Fedi.pub - Create public profile links for your Ghost ActivityPub handle
Sharing Ghost ActivityPub links was tricky. Until now... Use fedi.pub to make your Fediverse account more reachable.
I really like Social Web came with Ghost 6, and want to use it as my main Mastodon account. But one challenge was blocking this: How to share my address with people? In many places, I just share my Mastodon link, but there is no simple link that we can share for Ghost AP profiles.
When surfing on other Ghost websites, I noticed that many people have this struggle. Since I already spent some effort on making to solve this, I thought it would be possible to make a simple profile page for all type of Ghost Social Web profiles. And here I introduce: https://fedi.pub
With this simple site, you can generate (well, just put your handle to the end of URL) a public profile page for your Ghost Social Web handle. With a preview and a simple guidance to how to follow you, I think this can help many of us, to take the advantage of Ghost Social Web.
Url format is like https://fedi.pub/@murat@muratcorlu.com
How does it work
It's a very simple tool written with ExpressJS. Basically it uses my ghost-activitypub-embed web component to show the profile page. On top of that, backend server fetches data for filling open-graph metadata, so your links can be seen better on social media, or in Ghost Bookmark Card.
Bookmark card example of a profile link
Also Express backend is utilized as a proxy for the ActivityPub requests made by embed component. Normally, ActivityPub endpoints are designed to be accessible with cross domain requests. But because of special handling of www subdomains, I had to use this proxy solution. If you use www subdomain for your Ghost site, ActivityPub requests to your root domain are redirected to www subdomain. But this redirect responses are generally not CORS-friendly. If I can find a better solution to this issue, I want to make profile page a fully client-side solution.
Currently it's hosted on Synaps Media servers with some help from Cloudflare. Also worth to mention:
- This is (and will be) a free-to-use service.
- I don’t collect any data from this tool. I don’t even have any trackers on the page.
- The proxy used for AP requests doesn’t collect any information as well.
- Client side code is already open, but I can share proxy code (which is a simple expressjs proxy) in the future.
Some accounts to follow
If you are interested in Ghost like me, here are a few accounts to follow:
By far the best outside contributor of Ghost - Cathy Sarisky
Founder of Magic Pages, shares very valuable tools/information for Ghost
You probably already know him, but still... He is "the one" 😊
For more don't miss checking Social Web section of Ghost Explore.
Thoughts about the future of ActivityPub in Ghost
I'm very excited about ActivityPub integration in Ghost. Currently there are some missing parts but I can confidently say that, Ghost team is doing great job to improve it very quickly. The repository is very active. They are constantly fixing issues and adding new quality-of-life features.
Ghost is investing on discoverability and interoperability more than any other ActivityPub platform, which is great. When Mastodon became viral, confusion over the loneliness of the instances was the biggest friction. But Ghost ActivityPub is promising even if you use it on your self-hosted AP server. You can still find any Fediverse account, see their latest posts even without following them.
There are obviously some missing features, like attaching more images to a single post, attaching videos or hashtags, but I can also see a bigger potential specific to Ghost if I do some fantasy, like:
- Showing fediverse mentions/reactions for a post under the article. This can help crowding our silent "comments" sections.
- Separate accounts for each staff users, so authors can use it individually.
If we return back to this tool; eventually fedi.pub would not be needed for Ghost in the future. Because I expect that Ghost will provide something like this in the future. But until that time I hope it will be helpful for some people anyway. Also, I'm considering to support any type of Fediverse handles in fedi.pub, in near future. So maybe people can use it as a "fediverse link sharing tool". We'll see...
It’s a result of a few hours of work. There can be some quirks and bugs. So please give feedback if you find this useful, or if you miss some more features.
