The open-source newsletter platform Ghost, a competitor to Substack, has now established a connection to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. This connection is made possible through the ActivityPub protocol, which is used by various federated apps such as Mastodon, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, and Flipboard, allowing posts from one app to be visible and interactable on other federated platforms.

Ghost had previously announced its plans to integrate with ActivityPub last year, which would enable its publishers to share their blog posts with the broader open social web.

Although the company had initially expected the integration to be live last year, Ghost has now announced the launch of its social web beta, allowing sites running on its Ghost Pro subscription to test the new ActivityPub integration.

The beta feature is still under active development, as noted in the company’s help documentation, but is expected to be finalized in the Ghost 6.0 release.

When a Ghost Pro user connects their blog or newsletter to the fediverse, others across the open social web can follow their account’s handle, which is a combination of “@index” and the domain name (@yoursite.com).

Ghost has announced that users will soon be able to customize the “@index” part of their handle.

Users on federated apps can then follow the Ghost publisher’s posts and interact with them by liking, replying, or reposting.

To help Ghost publishers engage with the fediverse and expand their readership, Ghost has also launched a social web reader. This reader allows users to browse a feed of short-form content shared across the fediverse, including posts from services like Mastodon and Threads.

In a separate area called the “Inbox,” Ghost users can keep up with long-form content, such as articles published on Ghost or WordPress, which integrated with the fediverse in 2023.

Ghost’s help page explains, “Think of the Inbox screen like your email inbox. When you follow other publications on the social web, new articles they publish will show up here. Clicking on a post will open an inline reader view, right inside Ghost, and when you get to the end, you’ll be able to like, repost, or reply.”

With the integration of these two feeds into Ghost’s admin, Ghost will now allow its publishers to directly post short-form content to the fediverse, helping them build their reputation and following on the open social web.

Ghost’s Reader also alerts users to interactions like follows, replies, likes, and reposts in its “Notifications” section. Additionally, users can customize their Profile page to offer a preview of their social web account, following/followers, and their content, both short- and long-form.

In the future, the company plans to more deeply integrate users’ social web profiles with Ghost memberships, although for now, they operate independently. Other upcoming features include tools to block, report, and mute people or add images or media to notes and replies.

There are some compatibility issues with the Ghost Reader, most notably with Meta’s Threads. The company notes that Ghost users can search for and find Threads users’ profiles, but interactions do not work due to Threads blocking them. (The issue lies with Threads, and Ghost suggests that users mention Instagram head Adam Mosseri to resolve it.)

To try the Ghost social web beta, Pro subscribers can head to the Ghost Admin and enable the beta under Settings > Labs.

Ghost is currently used by several notable publications, including Casey Newton’s Platformer, 404 Media, David Sirota’s The Lever, Tangle, Jason Calacanis’ Inside, SFist, and others.