Moderation preferences
Hello again! We're back with a quick incremental update this week as we continue on our quest for fediverse feature-completeness. Let's get into it.
Last week, we introduced domain-based blocking to complement user blocking, and we improved how ActivityPub notifications are displayed to make it easier for you to spot conversations when people respond to your posts.
What's new with ActivityPub?
Following the last couple of weeks of work around blocking controls, we just rolled out a new moderation screen within ActivityPub preferences. Now you can track, edit, and update lists of blocked users and domains in one place.
Another quick improvement: If you unfollow someone, we now automatically purge their past posts from all your feeds. This is expected/usual behavior across most social apps, but it's not default behavior in ActivityPub.
Now it works the way you're used to inside Ghost.
Magic Pages ActivityPub beta
In addition to our ActivityPub open beta available on Ghost(Pro), there's now an independent community social web beta running on Magic Pages.
Jannis, always ahead of the curve, figured out how to get everything up and running even before we'd finished writing our self-hosting documentation!
It's very cool seeing the service running for the first time in multiple places.
Next up: Mentions
An obvious thing that's been missing from our social web beta is @mentions. Next week, we're hoping to change that.
Social Web/Activity Pub Beta
A few weeks ago I wrote about the state of Ghost's new Activity Pub on Magic Pages: ActivityPub Support Coming to Magic PagesAs many of you have noticed, Ghost recently released their Social Web (ActivityPub) feature into beta: Social web (beta…Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki (Magic Pages)
Blocking domains
If you thought slashing tariffs by 115% to ease global tensions around an impending recession was good news, just wait till you hear what we've got in store for you this week when it comes to ActivityPub.Last week, we shipped the ability to block individual users with ActivityPub, so you can limit interactions from people you would rather not engage with. We also touched on the idea that thoughtful moderation can't be achieved with a single feature, but rather is something that requires a collection of tools.
What's new with ActivityPub?
Building on that collection, this week we shipped support for blocking domains with ActivityPub. Domain blocking is a powerful way to limit entire servers in the fediverse, rather than just a single user.Now, if you get spam or abuse from
@bob@spam.com,@sally@spam.com, and@bot@spam.com, you don't have to go and block each user manually. Instead, you can block the entire@spam.comdomain to limit interactions from all users on that server.
0:00
/0:11
1×Once a domain is blocked, you'll no longer see posts or notifications from any of those users, and they won't be able to interact with your profile.
In the upcoming week, we'll also add new setting screens to allow you to easily look up all your blocked users and domains and make changes to it if needed.
Notifications improvements
A small but significant design improvement also went out last week, making it much easier to spot when someone sends you a reply using ActivityPub.While follows, likes, and reposts are useful signals that your content is getting engagement, we wanted to highlight even more clearly when you get a reply or comment on something you've posted – so you never miss out on a conversation.
If you visit the explore section, you'll also see that this week (for the first time since this newsletter started) we are no longer the most popular user of ActivityPub on Ghost!404Media have overtaken us and moved into the number 1 slot as the largest website sending out all their newsletters with ActivityPub, and they've been getting some great conversations going in the replies on their posts.
If you haven't already followed, they're a great example to take a look at.By the way, we're tweaking and updating the list of sites featured in the Explore section each week. Our sorting is based on a combination of popularity and activity. People using ActivityPub the most are the most likely to get featured!
Finally, we know there are still some issues with custom usernames and Bluesky sharing. We haven't gotten to the bottom of it just yet, but we're working on it.
Sean Tilley
in reply to Building ActivityPub • • •Building ActivityPub
in reply to Sean Tilley • • •