The federated One Man & His Blog

The biggest challenge for digital media has always been discovery: how do people find your journalism? For most of the 2010s, the answer to that was two-fold: search and social. But both of those have changed beyond all recognition in the 2020s, and the rise of the audience team — and audience as a discipline with journalism — is a reflection of that.

We're exploring both new ways of connecting with our audiences, and older ways, too. The rebirth and dramatic growth of newsletters has been one sign of that. But it has raised it's own challenges. If you're an independent newsletter creator, how do you find your audience? And how do they find you?

Substack has tried to solve that problem by turning itself into a platform. But, to me at least, this looks like an old trap in a new disguise. Think of all the businesses that built their audience presence on Facebook, only to be severely rug-pulled years later. As a VC-backed business, what's to stop Substack doing the same down the line?

The fundamental problem is that being social on the web is something you go to a place/platform/app to do. What if the web itself is social? What if there was an underlying protocol that allowed you to follow and reach to other people's content, and also publish your own, and have people read and react to it?

That's the underlying promise of ActivityPub. You've probably not heard of it. If you have, it's probably associated in your head with Mastodon, the geeky Twitter alternative the tech world has moved to en masse, but few other communities. But it's capable of much more than that.

Getting on the ActivityPub beta train

As of today, One Man & His Blog is part of Ghost's ActivityPub public beta. I've, personally, been involved for some months, with a smaller site of mine – Coffee & Complexity – in the private beta. That means that you can now follow this site (and that other one) on any Fediverse-equipped service, from Mastodon, to Flipboard, to WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin activated).

I'll write more about what this could mean, and how it works, in the coming weeks.

But if your work intersects with audience development or growth, this is something you should be paying attention to. It's not yet ready for prime time. But if it does work, it could transform how we reach and maintain contact with audiences, without that relationship being owned and mediated by one of the big tech platforms.

And that could be a very significant shift indeed.

Follow One Man & His Blog in the Fediverse

You can now follow the site at @index@onemanandhisblog.com. Search for that in Mastodon, or Flipboard, or other Fediverse service, and you'll be hooked up.

More information on the beta:

Social web (beta)

💡Currently in public beta on Ghost(Pro) This feature is in active development, and is not yet complete. We’re welcoming early testers to give it a try and share their feedback, as we work on finalizing this experience for inclusion in Ghost 6.0. Since 2013, Ghost has made it

Ghost Help CenterGhost

More about why this matters:

The web just got a little bit more social

Why Ghost’s ActivityPub Beta matters, even if you don’t undertand the first half of this sentence.

Coffee & ComplexityAdam Tinworth

Ghost Connects Creators Across the Social Web

The Internet is evolving, and Ghost is at the forefront of an exciting new shift. On 17 March, the content management and blogging platform announced the public beta of its social web – a ground-breaking move that allows creators and publishers on the paid Ghost(Pro) platform to seamlessly connect and

Studio6 by Neville HobsonNeville Hobson