Absolutely. Hey everyone. Our last talk of the night is going to be with the fantastic
John O'Neill. Who's going to be telling us about how ghost has federated and about networks
generalism in, oh, like I would really choke on that one. The work during all this
on it, works in general. So, good point.
Can we hear me?
Okay, good. Fantastic. Thank you being here. Thank you for staying here. I'm well aware that I'm the
one thing standing between you and food. I'm potentially a cold bear. So, right before we get
into it, I'm going to tell you what. I'm going to get into it. And then if you want to make a
evaluated decision about whether you want to stick with this, then that can be up to you. I'm going
to tell you about retrofitting activity pub to an existing product. So, perhaps a little different
to many of the activity pub native projects you've been hearing about for the rest of the day.
How we've been thinking about the Fed of Us at Ghost and our approach to it. I'm going to share one
strongly held belief with you as well as one key lesson that we've learned along the way. And those
are of course cliffhangers that you'll have to stick around like and subscribe and find out.
There will also be occasionally AI-generated images of pugs. We like to refer to ourselves as
the activity pugs, like to be public to any pugs. If you do not like AI-generated images and you're
morally opposed to them because you wish computer progress would stop when everything would just stay
the same. You are in the wrong place. The Java Track moved to room 218 and you should have
it over on that direction. Otherwise, I will be bringing you AI-generated images of dogs that you
will enjoy and with that we will get started. So, by way of introduction, my name is John O'Neill
and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ghost.org. Just for my benefit, how many of you have heard of
Ghost in any way? Great, fantastic. And then because it didn't come up the rest of the day,
I'm curious. I'm assuming we're in a dev room. I'm assuming a lot of you are developers.
How many people are not developers? Fantastic. And how many of you have a Fediverse handle
are actively using activity pub? Amazing. And how many of you are working on an activity pub
enabled app? You're a developing one for yourselves. Great. Wow. Okay, really good mix. So,
there's going to be something for all those groups. There's going to be something in here for you.
I am not a developer. I'm a very much a designer, a product person. I do develop on the front end,
but for all the heavy lifting, my co-founder and CEO Hannah is really the brains of the
operation on that front. So, for those amongst you who do not have not come across Ghost before,
it is a content management system. It's completely open source. What makes it different or unique
is that it has built-in support for user signups, memberships, email newsletters and subscriptions.
So, you could have gated access to paid content. You could deliver your blog posts as newsletters
and you can really build an audience around your content to allow you to turn that into a business.
We've been around for about 13 years. So, not a new product by any means. And over that time,
from the beginning, we developed a business model because we wanted an open source to be sustainable.
So, we started with a Kickstarter campaign that gave us some initial get-going money.
We use that to hire some good developers that help us build open source software.
Hopefully, that's popular enough to attract users who want to use it. And for those who
have them who don't want to worry about servers, don't want to deal with upgrades or patches,
we offer a paid hosting service. That hosting service funds the original team who continues
to hire more great developers and that's how we keep this whole operation going.
Call it sustainable open source. What's unique about Ghost in particular is that it's incorporated
as a not-for-profit organization, but getting grant funding seemed really hard,
so coming on with the business model seemed a bit easier and so far that has worked.
So, through just the hosting side of the business alone, we are able to self fund
about $7.5 million a year to award continuing to build open source software,
which is released completely free under an MIT license for everyone. And that model has been
very, very successful for us and continues to allow the kind of indefinite funding of the project.
So, who's using it? What is Ghost useful? Well, there's a lot of news organizations,
perhaps unsurprisingly, who care about publishing online doing so in a modern way. So, we have a
bunch of them, both local national and handful of international. We have most startup and tech
blogs that you've ever heard of. A lot of them are up here, a handful that are not Apple,
OpenAI and several extremely popular and surprisingly creative porn sites. And beyond that,
you have the creator economy, which is obviously booming people on the internet who are making
content, people want to subscribe to, that are popular enough that it has become a full-time
source of income, it is their business. So, that can range from podcasts, to YouTubers, to artists,
to everyone in between, a large and growing number of them. So, what these demographics and group
are people all having common is that they publish professionally for a specific audience. They are
not having a hobby blog, they are trying to put something out there and they're trying to build
and grow an audience around it so that they can turn it into a business or make that business
that they are already running sustainable and something that they can keep doing. So, if you're
trying to have an audience and grow an audience, what do you do? Well, you probably deal with one
of the eight horsemen of the apocalypse in the form of a social network. And social networks have
been very effective over the last decade and a bit for one thing primarily. They've been
incredibly effective for marketing, which is to say putting your content in front of a new audience.
