Ghost announces beginning of the public beta for the social web

Ghost announced public beta start for Fediverse support yesterday. I have been following their journey for a while now. I was eagerly awaiting this release. I had signed up to be included in their earlier beta, but I did not get in. Which might have been for the best.

Naturally, I enabled support for the feature right away. After, going through the documentation obviously. The documentation goes through what this feature is and isn't.

The first thing I felt after enabling it was that nothing changed. The ghost dashboard was still mostly the same. It had changed, obviously. But not massively so.

Second, after spending a day with it, about what the change means I had a few additional thoughts, namely:

1. The cost for this would be announced later. I have written about wanting to edit the theme and not being able to, even though I am a Ghost Pro customer earlier. This would be another cost on top of that.
2. I had thought there would be some way to combine my existing Mastodon ID with this. But that is not possible as of this beta. Which means building audience again, for an ID I don't own/control. This feels like it would tie me down to ghost from here on out. Which goes against how I feel about the Fediverse in general. I don't want to be beholden to any company.
3. I was hoping for Ghost to implement POSSE which this release does not seem to do. I basically wanted to differently categorise my posts on whether it was a short-form/mastodon toot thing or a blog. And then publish it accordingly. This does not happen in the current release.

At least two of the things I complain about are in the roadmap.

There are a handful of features you'd probably expect to find which don't yet work, because we haven't finished building them. In particular:There's no way yet to block, report or mute peopleYou can't yet add images or media to notes and replies

It's not yet possible to customize your social web handle

These are already on our roadmap.