I love Ghost's vision for the web, but its ActivityPub integration has one glaring drawback
It's been almost two weeks since I updated to Ghost 6.0, and so far it's been great. But it could be even better with one simple change.
I switched BTTR from WordPress to Ghost just over a year ago, now. There are a few things I miss about the versatility of WordPress through its multitude of plugins, but for the most part, Ghost is a far cleaner CMS for an independent publisher like myself.
I also love that Ghost is a non-profit organisation and its CMS is open source. At a time when Substack is sending push notifications encouraging you to read Nazi propaganda that it won't remove from its platform, I appreciate the fact that Ghost isn't doing this to make its shareholders richer.
So last week, when Ghost launched version 6.0, I hit the update button straight away. There was a fair amount in the update, led by two flagship features: native website analytics and ActivityPub integration. I don't want to focus on the analytics feature here, other than to say it's pretty great, and the numbers largely track with what I see through my other analytics setup.
Instead, I want to focus on the integration of the ActivityPub protocol into the Ghost platform. It's a big shift for the company, and it indicates a vision for how Ghost wants the future of the Internet to be.
It's a vision I can get behind.
This is the promise of an internet built around protocols rather than platforms, where you can easily move from one place to another while maintaining the connections between you and the rest of the Internet.
Ghost 6 is a decent step along that journey, but it's a far cry from perfect.
