[johnonolan]

John from Ghost here, happy to answer any Qs if there are any. I know HN crowd tends to have pretty mixed feeling about the utility of ActivityPub, but we're pretty excited about it. Will it work out and be amazing? Don't know - but we're see what we can do and find out.

[Kye]

Will ActivityPub subscribers count against the member limit on Ghost Pro plans the way free email subscribers do?

[apitman]

First of all, thank you for at least giving it a shot.

One of the main problems I see with AP is account fragmentation. If I'm an author on Ghost, but also have a Mastodon account, which account should I use to follow someone on PeerTube?

It really seems like the server side should be datatype agnostics, handling activities of any type, and it should be easy to delegate access for sending/receiving activities. So for example maybe Ghost is my main account, but I can delegate some access to Mastodon and PeerTube while sharing the same actor.

Have you guys discussed this much at Ghost?

[johnonolan]

I think if you were to ask an ActivityPub absolutist about this (of which I am not one) the answer would be that you follow different things from different places, and it all balances out based on utility. So the idea is not that you have centralise all your following under a single account, but rather than you can follow anything, from anywhere. So maybe you follow video stuff from a Peertube instance, and you follow longform writing from a Ghost instance - but if every so often you want to mix and match... you can.

ActivityPub, like many of 'open social' web standards before it, suffers to some extent from being invented without clear enough usecases in mind. Much like WebMentions (which we also adopted) the answer to "what's it for?" - often seems to be "yes".

So you can either try to ship the spec and support everything, or you can try to build an end-user usecase that fits within the spec, and get more specific. We tend to lean toward the latter, and try to create something useful - which would still be useful even if nobody knew it was running on [whatever web standard].

Whether we can succeed with it or not, remains to be seen :)