Get federated... with Ghost
With the exciting announcement about Ghost 6.0, things are looking up for everyone looking to leverage federated social networks more widely.
As big fans of Ghost (Reclaim's blog and newsletters run on Ghost and there's plenty of folk in our Blogging Community of Practice experimenting with Ghost as a blogging platform) and champions of federated social media, we've been taking a look at what's in store.
Networked publishing
The big news from our point of view is that Ghost 6.0 includes networked publishing, which means that "Ghost publications are now connected with an open network. People can discover, follow, like and reply to posts across Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, Mastodon, WordPress, Ghost, and any other social web platform. Distribution is now built-in."
In practical terms that means that in addition to RSS (#4life!) and web feeds (which were introduced with Ghost 1.0) and the email newsletters we've come to expect, users are now also able to:
"Have a social web reader in admin to follow and read long-form content from other Ghost, WordPress or Flipboard publications. You can also follow and share short-form notes with people across Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and others."
In the announcement for Ghost 6.0, they call this new ability to use an admin social web reader interface to comment, like and interact with folk the "return of the blogosphere". This is music to our ears, as we've been here all along and maybe platforms like Ghost expanding users' abilities to interact will help a new generation of bloggers discover the joy of commenting... (for a refresher, read Jim's ABC of Blogging: Always Be Commenting).
We are currently working through the details to get Federation supported out of the box on our Ghost installer, as well as instructions on how to get any existing Ghost sites you may already have on Reclaim Cloud ready for the Fediverse so stay tuned!
Get stuck in this fall.. and explore Ghost with us
We've long championed Ghost via our popular flex courses and community of practice workshops, and this time is no different. Look out for fresh dates in our events calendar in the new academic year if you are interested in exploring Ghost for the first time, or share your experience with fellow users.
