciting new technology with a lot of promise, but... there are also still a lot of rough edges. Metaphorically speaking, the social web still doesn't know how many R's are in strawberry.
It turns out that getting a large number of very different platforms and products to interoperate smoothly with one another is actually a fairly complex problem, and there's still a long way to go before it's a totally seamless experience.
More on that in a moment.
How to use the social web in Ghost
When you publish a new post on your website, it's automatically available on the social web. There's nothing you need to do, it all happens in the background.
People across the social web can find and follow your site using your handle, which is just like an email address, but with two @ symbols instead of one.
- The first half is always
@indexrepresenting the home, or index of your publication. You can't customize this, yet. We're working on that! - The second half is your domain name, where your site lives, like
@yoursite.com
So, to connect with your Ghost publication, people on the social web can search for @index@yoursite.com and bring up your public profile to follow it.
When you get started with the social web beta in Ghost you'll arrive on the Explore screen, where you'll see a list of suggested accounts that you can follow, or search for other accounts to follow using their handle.
While the appeal of the social web for most publishers is to increase their distribution so that more people can find and follow them, the secret to all social platforms is that they're built on two way interactions. Aka: Being social.
The best way to get people on the social web to discover your posts, is to follow and interact with the posts of others. So, Ghost now has a social web reader built directly into admin, where you can receive and read posts from people you follow.
No matter what type of content you create, following other people is a wonderful way to find inspiration for your next post; and connect with others.
Content from people you follow is split into two areas of the reader. The inbox is where you'll receive long-form content and articles. The feed is where you'll find short-form content and everything else.
The inbox
Think of the Inbox screen like your email inbox. When you follow other publications on the social web, new articles they publish will show up here. Clicking on a post will open an inline reader view, right inside Ghost, and when you get to the end you'll be able to like, repost or reply.
Long-form posts from platforms like Ghost and WordPress will show up here.
The feed
When you're not in the mood to read long articles, and you just want to do some casual browsing through short-form content, head over to the Feed screen. Here you'll find a timeline view of content from the social web to digest at your leisure, like, and respond to if you feel like it.
Short-form posts from platforms like Mastodon and Threads will show up here.
What's unique about the Feed screen is that now, for the first time, you can also publish short-form content, called Notes, using Ghost.
If you have something short that you want to share to the social web, you can do so. You don't need a separate platform just to tell the world what's on your mind.
At the moment, short-form posts that you publish here don't show up on your website. They just go out to your followers on the social web.
Notifications
When people interact with you on the social web by following, liking, replying or reposting — you'll get notifications of what happened, giving you real-time feedback when things you share are resonating with others.
Profile
Finally, the Profile screen is where you can see a preview of your site's social web account, including following/followers, as well as all your posts – both long and short.
Your profile is populated automatically from your Ghost settings, so any changes you make to your site title and description there, will be reflected here.
Integration with website & memberships
In future, we hope to develop a deeper integration between your social web profile and followers <> and your public website and registered members. To start with, though, they operate independently from one another.
Your social web profile and followers are separate to the rest of your site and memberships, so you can think of it as a new, additional distribution channel.
If you want to promote your social web profile, you can optionally encourage people to follow you on – @index@yoursite.com – on a page of your site, or in your Ghost theme.
Beta testing & rough edges
We've got our social web integration for Ghost to a point where we're excited to have you try it out, but there's a lot of work still in progress and (as alluded to earlier) there are some significant rough edges.
You can send us feedback using the feedback widget in the sidebar of your social web reader inside Ghost Admin. Before you do, though, here are some things we already know about in advance:
Missing features
There are a handful of features you'd probably expect to find which don't yet work, because we haven't finished building them. In particular:
- There's no way yet to block, report or mute people
- You can't yet add images or media to notes and replies
- It's not yet possible to customize your social web handle
These are already on our roadmap.
Compatibility
As mentioned earlier, the social web is a new and emerging piece of technology, and the reality is that compatibility across different platforms is far from perfect at the moment. If you're here, you're an early adopter!
Some compatibility issues are things that we can fix in Ghost, while others are issues that need to be fixed by other platforms.
Here's a quick overview:
- Ghost<>Ghost: As you might expect, Ghost sites can interact with each other pretty smoothly, as long as both are in the ActivityPub beta. We're going to do our best to continue to feature Ghost sites in the beta on the Explore screen, to make them easier for you to find.
- Ghost<>Mastodon: These two also play nicely together and generally work well. We're actively working with the Mastodon team to make this even better.
- Ghost<>WordPress: Works well, with WP sites that have the ActivityPub plugin enabled. New posts from WP show up in Ghost, but there's no way (yet) to read social web posts inside WP. We're actively working with the WP team on making this even better.
- Ghost<>WriteFreely: Works well, you can find, follow and read posts from any WriteFreely community, such as write.as, in Ghost. We're also actively working with the WriteFreely team on this one.
- Ghost<>Threads: Works a little bit. You can follow in both directions, and Notes will show up on each platform. Support for long-form content is still in progress on Threads, and we're working on this together.
- Ghost<>BlueSky: Because BlueSky is built on a different protocol, it doesn't work the same as everyone else – but, if you follow
@bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gyfrom your Ghost site, you can get your posts showing up there. More info on BridgyFed. - Ghost<>Flipboard: Mostly works! New posts from Ghost show up on Flipboard, but they have issues showing likes, replies and reposts. You can also follow social web Flipboard magazines inside Ghost. We're actively working with the Flipboard team to make this even better.
- Ghost<>Surf: Mostly works! New posts from Ghost show up on Surf, but they have issues showing likes and replies. Surf is made by the team at Flipboard, so we're working with them on this, too!
- Ghost<>Tumblr: Doesn't work yet because Tumblr haven't completed their work to join the social web, but apparently this is coming soon. You can mention @photomatt on Twitter to encourage them.
- Ghost<>Buttondown: Doesn't work yet because Buttondown haven't completed their social web integration. If you want to see this happen, you can encourage them on this GitHub issue.
- Ghost<>[Other platforms]: May work completely or partially. There are thousands of platforms out there, and we haven't tested all of them yet! Ghost's social web integration is built on ActivityPub, and is broadly compatible with any other platform that uses it – but there may be rough edges.
Now, if you read all that and think it sounds like total chaos, you'd be right.
It's relatively easy to build a closed social network with a single team and a single technology stack, but after trying that approach for the last 20 years we've ended up with a small number of platforms that control everything and everyone. Collectively, it doesn't seem like anyone is thrilled about where we've ended up.
Building an open social web is difficult, chaotic, messy work that involves organizing thousands of different humans and companies spread all over the world, all with disparate motivations and incentives. It always takes more time for open technology to develop, but it's usually worth the wait.
The world wide web and the dawn of the internet began much the same way. Not at the direction a few giant corporations who wanted to profit from it, but as an emergent property of the explosion of creativity and collaboration that came from the people who wanted to use it.
If you're interested in this topic, please check out The Social Web Foundation, the non-profit doing their best to organize and push this movement forward, of which Ghost is a founding sponsor:
We're looking forward to chatting with you and seeing what you create.
Ghost(Pro) social web pricing
While in beta, our social web integration for Ghost is available to all customers, free of charge. We'll announce final pricing and availability of our social web integration on Ghost(Pro) with the release of Ghost 6.0.