At this point I’m not sure any social platform that launches without an eye towards federation stands a chance, really.
That is a…hilariously bold statement. As much as I would love to believe that, the entirety of the Fediverse comprises ~1% of Threads. Not to mention Instagram or Facebook.
Of course it matters. A new network will have to start from scratch and with the “nobody is there, so I won’t join”-mentality, potential growth is severely limited. By implementing federation, you will instantly have a base community to build on.
Small detail that I think is actually quite meaningful:
The article is written by editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. Nilay does not usually write a whole lot of articles, as he’s the boss, and the articles he writes are often more commentary (like the famous ‘welcome to hell’ article for Elon, or his running joke on Brother printers). Within The Verge its usually more David Pierce as a true fediverse believer than Nilay.
Futhermore, earlier this week Nilay posted on Threads a response to Ghost’s survey about federation: “Curious how you approach federation for paid newsletters! (Because we want to figure that out too)” www.threads.net/
Yea the paid subscription question is the big one here. Ghost’s announcement stated that they think it will be easy to integrate that with ActivityPub, which I’d interesting because no one has done it while I think there’s been a good amount of demand for some sort of solution. If ghost sort that out for the ecosystem it could unlock the fediverse for some other platforms. Nebula comes to mind especially.
Wow great work, do you think payments will start to also go this way with Ghost in the future? As ActivityPub is decentralized, maybe having some decentralized type payments fit into the future
John O’Nolan replied:
yeah! I think crypto is actually starting to get interesting for the first time now, because most people are no longer interested in it. Generally that signals the end of the hype phase and the beginning of practical utility - so I’m very interested in exploring how decentralised payments could work in Ghost in the future. There are all kinds of interesting and legitimate and interesting usecases which Stripe (mostly Visa/Mastercard) refuse to support
Yea the paid subscription question is the big one here
What is the question, exactly?
I assume your Ghost account will become a Fedi account and your articles will be automatically shared with headlines and links to the article, along with federated boosts, likes and comments.
I suspect it’s more complex than that. If they want any fediverse account to be able to subscribe, which they do, then how do they distribute content only to subscribers and not everyone on their instance?
If they want to actually read the article, they’ll have to log in and give them money.
Yea, that’s the most straightforward for sure … but requires leaving the fediverse. I suspect that there are plans/dreams of being fediverse “native” and enabling the full content/publication to be read from ones fediverse account.
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