John from Ghost here, happy to answer any Qs if there are any. I know HN crowd tends to have pretty mixed feeling about the utility of ActivityPub, but we're pretty excited about it. Will it work out and be amazing? Don't know - but we're see what we can do and find out.
First of all, thank you for at least giving it a shot.
One of the main problems I see with AP is account fragmentation. If I'm an author on Ghost, but also have a Mastodon account, which account should I use to follow someone on PeerTube?
It really seems like the server side should be datatype agnostics, handling activities of any type, and it should be easy to delegate access for sending/receiving activities. So for example maybe Ghost is my main account, but I can delegate some access to Mastodon and PeerTube while sharing the same actor.
I think if you were to ask an ActivityPub absolutist about this (of which I am not one) the answer would be that you follow different things from different places, and it all balances out based on utility. So the idea is not that you have centralise all your following under a single account, but rather than you can follow anything, from anywhere. So maybe you follow video stuff from a Peertube instance, and you follow longform writing from a Ghost instance - but if every so often you want to mix and match... you can.
ActivityPub, like many of 'open social' web standards before it, suffers to some extent from being invented without clear enough usecases in mind. Much like WebMentions (which we also adopted) the answer to "what's it for?" - often seems to be "yes".
So you can either try to ship the spec and support everything, or you can try to build an end-user usecase that fits within the spec, and get more specific. We tend to lean toward the latter, and try to create something useful - which would still be useful even if nobody knew it was running on [whatever web standard].
Whether we can succeed with it or not, remains to be seen :)
I really don't understand what the great benefit here is over an existing solution like RSS. It also feels like the announcement undermines itself.
>When you do publish, your posts will appear in other people’s feeds in Ghost... and in Mastodon, and everywhere else.
>Long-form content deserves a dedicated design so you can read in peace, much like the way email newsletters show up in your inbox.
Basically, long-form content should be presented in a way that makes it great to read – but thankfully now people can also read it on PeerTube too? Were people on PeerTube really hankering for Ghost blog posts that much?
If people wanted blog posts on Mastodon, couldn't you just add RSS feed supports to Mastodon?
ActivityPub is basically bidirectional RSS. So you can e.g. read Ghost posts on Mastodon, but then also reply to them and have that show up for other readers as well.
Do that many people even have comments enabled on their blog? I personally don't and I don't remember seeing that many blogs have them enabled. Checking random posts on the HN front page also fails to reveal a large number of blog sites with commenting enabled.
Does ActivityPub at least have moderation tools so that you can set approval requirements and/or delete posts?
You don't necessarily have to host the comments on your server. But by providing an AP id, you provide a common reference for other people to refer to.
Can I as the owner of the site moderate those comments if they're linked to the canonical reference to my site and appear next to my content when viewed outside my site?
You can moderate what can be seen from your site (and what your site will return when asked for comments on that post by other sites(?)), but you can’t moderate it completely when viewed on other sites — i.e. if you’re Site A, someone comments something you don’t like on Site B, and someone looks at the comments from Site C, if Site B and C were already federating with each other then C will see B’s comment (and in this case it’s Site C’s responsibility to moderate)
You can block a specific user of Site B from viewing your posts in the future, but it’s up to Site B’s software to actually respect that. But if it doesn’t (this is rare, most software does respect things like this and it’s only tiny forks that disable this functionality), you can also just block Site B entirely
Editing to expand: Yes, this is pretty wonky and basically means you can only control what’s seen on your site unless you go through a lot of effort, but without ActivityPub you can’t control what other people say about your post on other sites either (i.e. you can’t moderate the HN thread of your article)
I think if someone on Mastodon comments on a Ghost blog, then Mastodon will tell Ghost that they did so (via ActivityPub).
Then if someone on Pixelfed sees that blog, Pixelfed will ask Ghost who has commented on it (via ActivityPub). Ghost can then tell them about that (via ActivityPub) - or it can choose not to do so (based on its own moderation tools).
That doesn't mean that the Mastodon comment no longer exists, nor that it is invisible to the people looking at the Mastodon comment (similar to HN comments), but Ghost won't boost its reach.
So what ActivityPub gives you is the option to reshare comments.
I think the extra integration has some nice benefits. RSS mostly does one thing, but ActivityPub provides both content creation and discussion in one platform.
In addition to what's already described, ActivityPub allows for access control. It's completely possible to have feeds for paid readers, personalized feeds, etc, in a way that RSS doesn't really support.
Yes, but it's a kludge: 404 has specific, secret RSS feeds for subscribers that contain full-text copy. With ActivityPub each recipient can have personalized content through the same link, and even for free subscribers, the publisher has a better view on who is actually subscribing.
