Hey all - so i have this kind of funky sidecar + bridge to post articles to bluesky and pull the comments back to ghost - https://github.com/Cooperation-org/ghost-atproto
would like to do it a more native way but ghost seems unfriendly to forks? is there a chance we could get a fork accepted for native Bluesky OAuth for readers?
I am submitting a workshop on bluesky+ghost integrations to the Atmosphere conference in March and am interested in adding collaborators (ATmosphereConf 2026)
Hello,
Your GitHub repo link is broken, and I couldn’t find the repository on that organization. Did something changed after you posted here?
And, why do you think Ghost is unfriendly to forks?
ah sorry! i made it public now. its not only mine - they may want parts of the bridge stuff to be private, i can move the shim over to a separate repo later if so.
I didn’t mean exactly unfriendly to forks, but resistant to mods - like I’m not aware of a plugin architecture that would let me nicely add bluesky oauth as a primary method of reader login
even like adding a new type of card, i had to do all these tricks to mod the asset package after cli install. so i guess, if i actually go and fork ghost, its likely a hard fork unless they want the changes back in main ghost.
does that make sense? i can be more precise if helpful
OK, now it’s more clear. Ghost team would definitely answer better, but since they gave clear signs with similar PRs before, I think I can share my thoughts:
Ghost is an open-source software and accepts PRs. But it’s not only a software, it’s also a product that Ghost team delivers and maintains (I mean Ghost Pro hosting service) to fund the project. Because of that, if a code (especially a large one, like ATProto integration) would be merged to main branch, they would need to consider how to provide this feature to their user base (more than 25k websites), how to cover the costs, how to explain the feature (a nice UI, writing docs, tutorials), and what would be the customer reaction over this feature (if they will like to have it or will find confusing or unneeded…)
Some people think as, “you can just make it optional for self-hosters, and don’t use it in Ghost Pro”. But since Ghost team will not use it, maintaining of that feature will be an hassle. And if it will not work as expected in the future, people will complain about it, then eventually it’ll not add any value but just headaches.
So, generally, it’s better if you wire up your integrations outside of the Ghost codebase by using its APIs, webhooks etc. If needed, there can be requests or PRs for enabling endpoints or features to use with integrations.
According to ATProto integration you are working on: I didn’t dive deep but your Readme mentions to automatically post articles to Bluesky. There is a built-in integration with Bridgy Fed to give that functionality. Do you think it’s not a good approach? Or is your project targets something else?
Actually, current Bridgy Fed integration is a little shady. If you can consider an external server that can replace Bridgy Fed, with a better integration and more features (custom domain handle, follow bluesky accounts etc), that would be so helpful.
Comments integration could be considered for ActivityPub protocol as well (which is built-in with Ghost now), and with Bridgy Fed (or a replacement for it), this integration can include bot ATProto + ActivityPub.
ah sorry i keep forgetting to check back in here. so, yeah, we first tried to use only the API! but i want to do a few things that are beyond what the API allowed, some of which the core ghost would def not want but some they might possibly?
custom - we wanted a different type of card to be added, a Civic Action that came from Mobilize. To do this i had to do a bunch of tricks with koenig-lexical, got it done, but i don’t think this would be included in ghost. that’s fine.
beyond just posting the article to bluesky, which is pretty trivial to do manually, I want the comments people make on bluesky on the article post to come back to ghost. this is done via a sidecar that injects them in, but in general would it be of interest to ghost folks to have comments made on an article post on social media to return to the site? like syndicated conversations? I thought this might have interest tho i can see security concerns also.
I’d like my readers to be able to login to ghost via OAuth! via google or bluesky oauth. I think a lot of people would want this? its how people expect to login? I thought this might be something core team wants.
Are there other integrations that could be of interest? I’m open to ideas and would love to collaborate with anyone else going to ATMosphere conference on them. I had an idea for something like articles-for-purpose that lead to a tip or donation to a cause, for people who are not writing for a living but maybe writing for a purpose.
Thanks for taking the time to engage on this!