Look out Substack, Ghost will join the fediverse this year

Newsletter platform Ghost — a popular rival to the reigning Substack — has confirmed it is joining the fediverse later this year.

This means Ghost is joining the likes of Mastodon, Instagram Threads, Wordpress, Flipboard, and others, in the "federated universe", containing decentralized social networks. Ghost's founder John O’Nolan explained in a post on Threads that users have been requesting federation, and asked followers to give their input on how it would work.

Later, the company confirmed that it would federate on ActivityPub, a popular protocol to make open networks happen, in order "to become part of the world’s largest publishing network." In its announcement, Ghost said that users have had to participate in closed social networks — "at the mercy of algorithms" — and it is now time "to take back control" online.

"The open web is coming back, and with it returns diversity. You can both publish independently and grow faster than ever before with followers from all over the world and the web," reads the statement.

For these reasons, the fediverse has gained momentum in the past year, but it's not exactly commonplace yet. As Mashable's Christianna Silva explains, "The fediverse allows you to have an account on one service and post on other services." From Silva's report:

In less basic terms, it is a collection of interconnected servers, also called instances, that run software compatible with a set of open protocols. The primary goal of the fediverse is to allow users to communicate and interact with each other on different platforms and servers while retaining control over their data and identity because they aren't giving it all to one individual company.

Ghost said that readers and users will have more power when the platform is federated: they'll be able to like, follow and interact with people on other federated services, for example, and also follow publications and topics of interest from around the internet.

To put it more simply, the platform compared the power of open networks to that of email: "Email, the web’s original open protocol, is used by more people than any platform or social network that has been invented before or since; because it shares users rather than competing for them."

These efforts from Ghost may pay off in more ways than one: already, several Substack users have turned to Ghost as a result of the lack of moderation on the former. Some major publishers and creators are on Ghost, including Platformer, 404 Media, and Quillette. Now with federation, the reach and growth of publications on Ghost has the potential to be even greater, according to the platform.