Tap tap tap. Is this thing on?

Hello! If you're seeing this, I'm super excited. Heck, if I am seeing this, I am super excited. Well, as long as we're both looking on Social Web. I know you can see it on my blog. 😀

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make content look good on web, on ActivityPub, and in email, all in the same message, including this:

Email-Friendly Embeds — Spotify, Instagram, Bluesky, Datawrapper and writer headshots that still work in email | SWS Tools

Paste a Spotify, Instagram, Bluesky, Datawrapper or PDF link and get cards for the Ghost editor: the real embed for your site, and a card that works in email, where embeds never load. Plus cards Ghost doesn’t have: a small image with its caption, and an author bio card.

Spectral Web Services

I also spend a lot of time talking to newsrooms onboarding to Ghost, including fielding questions about the Network toggle, and what it does. Sometimes they turn it on. Often they don't. Sometimes they are expecting to be able to manage their existing socials with it, and disappointed when it doesn't.

Lots of folks just don't want all the content sent out to the Fediverse in un-branded form. I'm among them – my content just does NOT translate to plain text very well.

The problem is worsened by lack of controls. The network slider is all or nothing. You can't send some content out to the Fediverse and keep other content web-only, unless you restrict access on the web. Card visibility settings, which are a game changer for web and email, don't really work for ActivityPub, since the content is email-like in terms of restrictions, but obeys the web visibility rules.

I've continued to use ActivityPub, because I field a lot of questions about Ghost, and the best way to know the answers is to use it, regularly, and not just on a test server. (It's also a great way to find bugs.) But... I don't love it, and it annoys me that my content might be 'broken' in the Fediverse.

[It's a consolation that Mastodon doesn't actually show my full text content. So it's only other Ghost sites seeing it in broken form. But... I want other Ghost sites, for whom I am presumably writing, to actually see my content as I intended it!]

I had this random thought last night. When I publish a post on Ghost, it talks to ActivityPub (a separate service – in my case kindly hosted by ap.ghost.org, although the Ghost site itself is self hosted) via a proxy. It's just a webhook. No deep integration. And I self host, which means I control the proxy.

So... a couple added blocks in NGINX and a little endpoint that constructs 'notes', and now when I publish a post in Ghost, you get a note. Not a reader entry with full text. A note, linking back to my site, where you can have the full reading experience as I intended it.

No patch to the Ghost core, nor the ActivityPub package. I just added a couple lines to my nginx config file to divert the webhooks.

My biggest complaint about Ghost's implementation is that my full-text content never survives the trip to the Fediverse intact. It just doesn't work for my content. My second biggest complaint is that my featured image shows up as absolutely huge, and while I love my ghost mascots, I like them better at 300px than 800px+.

The only downside here is that it's a self-hoster solution.

I went to bed thinking about this. I am also thinking about how there's a delete endpoint, and you can delete an ActivityPub post without deleting the actual Ghost post. So... I wonder if it would be possible to set up a separate webhook and function that effectively follow along behind Ghost and delete unwanted posts, and recreate them as notes.