They say you are the sum of the 5 newsletters you spend the most time with, and, since you're reading this one again – it's probably time to start getting worried.

Last week, we shipped the glorious ability for you to change your ActivityPub handle, so you're no longer stuck with @index. Hundreds of you are now rocking brand new social web identifiers, and looking good doing it.

What's new with ActivityPub?

The big news this week is that you can now upload images to notes, comments, and replies on the social web. Now, when you want to share a quick photo, receipts for your argument, or a dank meme: You can.

Editing your profile

As well as being able to change your social web username, you can now also edit the rest of your social web profile. By default, we set up your profile with the title, description, and icon of your Ghost website. Now you can customize them for the social web, and add an optional cover image.

Sharing to Threads & Bluesky

As discussed last week, Threads and Bluesky require additional steps to display content. Rather than having you figure out what those steps are and then perform them manually, we've simplified the process by turning it into a button you can click.

You can find these new buttons on the new Preferences screen and, once enabled, a shortcut link to view your profile on those services.

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That said, this is kind of like a beta of a beta. Betaception, if you will.

If you enable Threads/Bluesky sharing and then change your social web handle afterwards, Threads/Bluesky aren't particularly good at handling that right now. Sometimes things break. We've reported these issues to their respective teams, and hopefully they'll be resolved soon enough.

Nice.

Coming up next, we'll deal with the Fediverse Chick. IYKYK.

Building ActivityPub

2025-04-21 18:58:07

Custom usernames

We've been shipping hard in the last week, and we've got more ActivityPub updates to share for those of you who are trying out the beta!

Last week, we recapped the top feedback we've received so far around what's working well about ActivityPub; and what isn't. This week, we're addressing the request that has been sitting firmly in the number one spot.

What's new with ActivityPub?

Up until now, all users of ActivityPub in Ghost had a simple, fixed username of @index@domain.com. And, if your domain included www then the username would be @index@www.domain.com.

Now, the www prefix has been automatically removed from all usernames, and you can customize the @index part to anything you like!

This a first step to give you more control how people see and interact with your profile in the Fediverse, and you can expect more settings like this to be added as we go.

What about multiple usernames?

One of the other common questions we've had lately is whether Ghost will allow multiple staff users within a website to have separate usernames. The answer to that is: Yes, that's that plan. But we're not there yet.

Eventually, we're hoping to make it so that you can have a publication-level profile like @index@404media.co that contains all posts, from anyone on the site — as well as staff user profiles like @jason@404media.co and @sam@404media.co that represent posts and interactions from those individual authors.

This part, though, is still a way off.

Making it possible to support multiple users within a single Ghost install is a significant piece of work, and there are many other things we're hoping to get working first. Like, for instance, support for @mentions and being able to add images to replies! (Foreshadowing)