Ghost publishing, with a federated community around it: what Bonfire built with Jacobin

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Hi everyone,

For the past several months we have been working with Jacobin’s German-language edition on a question that may be familiar to other membership publications: what happens when readers want to do more than read and comment on individual articles?

Jacobin wanted a place where its readers could debate, organise and build relationships, while keeping the Ghost publishing workflow its editorial team already used. We connected Ghost to Bonfire, an open-source federated community platform, and have now turned that work into a reusable Ghost integration.

Ghost remains the editorial and membership home. Bonfire gives the people around the publication somewhere to meet between articles.

The integration currently supports:

  • Importing an existing Ghost archive and synchronising new articles and edits

  • Preserving public, member-only and paid visibility

  • Mapping Ghost tiers to community access

  • Letting members enter with the email Ghost already knows

  • Embedding the Bonfire discussion beneath the original Ghost article

  • Giving discussions a persistent home inside groups and topics

  • Synchronising unpublishing and republishing without discarding the conversation

This is meant to complement Ghost, not replace its comments or Social Web work. If a publication only needs conversation attached to each article, Ghost may already provide what it needs.

Bonfire becomes useful when conversations should continue across articles, when membership should open participation or private spaces, or when readers and writers need an ongoing community under the publication’s identity.

The first implementation is live with Jacobin. The extension is AGPL-licensed and the source is public. Articles and discussions can participate in the fediverse; groups are local spaces today, with group federation now being implemented.

We would especially like to hear from people running Ghost publications with an active membership: do your readers have anywhere to meet between posts, and is that something they have asked for?

We are looking for a small number of publications to test the reusable setup with us. If this resembles a problem you are already trying to solve, reply here or send me a message :slight_smile: