You do understand that Mastodon is a part of the Fediverse, do you?
Likes are there so that people don’t litter the comment sections with “yeah”, “uh-uh”, “+1”, “cool”, “ok”, etc., or at least do it less. Some platforms, like Misskey even have a little more choice in regards to reactions beside just “likes”. All in all, it’s basically a part of social networking language. You like something - there’s a button for that. You want to say something of substance about it - there are comments/replies. If you agree something so much that you’d sign every word of it - reblog then.
Of course, it all should be optional. If somebody don’t want it, they don’t have to deal with it.
I am well aware of what Likes are for, thank you. I’ve just seen increasing evidence over the past 20 years or so that they create more problems than they solve.
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Likes, +1, and so one are the Cancer for Comments in Generall.
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I was looking for this since I am hosting my peertube and soon a pixelfed.
I was thinking of federate this way different blogs reviewing video games for example in one instance, then mastodon user can follow the post this way.
It would be like from twitter account having news from kotaku and youtube the same way: that’s just wonderfull in all points.
Maybe it is far from ghost idea, but for me it is an amazing one that could be inside the project.
There is for example write [dot] as that works this way.
Upvoting this idea!
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I agree with this. The problem with Medium is, they keep unilaterally making changes that not everybody likes. With Ghost, site owners would be more in control over what changes are made and which ones are implemented.
I currently run a publication on Medium, but I’ve been thinking of moving off onto some other platform. Unfortunately, most are not as “social” in the sense of being able to follow people and have a stream—and if they are, they’re not geared towards a blog or magazine-style website.
I’m thinking Ghost could have something like the Pterotype plugin for WordPress to ActivityPub-enable it—and then perhaps add (optional) features like “share” and “like” and/or a “stream” for following posts. Or, these could be left to other platforms like read.as to handle.
I would be interested too, but I’ve only recently heard of ActivityPub, and have hardly used Node.
But I have been thinking about the more philosophical side, about ActivityPub-based platforms and the details of how they should work. I have a small blog on the topic which @John and other devs may like to check out.
I’m also open to discussing this further, if the occasion arises—if not code, perhaps I can help with ideas 
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@badrihippo you should try out Mastodon.social in case you still want a “more social” Network without being locked in.
Yeah, it’s not “plugin integrated” yet but it still works fine manually and better like Twitter.
Thanks for the suggestion—I’m actually using Mastodon for social networking, but I’m looking out for places for my publication. That’s why I’ve been looking into Write.as, which is great for blogs but a bit to minimalistic for publications (by which I mean an online “magazine” a friend and I are editing; we take submissions from other authors and put out an article every week).
WordPress + ActivityPub would work, but I’m thinking it’d be great if Ghost got into this too. (No hurry, I’m still on Medium for now).
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To those looking for a workaround: GitHub - dariusk/rss-to-activitypub: An RSS to ActivityPub converter.
I haven’t tried it myself, but I am considering it. The idea is to have an ActivityPub server in between that posts an update whenever the RSS feed gets updated.
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@baddr
WordPress + ActivityPub would work
WeDistribute is an example of this, using the Pterotype plugin. Comments can be posted from the WordPress website as normal. But people who follow @blog@wedistribute.org with their fediverse account can reply to posts from there, and those replies appears as comments on the WP site too.
FYI a bunch of developers using or wanting to use ActivityPub for federation have been having discussions about implementation and inter-operation here:
https://socialhub.network/
There is rss-to-activitypub if one is willing to set it up. Could be a starting point for Ghost federation?
Right now, the only thing Ghost would be federating is the posts themselves (perhaps once for the whole site and once per author). Now that Ghost has a Content API, I’m guessing it’d be pretty straightforward to set up a more integrated federation system.
However, if you want to federate comments too, then this only address half the issue. So what I would propose is something in the middle that:
- pulls in content from Ghost and pushes it as ActivityPub posts
- displays comments back on the blog (something like Commento or Disqus
- provide a link or login mechanism for people to comment with their Fediverse accounts
- allows users to comment anonymously/with email if they’re not on the Fediverse (either by making dummy ActivityPub accounts, or having them as blog-only comments which don’t federate)
Additionally, the system could allow blog authors to link their Fediverse accounts, so post appear to be coming from that account rather than from a separate blog-specific account (ie. it puts the posts, on their behalf, on the main server). Not sure how good an idea it is, but it’s a possibility to think of.
That sounds like an idea for a separate project though, rather than something in Ghost itself (which doesn’t even handle comments right now). Perhaps it could be built out into a separate “Ghost Comments” module…what do you think?
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Has there been any progress to starting an implementation of ActivityPub for Ghost? What would need to happen to jump start this?
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I’m thinking of creating a “ActivityPub-enabled Commento for Ghost”, for use at my magazine website. This would make more sense as it would handle both posts and comments in an integrated system; you’d just have to plug in a small script to “enable” it in Ghost.
But I don’t have much experience in either JavaScript or ActivityPub, so it’s going to take a while. Plus, I have a ton of other things to set up on my site too.
One thing that would help is funding ($5/mo) for a VPS to test out configurations. I can’t make any promises at the moment so don’t want to take donations till things are more settled, but if anyone’s interested I could contact them when I’m open 
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That is exactly what is going on here.
This is possible if you are using write.as
So I don’t see what it isn’t possible if you are using Ghost. I vote for this.
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So glad I discovered WriteFreely (write.as). It’s much more “no bullshit” and the theming is limited for now, they’re working on a more powerful backend for that similar to Ghost
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Given the big rise in Mastodon usage in the last four days, it would be really cool to have some ActivityPub support at Ghost.
Any devs interested in talking about it and working on code addition or some rough workaround for Proof of Concept (assuming Ghost folks aren’t working on it)?
One of the things I’ve been looking at and trying to think about in re:Ghost is Bridgy: https://brid.gy/
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This occured to me too, given the current popularity.
But although this post us pretty comprehensive, I couldn’t find a GitHub issue.
Edit: I now understand that you track feature requests here, gitHub relayed me here.
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