Newsletter platform Ghost – a popular rival to incumbent Substack – has confirmed that it will be joining the Fediverse later this year.
This means Ghost joins companies like Mastodon, Instagram Threads, WordPress, Flipboard and others in the “federated universe” that includes decentralized social networks. Ghost founder John O’Nolan explained in a post on Threads that users had requested federation and asked followers to share their opinions on how this would work.
The company later confirmed that it would join forces with ActivityPub, a popular protocol for realizing open networks, to “become part of the world’s largest publishing network.” In its announcement, Ghost said that users had to participate in closed social networks – “at the mercy of algorithms” – and now it was time to “take back control of the internet”.
What is the Fediverse – and what impact might it have on creators?
“The open web is coming back and with it diversity. You can publish both independently.” And With followers from around the world and the internet, we are growing faster than ever before,” the statement said.
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For these reasons, Fediverse has gained momentum over the past year, but it’s not exactly commonplace yet. Mashable’s Christianna Silva explains: “The Fediverse allows you to have an account on one service and post to other services.” From Silva’s report:
In less simple terms, it is a collection of interconnected servers, also called instances, that run software compatible with a set of open protocols. Fediverse’s main goal is to allow users to communicate and interact with each other across different platforms and servers while maintaining control over their data and identity by not leaving everything to a single company.
Ghost said that readers and users will have more power when the platform is federated: for example, they can like, follow and interact with people on other federated services, as well as follow publications and topics of interest across the Internet.
Put more simply, the platform compared the power of open networks to that of email: “Email, the web’s original open protocol, is used by more people than any platform or social network invented before or since; because it Shares users instead of competing for them.”
These efforts by Ghost could pay off in several ways: Several Substack users have already contacted Ghost about Substack’s lack of moderation. Some major publishers and developers use Ghost, including Platformer, 404 Media and Quillette. With Federation, the reach and growth of releases on Ghost could become even greater, according to the platform.