Short thoughts, notes, links, and musings by Molly White. RSS 
I had such a great chat with Mike McCue on his Dot Social podcast, where we talked about the future of the web and why I'm a web optimist, why everyone should be a blogger, digital ownership, and decentralized social media.
The full episode is available here and on PeerTube/YouTube/the usual podcast feeds!
is this feeling... hope?
![At various points we revisited our old idea for networked publishing in Ghost and tested a few prototypes, but we were never sure how to make it scale; nor how many other platforms would ultimately adopt it. For all its promise, ActivityPub (like many open standards) seemed to generate products with user experiences that were often confusing and convoluted. But something else happened in the intervening period between 2016 and 2024: People became increasingly fed up with the behavior of centralized platforms, and increasingly hungry for alternatives. The motivation for exploring and understanding new technologies, rough edges included, meaningfully increased. In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. In the past week alone, we've had conversations with Mastodon, Flipboard, The Verge, Buttondown, WriteFreely, and several co-authors of the ActivityPub spec. There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of [begin strikethrough] the linux desktop [end strikethrough] the open web.](https://storage.mollywhite.net/micro/1d5eb382a3faf17a0c4d_Screenshot-2024-05-10-at-12.36.00---PM.png)
So excited to hear that the Ghost blogging software is going to support federation via ActivityPub! https://activitypub.ghost.org/
If you sign up for updates, they have a survey where they're asking for feedback. Now's your chance to get your suggestions in!
Cool to see Ghost taking this step, while Substack is over there trying to build walls around their product to trap people in.
Ghost's post is also how I learned that Buttondown is working on ActivityPub support! 🙌 Exciting times.