What people think they're also effective for is distribution, which is getting your content
to your existing followers or subscribers. But as we now know, they are not particularly
effective for that because no matter how often you like, subscribe, ring the bell, turn around
three times and click your fingers really quick, often the people you're following's content
doesn't actually sharpen your feet. So, social networks have been good for some things,
but not as good for others. And the smart publishers in the room, the smart creators, the smart
new media professionals, have figured this out and so they use social networks for their marketing
prowess to try and drive traffic back to a property that they own, usually in this case,
an independent website on the internet. And that's where ghost comes in. That's what we do quite
well. So you can build a website, you can capture using sign-up forms, email addresses,
and then you can use those email addresses to deliver your content by email, which no one can
put an algorithm in the way of, so that 100% of your audience, spam filters aside,
actually do see what they've signed up to receive. So you solve your marketing and you solve
your distribution, fantastic, right? Kind of, but what's missing is you still have to use
the social networks. If you don't use the social networks, you just have your independent website
and you have your email addresses, it works, your distribution is kind of perfect, but your
marketing is non-existent. It's quite hard to grow because email inherently does not bring in
new people. You might get the odd forward or something, but it doesn't really have any mechanisms
by which email spreads. The email chains have you seen this funny thing. There's not been
around since the late 90s, early 2000s, RIP. So we wanted to have some kind of network component
in Ghost for many years because all of our rowdy, well-funded competitors have them. I'm going
back to Tumblr at one point. It was medium. More recently, it's Substack. There's a very obvious
sense that networks add value to a publishing products, and that's not just because it helps you
get exposure to a new audience. If that's what you're trying to grow one, but it also gives you
a direct connection to your peers to other people who are doing the same thing that you do, other
people who you respect and admire, or perhaps just want to be associated with, you know,
collaborations on YouTube. I like one of the big things and meeting people who are doing the same
thing as you, is very motivating. When you have an independent website, independent blog on the
web, a lot of the time it's not lonely. You put stuff out there and you wonder, anyone reading
it? It's the great downside of especially kind of self-hosted stuff where there's just not
that fundamental connection to other people compared to one of these networks that are connected.
And so the great sadness is while you are running an independent website and publishing it out
into the open web, you have the sense that you're alone and yet you are surrounded by a far larger
number of people and sites and instances than any of these networks, you just don't know it.
And of course, that's the great promise of activity pub to enrapp and enshrine
our socialist ideals and envelop this capitalist society and something that overwhelms it and fundamentally
brings it down. I don't think that was quite just a strong reaction. And that's what we're here
to do, right? Like Wikipedia surrounding the fucking cyclopedia Britannica and just going,
this is better. That's what we're all hoping for and that is the promise and the ideal
of the Fediverse. That's what we want to do. That's what's so exciting about this is the potential
scale and the potential change in the behavior of how we all use the web. But in thinking about
how we're going to enact this, how we're going to make this come true, we spend quite a long time
trying to figure out what's so special about networks, why on networks so different,
because networks aren't the first form of distribution, they're just the latest kind of mainstream
form of distribution of marketing. So what makes them different to what came before? We've had RSS,
we've had email, these are not new things. But both of those technologies very much the broadcast
model. You have a clear delineation between the publisher and the reader. Sky News tells you
what's important, you the reader get to enjoy what's important. We're informed, you need to be informed.
Social network fundamentally changes that. Everyone is the publisher, everyone is the reader,
every reader is a publisher, every publisher is a reader, it all gets mixed up in this wonderful
weird into mingles thing where the most important thing of the day is not what one organization
decided to put above the fold on the homepage and print off on a piece of dead tree. It is
an emergent property of whatever everyone happens to be talking about or everyone has collectively
decided is important. It's like going in nature from a structured direction, decided by one
goose to no one's really sure what's happening but my god is it beautiful. And this is really
important because the dynamics of the interactions change and the biggest change is that we go
from one way communication to two air communication. Two air communication between every node
is what makes it in effect a network and stories spread when people discuss them.
So my strongly held belief is that you can't be a part of the social web without being social.
And that's really important because a lot of existing products that I've seen think about
at activity pub support or maybe just fed of a support in general via any of the kind of open
protocols. They have this idea that, oh, all we have to do is just add activity pub and then we just
keep on fucking broadcasting out. And it doesn't make any sense because you bend up being this guy.
When social networking started, we all said it's like a cocktail party. Remember to whatever you
trying to explain to your friends, it's like a party, everyone just shows up in a really good time.
If you are only broadcasting without listening, you're this guy at the party. If you're the
only thing your platform does is send content out but when people reply you're going, I'm not
interested. That's not a social network. So I think to do social networking software or to be a
part of the social web, you have to be social and that means you have to read as well as right.
