Ghost's ActivityPub Integration Feels Half-Baked

Fediverse Photo byStefano Pollio/Unsplash Ghost's ActivityPub Integration Feels Half-Baked Their work is far from over, but lack of development and progress is leaving me wanting. Stefano Pollio / Unsplash Before people start calling for pitchforks, let me say this: I love Ghost, and I think they've done some great work with embracing the Social Web. To see such a massive publishing platform do this is nothing short of impressive, and I'm grateful for the work the Ghost team has done. It's been a little over a year and a half since the Ghost publishing platform adopted the ActivityPub protocol to enable federated subscriptions and interactions. While much fanfare was made about the release, subsequent development feels like it has stalled, with minimal visibility regarding future development. As someone who bought-in to the platform after these promises were made, I've been dogfooding the Social Web integration daily, switching my personal site over to Ghost completely. While there's much to be happy about, I can't help but feel that there are still many, many feature gaps. Today, I want to talk about what I feel Ghost is still missing. Social Integration Social aspects for Ghost still feel lacking in some ways, which is more than a little bit ironic, considering that ActivityPub is really meant to add social capabilities to the mix. There are several areas where I feel this really breaks down still. Federated Subscriptions This was supposed to be a big selling point for Ghost, and was even part of their earlier product mockups. You could subscribe to a publication in the traditional way, through newsletter memberships, but you could also use federation to subscribe from your Ghost dashboard, as well as other parts of the Fediverse. Technically, you can do that. However, discovery for this feature on the front end of any Ghost site is practically non-existent. I have ActivityPub turned on, and if you visit my site, there is no obvious way to figure out my handle and subscribe to me. Of course, I can tell you my handle (@sean@deadsuperhero.com), but this limitation is bad UX. Even a subscription form that redirects you to your instance dashboard to subscribe would be an improvement. Which also leads to the question: why can't followers also be considered Subscribers / Members? It makes a lot of sense to put these things together. Social Interactions Another weird thing involves how social interactions work in Ghost: you can't see them on my site. The only way I can access them is through Ghost's dashboard, under the Social tab. If I click on any of my articles from there, they show up. Here's a post on my site: Here's the same post in the dashboard: I actually reached out to the Ghost team a while back about the possibility of migrating We Distribute over to Ghost, and this was one of the main things I asked about. Is there an officially, supported way to embed interactions directly into the frontend, and possibly also integrate...

Preview: ~500 words