ActivityPub Clients

Using Ghost
1

Hello - I’m exploring the ActivityPub part of Ghost and wondering how to log into clients like Tapbots’ Ivory or Megalodon on Android. At log in, each one asks for the “instance” and I can’t seem to get it to detect my @hello@booksaboutbooks.com profile.

What info am I missing? I feel like I just don’t understand how the fediverse works and when it says @booksaboutbooks.com is my handle, it’s actually not since I’m set up through Ghost.

Thanks, in advance, for any advice or links to help docs that I can’t find.

2

This is a common confusion about ActivityPub and Mastodon.

The clients you mentioned are Mastodon Clients, not ActivityPub clients. ActivityPub is the protocol that Mastodon uses behind the scenes but also adds some special extensions over it like hashtags, sensitive content, custom emojis etc.

Now Ghost also has a ActivityPub server, sharing many contexts with Mastodon but also focusing some different aspects, like long-form posts, automated publishing, automatically connecting to different platforms (like Bluesky via Bridgy Fed). But since both uses ActivityPub protocol as their core, that allows them to communicate each other on the features that they both supports, like posts, media attachments, likes, re-posts, replies, follow/unfollow etc. This is also same for other platforms using ActivityPub, like PixelFed, Threads, Pleroma, MicroBlog, PeerTube etc.

The Mastodon Clients uses Mastodon API which is not part of ActivityPub protocol. Ghost doesn’t cover Mastodon API, because, it’s not Mastodon :blush:

So, unfortunately we are not able to use Mastodon Clients for our Ghost Social Web accounts. But I think someone will consider to make a mobile client for Ghost Social Web soon, because it will be an obvious need.

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I can not thank you enough for this explanation. This makes total sense and I can understand the hurdles involved. You’ve saved me a lot of time of banging my head against the wall in trying to figure it out. Thank you! :clinking_beer_mugs:

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Thank you for this info, I hadn’t been aware of that differentiation. That explains why I hadn’t been able to get hashtags to work, which is a shame as taking part in Mastodon hashtags was the main thing I had been hoping to do with short-form Ghost posts. Ah well.

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Not having hashtag support certainly heavily limits the effectiveness of short-form posts. Surely there must be some form of implementation, but if not oh well! But yes it definitely explains it. I wonder if there is some form of way it could be implemented over the ActivityPub API that Mastodon would recognise. I don’t know much about ActivityPub or Mastodon personally since I haven’t looked into it, but I wonder if ActivityPub - Mastodon documentation has anything to do with it/could be beneficial and whether this is something Ghost could implement. I’ll have to have a dive into it at some point personally.

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This is really an unfortunate situation at Ghost with regard to ActivityPub. I realize it’s early days for them with ActivityPub integration, but in its current state, it shouldn’t have shipped in my opinion.

  1. Notes need mobile support, period. Yes, Ghost is focusing on long form content and newsletters, but people don’t want to use 12 different apps. ActivityPub was supposed to remove all these silos but so far organizations’ implementation is just creating more places we have to go to share and enter info. They keep pushing back and saying the web app is fine, but it’s not.
  2. Adopt the Mastodon API and you no longer have to worry about doing your own application development you can’t afford. Or at the very least, use Micropub for shortform notes posting.
  3. Where is Webmention support???
  4. Where is follower/following migration?? Oops, changed your domain…both are gone now. Turned off social by accident? Oops, all your followers are gone now.