So that's what we've been working on. Gurs is a publishing platform. We've had long-form
content publishing for the web and for email built in for a long time. And when we started thinking about
activity pub, the first thing we thought about was not how do we ram the content of our
publishers down the throats of the Fedabers to make sure that they get more views. How can we connect
ghosts to the Fedabers that our publishers can see what's already there and can start to become
integrated, become part of that community so that we can have those discussions. We can have those
social connections start to make sense because I think that's how things actually grow.
So we've got what is kind of an amalgamation of an email inbox and an RSS reader and a read it later
app that gives you a window into the Fedabers for long-form content rather than the more popular
apps today which are typically short-form or some of the more creative ones we've seen there and
3D objects and social bookmarking that are incredibly cool. So you can open full length
articles directly from the Fedabers and browse through them with creative kind of
most kind of kind of kind of kind of like experience on this where you have some customization
when you're reading options percentage of completion reading time all those types of things.
But once you get to the end of an article, unlike an RSS reader or an email,
there are the replies, there's the networked comments that you can see coming in from anywhere,
you can engage with, you can respond to, you can like, you can interact with.
And if you see a comment you like for someone you can pull up their profile and see what
this question's all about, which is the other thing that's kind of interesting compared to the
old blog comments, you know, if someone left an interesting comment and spy Dave, who's Dave?
No idea, I can't find out. But when it's all an activity pub, when it's all in the Fedabers
you can, you can go and see who, in this case, New York citizens bases and what he's all about,
what he's been posting, which is really exciting. And one of the things that I didn't expect
when we started working on this is how different the feeling is of hitting publish in a federated
independent website compared to an old one. When you suddenly hit publish on your own website
and then shit starts happening, people start saying nice things, more people start following,
people start liking it, someone has said it looks like it's going to be a great year,
congratulations on your progress. I feel like writing another post now, I've read that.
That wasn't a thing that used to happen before. It makes it has taken what was previously a
product that I logs into to use for myself into something that feels alive when I log into it,
because it's not just me that's making stuff happen within the app that is ghost.
There's other people who are influencing my experience when I use it. And that sounds maybe
obvious or somewhat slight, but it's a very different feeling to what I guess I would now describe
as a traditional CMS historically was. So this sadness goes away.
Another thing we've added, we kind of tried to put everything into this,
things like work and we did this inbox view, and we figured that works really good for
long-form content, works nicely. But as soon as you get the short-form content, sometimes
people will share a message and just an image, or as evidence has in fact very creatively broken
ghosts on many times, just word all like emojis. Those didn't look so good in the inbox format.
So we split off articles into this inbox view and then everything else,
Federalist Related into a feed view, which is a more traditional newsfeed. So that we could support
the content type that ghost is most suited to, which kind of long-form open content, but still
allow you to see this more casual feed of what else is going on in the Federalist if you want to.
And that led us to obviously being able to engage with those pieces of content like and
reply to them. Those things are just notes. So then we thought, okay, well, why don't we just
add support for adding notes? So now we then ghost, which never did this before, you can publish
short-form content as well as long-form content. And that is again, a paradigm shift, which we're
just starting to explore, which is kind of exciting. The next question is, could you get that back
onto your personal website? Good question. So one of the things in talking to publishers that we
have about activity problem general, we notice they struggle with and I've observed people just
more broadly struggle with is that use a name change, paradigm shift from what people are used
to in social networks to activity pubs a whole. It was quite difficult to wrap their heads around
what do I do? What is this extra extension on the end of my thing? Why is it sometimes different?
What are all these TLDs? We've had a somewhat easier time talking to them because our publishers
are already from some nights because they understand fundamentally that email is the only thing that
has been bigger than Facebook. And in activity pub is one of those, right? When we tell the story
in this way is people, activity pubs like email and emails, the only thing that has been
bigger than Facebook, then they start to get the wheels turning and that's something that I think
we are still in the very, very early days of people getting. This is the first couple of years,
it's getting easier and easier from here. So we solve marketing, we've solved distribution.
The dream of course is to take away the need for the external marketing. What if your website
was the marketing? Well, if your website did the marketing for you as well as the distribution
and in doing so allowed you actual independence and not having to depend on giant third-party
corporations who might rug pull you any second for the privilege of being able to reach your
own audience or indeed a new audience. That's the dream, that's what we're working towards
and that's what we're trying to achieve. And the key lesson that I want to leave you with for any
of you who are working on activity pub projects or apps of your own is one that I've learned repeatedly
over the years with Ghost in general and again with activity pub and something that I just see
is being a missing lesson within the world. I have to remind myself over and over again and that is
that just being open is not enough. I think for all of us in this room who understand open source
and who are deeply invested in open source, the benefits of being open are so inherently obvious,
it is confusing us to why anyone would choose anything else. It is utterly perplexing if you
have two projects and you say this one is closed and has a billion dollars in funding and this one
is open source, which one would you rather? Of course, the open source one, this one comes with strings
attached. This one will probably be out of business in few years. This one is going to harvest
your data. We all know this, right? But that's because we're so deep in it. And when it comes
to choosing software a lot of times it ends up feeling a little bit like we're so wrapped up.
