ActivityPub Support on Synaps Media

Recently Ghost announced beta version of its ActivityPub support in their official blog:

Social web (beta)

Increase your reach by connecting your publication to the Fediverse

ChangelogJohn O’Nolan

ActivityPub will allow people to follow and interact with your post without even coming to your website. People can follow, re-post and comment on your posts on platforms like Mastodon, Threads or another Wordpress blog. You can consider your ActivityPub followers as free members. Currently it's only for your free and public contents, but in the future it can be better integrated with current memberships.

We were following the development of ActivityPub support on Ghost since the beginning and very excited that it's now very close to the first version that can be used by everyone. Of course, it's a question if and when Synaps Media websites will have this feature, as a fully-managed Ghost hosting service. Here some details about those questions.

Will Synaps Media provide ActivityPub support?

Yes, definitely. We really believe that ActivityPub will add a big value to the Ghost publishers. It'll open our content to a very large network automatically, with extra interaction opportunities. And of course, we would never accept to miss an opportunity like this for our Ghost publishers.

When will Synaps Media support ActivityPub?

Currently, Ghost team actively working on it and making breaking changes as they stated in the announcement:

While in beta, we're actively making multiple breaking-changes every single week, so while it can technically already be self-hosted, it's not recommended.
https://ghost.org/changelog/social-web-beta/

So, basically Ghost team is currently "testing" this feature on their own platform. Whenever we get the sign that it's mature, we'll implement and announce it on Synaps Media as soon as possible.

Will ActivityPub feature cost extra?

That's a difficult question for now, since we can't measure the cost of it on our infrastructure yet. But, in the beginning, it will be included on our plan without any extra costs, at least for some time. Then we'll announce details about pricing of it. Let me explain a little why it's complicated:

ActivityPub feature will work differently than a regular website visitor. Regarding to you follower counts (and also the count of ActivityPub account you follow on Ghost Admin), it can lead a huge amount of traffic and storage usage behind the scenes even without having a single real visitor to your website or even you don't enter to your Ghost Admin for a while. ActivityPub server will save any posts from the accounts you follow, and any interactions over your content on ActivityPub. Of course this also depends how Ghost ActivityPub server will handle this traffic and data.

We will need time to investigate on the costs, and will do our best not to pass on the additional cost of this service to our users.

If you have any questions about ActivityPub support, please don't hesitate to reach out us by writing to support@synapsmedia.com or support chat on our panel.