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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand what the great benefit here is over an existing solution like RSS. It also feels like the announcement undermines itself.

>When you do publish, your posts will appear in other people’s feeds in Ghost... and in Mastodon, and everywhere else.

>Long-form content deserves a dedicated design so you can read in peace, much like the way email newsletters show up in your inbox.

Basically, long-form content should be presented in a way that makes it great to read – but thankfully now people can also read it on PeerTube too? Were people on PeerTube really hankering for Ghost blog posts that much?

If people wanted blog posts on Mastodon, couldn't you just add RSS feed supports to Mastodon?

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ActivityPub is basically bidirectional RSS. So you can e.g. read Ghost posts on Mastodon, but then also reply to them and have that show up for other readers as well.

Do that many people even have comments enabled on their blog? I personally don't and I don't remember seeing that many blogs have them enabled. Checking random posts on the HN front page also fails to reveal a large number of blog sites with commenting enabled.

Does ActivityPub at least have moderation tools so that you can set approval requirements and/or delete posts?

ActivityPub is just a protocol, but yes, Ghost could build moderation tools to determine what comments it will display.

You don't necessarily have to host the comments on your server. But by providing an AP id, you provide a common reference for other people to refer to.

Isn't the post URL already a common reference for other people to refer to? That's how I've seen people link to my site and discuss my blog post.

Sure, but with AP all the comments could be in one thread instead of being dozens of threads on different sites

Can I as the owner of the site moderate those comments if they're linked to the canonical reference to my site and appear next to my content when viewed outside my site?

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but

You can moderate what can be seen from your site (and what your site will return when asked for comments on that post by other sites(?)), but you can’t moderate it completely when viewed on other sites — i.e. if you’re Site A, someone comments something you don’t like on Site B, and someone looks at the comments from Site C, if Site B and C were already federating with each other then C will see B’s comment (and in this case it’s Site C’s responsibility to moderate)

You can block a specific user of Site B from viewing your posts in the future, but it’s up to Site B’s software to actually respect that. But if it doesn’t (this is rare, most software does respect things like this and it’s only tiny forks that disable this functionality), you can also just block Site B entirely

Editing to expand: Yes, this is pretty wonky and basically means you can only control what’s seen on your site unless you go through a lot of effort, but without ActivityPub you can’t control what other people say about your post on other sites either (i.e. you can’t moderate the HN thread of your article)

I think if someone on Mastodon comments on a Ghost blog, then Mastodon will tell Ghost that they did so (via ActivityPub).

Then if someone on Pixelfed sees that blog, Pixelfed will ask Ghost who has commented on it (via ActivityPub). Ghost can then tell them about that (via ActivityPub) - or it can choose not to do so (based on its own moderation tools).

That doesn't mean that the Mastodon comment no longer exists, nor that it is invisible to the people looking at the Mastodon comment (similar to HN comments), but Ghost won't boost its reach.

So what ActivityPub gives you is the option to reshare comments.

I think the extra integration has some nice benefits. RSS mostly does one thing, but ActivityPub provides both content creation and discussion in one platform.

In addition to what's already described, ActivityPub allows for access control. It's completely possible to have feeds for paid readers, personalized feeds, etc, in a way that RSS doesn't really support.

Didn't 404 recently announce that they had RSS feeds for paid readers that was in fact built into Ghost now?

https://www.404media.co/404-media-now-has-a-full-text-rss-fe...

Yes, but it's a kludge: 404 has specific, secret RSS feeds for subscribers that contain full-text copy. With ActivityPub each recipient can have personalized content through the same link, and even for free subscribers, the publisher has a better view on who is actually subscribing.

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