Like we're collectively so wrapped up in the ideologies of open source and the ideologies
of why our thing is technically better, that we miss out that consumers are choosing the
products that are simply the easiest one to understand. And that's something I wish collectively
we would all be slightly more aware of. And it depends a little bit on your goals. If your goal
is just to do open source because you love open source, that's fine, no problem. But you my goal
and if your goal is similar to my goal is that I want that to be more open source in the world.
I believe the world would be fundamentally more useful if we collaborated more than competed
and if we had more shared infrastructure to depend upon. And if that's your goal,
you've got to look up from the cell phone. You've got to see what's going on because the most
likely person to win this fight is the one who wants to win it the most. And that requires
we the collaborators to be a little bit more competitive. It requires that we get outside our
comfort zone and not just focus on the facts, but what we're doing is open, but try and make it
better. Because Patagonia does amazing things with nature, but if they're fucking range
jackets and they're like water through, it doesn't matter what they're doing for the ecosystem,
no one's going to buy the jackets, right? So if the product doesn't grate, the rest doesn't matter
and if you want to compete within the activity pub space, if you want to enact change to have
this technology be more widely adopted, my message that I would give to any of you working on an
activity pub app is to try and make the product great first and bring all of the open idea deals
along with it. That's my talk. If you would like to hear more, we have a public beta of activity pub
ghost coming next month or a few weeks. General availability will be the summer and you can follow
the newsletter which has behind the scenes developer log updates on this handle or this domain.
If you want to see it on the web or indeed you can subscribe to it via email because
ghost lets you do all of these things. And always remember on the internet nobody knows your adock.
Thank you.
Well the biggest question we've always got is like okay so how many people are on mastone or on
the Fediverse? There was a mastone both in the way. And how many people are on X and L's where?
And I know we've tried so many different arguments. I think the email ones that we've not tried
but do you do that actually work? So yeah. Really? Yeah. We have to have the words for sure.
I mean you can also fed it to me as useful. That shows monthly active users across the whole
Fediverse. It's climbing steadily quite quickly. But I think the the story that goes along with
with this fact or this email narrative is you have to remember that open protocols don't
go away because they're not dependent on one company. Ghost could disappear tomorrow.
Activity pub would not. Massaging could disappear tomorrow. Activity pub would not.
If and when any of the closed source companies go under so does their protocol they disappear
immediately. So all companies have a wall around their protocol that when the company goes under
the protocol goes under. But it's like a compounding thing over time. Open protocols. The
user numbers typically just don't go down. They continue to go up because there's nothing to
make them go away. They do not depend on a single company to succeed. I feel like I'm your new
marketing department somehow. There you go. Evan. Evan. Let's get you an insurance policy.
So you were mentioning before that it doesn't need to be on the open. We also have to make the
coolest stuff. But right now what I see a lot in the Fediverse is just we are copying and
cloning all these ideas of companies, of millions of euros like peer-to-peer, like masterdom,
like pixel fat. And I think it's brilliant. But how do we get like I really like the design of ghost?
Like what is the budget of your team? How you get funding? How do you brainstorm? I don't know
this is brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean so it's been two developers and one designer
working on it for about nine months to get to this point. We're expanding team next week to
it's going to be five engineers and three designers. I think at that point to work towards launch.
Funding is also self-funded. All from the blogging platform existing are selling hosting for it
and making revenue from that for the nonprofit organization. So everything DIY. But how
good your design is just depends on how much you value design in a big way. So how much are you
willing to slow down? Because the design is not good enough. How much are you willing to not ship
to keep that quality high? How much are you willing to spend on designers if you are in the context
of a company? Ghost is more design biased because I'm a designer. Before Ghost, I worked
on the WordPress core team and it designed there. So it's kind of a history of publishing plus
design is really very much in my veins. But it's hard man. I don't know.
All right. I should mention that John says that Ghost's implementation is DIY. But he is using
Fedify, which is an open source library and he is actually contributing back financially. Which
means that John is one of the few activity public developers contributing back to open source.
Yeah. The library were used under the hoods to power a activity public. Functionals
it's called Fedify. It's developed by Hong Min He who's an independent Korean developer who's been
working on Fedify for I think a year and a half now. And he was just about to start working on it
and go back to full time employment. And we said no.