Why doesn't Ghost v6 include Fediverse commenting ?
Hello, World !
I'm Tiana, 26yo web developer from 🇫🇷 France, computer enthusiast since forever.
Some personal history
Ages ago, I got started with my very first blog hosted on Skyblog, back when I was still a kid who didn't (but definitely pretended to) know much about computers. 🧑💻 Then, I went hopping between other free providers, until it got serious with WordPress.com, which I eventually migrated to a self-hosted WordPress.org instance (I also got my first Linux VPS later on).
I eventually dropped blogging and never picked it up again though, and for a while I couldn't figure out why... Until I became somewhat more active social media, and realized : since self-hosting, I missed interacting. People sign up on social media knowing they will experience regular interactions, but not necessarily with the same people, therefore they won't sign up on every single blog they visit, for possibly commenting just once. Nevertheless, I didn't want to go back to free hosts with subdomains and ads, so I gave up.
Discovering the Fediverse
I first joined the Fediverse on Mastodon (@KaKi87@mamot.fr), and quickly realized how awesome decentralized social media is : the independence that comes with self-hosting, combined with the interaction potential brought by federation. 😍
But, Mastodon is microblogging, not blogging, and I love blogging. So, I looked up federated blogging solutions, and found one : Plume. I was excited! Until I noticed its lots of bugs, missing features, and spam issues...
There are other notable options like the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, or the WriteFreely platform, but they're all incomplete, gluing federation on platforms that weren't designed for it.
Seeing how attractive the modern Ghost CMS is, people (me included) wished for it to join the Fediverse, and when I wrote this article for the first time, 3 months ago (explanation below) I learned they were working on it. They're done now (more about that later as well), but weren't at the time.
Finally, here comes Lemmy.
"Lemmy as a blog"
This is mentioned once in the documentation (and nowhere else) :
Lemmy can also function as a blogging platform. Doing this is as simple as creating a community and enabling the option "Only moderators can post to this community". Now only you and other people that you invite can create posts, while everyone else can comment. Like any Lemmy community, it is also possible to follow from other Fediverse platforms and over RSS. For advanced usage, it is even possible to use the API and create a different frontend which looks more blog-like.
The first Lemmy as a blog?
That is indeed what I ended up doing then, but actually, I started looking into this a long time ago (my fist public question about it is 2 years old), and as this and all following inquiries I made on this subject remained unanswered, I believed that I was gonna have to be the first one to do it.
But... No! As the documentation says, Lemmy isn't blog-like, so making a blog-like frontend for it would be a good idea, but I don't wanna make the UI components, so I asked around about whether there is a UI-only framework for blogs somewhere, and I was told “no, but someone made a frontend for their Lemmy-as-a-blog instance over there”, and I was like, what? I've been looking for this for a while and never found anything... Well, turns out it's a very new project.
I will not end up reusing their frontend though, because that's not really the kind of design I'm looking for.
The second Lemmy as a blog.
So, I welcomed you on the second Lemmy-as-a-blog instance !
Until... it ended up being a bust. I wrote this article on my instance running on this very domain, shared it at !Lemmy@lemmy.ml using lemmyverse.link, at which point I thought people didn't want to interact with my instance for some reason, but only with the one I shared on. Wrong ! What really happened is, my instance was not receiving anything, and despite several attempts, I wasn't able to restore it.
With more patience, maybe I would've, but in the end, it doesn't matter : setting Lemmy up is too much hassle for just a blog.
Ghost
As hinted above, this is my second time writing this article, using Ghost. The first time was on Lemmy.
Here's a backup screenshot of that one for those interested :
Click to toggle image
Following the Lemmy disaster, I created fediverse-comments : a small client-side app that brings Fediverse comments to your self-hosted blog, easily installable as an iframe. And it mostly works ! You'll find it below this article, and more details in another article.
KaKi87
In short — I did exactly what I didn't like others were doing : something incomplete, gluing federation on platforms that weren't designed for it.
As mentioned, I discovered Ghost's ActivityPub project as I wrote this article the first time, but also, I discovered by chance that they finally released it, when someone on Mastodon mentioned everyone who pushed for this on the Ghost forums (including me), as I was in the middle of coding the fediverse-comments project.
So, I wondered : did I do this for nothing ? Well, no. Of course this is still useful for static sites too, but also, Ghost didn't implement Fediverse commenting. Commenting on blogs running Ghost v6 still requires registration.
So, I still switched to Ghost, because it's the only interesting modern blog CMS.
Now, what did Ghost devs actually do ? Looks like they created their own Mastodon inside a blog CMS. I don't get it. Maybe you can explain it to me in the comments, from your Fediverse account !