this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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So the fediverse has missed an opportunity here.
Get subscriptions into the system, but decentralised (ie, not bound to a single platform / corporation) and you've pretty much got substack on the fediverse automatically with authors having all the control substack gives them and more.
It's a real no-brainer except that the fediverse's aversion to money and any sort of "transactional" internet means such things are an afterthought here it seems, unfortunately.
It saddens me a little, because on top of that, there seems to be relatively little impetus to lean into bringing blogging back on the fediverse (compared to trying to merely clone twitter), when it seems like the perfect fit for the fediverse and its decentralisation (unlike cloning twitter, which won't really happen on the fediverse TBH). And just when a company could have been taught a lesson the fediverse seems to me to have dropped the ball.
Maybe Ghost will consider adding activitypub support
That definitely sounds interesting (I've heard some are moving to Ghost, and from their page it definitely looks interesting).
The issue though is money. The fediverse doesn't do money, transactions and subscriptions, and so Ghost would have a hard time seeing value in federating as they wouldn't, AFAIU, be able to federate a subscription system over the protocol and so wouldn't be able to integrate with the userbase already here.
And this is one of the problems the fedi has. It's kinda on the roadmap for the development of the protocol, but probably a long way off. And even if it were in the protocol, it wouldn't work until other platforms added the features for a subscription system and successfully developed working federation of it, which in the case of, say, Mastodon and Lemmy, would only serve to benefit some other platform like Ghost rather than themselves.
So unless Ghost develop the necessary parts for the fediverse ... I'd be doubtful something like that is happening any time soon.
Otherwise, more abstractly, if I'm onto something with this take, I believe it's a good example of how the fediverse's dependence on monolithic platforms rather than a more modular ecosystem of composable apps that all operate directly on data shared over the protocol may actually start hurting the attractiveness of the ecosystem.
I don't understand the confusion.
Just use ActivityPub to publish blurbs and links to content available on your Ghost blog. Ghost supports subscriptions so you can then stand up a paywall when people click through.
Nothing about ActivityPub requires you syndicate full article content to the fedi. Hell my own blog doesn't do that, if only because Mastodon is not a good place for long-form content.
Fair!