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open social web

What We Learned About Publishing on the Open Social Web

Over two years, we’ve grown alongside the open social web, experimenting with Ghost, ActivityPub, and Bluesky to publish in ways that align with our values.

What We Learned About Publishing on the Open Social Web
Photo by Viktor Forgacs / Unsplash

By Mallory Knodel and Audrey Hingle

Publishing Like It’s 2025

When Mallory started this newsletter in 2023, she knew she wanted it to avoid the pitfalls of billionaire controlled social media. Her background in internet governance and open protocols made it the obvious place to build a publication that aligns with the values of a decentralized web. Over the past two years, the open social web—which includes the ActivityPub-powered Fediverse and emerging networks like Bluesky—has grown from a niche experiment into a meaningful part of the social media landscape, and this newsletter has grown alongside it.

Today, we publish Internet Exchange every week through Ghost, which automatically pushes our content to the Fediverse (Mastodon, Threads, PeerTube, and others) and then bridges to Bluesky via BridgyFed. This means you can follow us from any ActivityPub-enabled account at @ix@internet.exchangepoint.tech and from Bluesky at index.internet.exchangepoint.tech.ap.brid.gy.

Like the Internet Exchange, BridgyFed, FreeOurFeeds and Social Web Foundation are all projects of Exchange Point, the non-profit founded by Mallory that supports initiatives dedicated to transformative technology and social justice, with a focus on advancing public interest technology and open ecosystems.

This year Audrey joined as editor-in-chief, overseeing editorial strategy, shaping voice and tone, and leading audience growth. She has also focused on improving how our publishing workflow connects Ghost with federated platforms. Together, we’ve been figuring out how to make this setup work—not just technically, but editorially and culturally. What follows is what we’ve learned along the way.

Why Ghost and ActivityPub Made Sense

Ghost is an independent publishing platform for people who care about owning their work and their relationship with readers. Founder John O’Nolan describes Ghost as “open source, non-profit, and built to give creators complete ownership of their content and their audience.” Ghost also supports open protocols, which matters for distribution that is resilient and fair.

The big challenge for independent publishers hasn’t changed in two decades: discovery. As O’Nolan puts it, “You can own your platform and serve your audience beautifully, but if people can’t find you, none of it matters.”

While email remains a reliable way to reach readers, it’s still dependent on delivery systems and inbox placement. Algorithms on mainstream social platforms actively suppress links, making it harder to reach new audiences. The integration between Ghost and ActivityPub has the potential to create a more open, free-flowing distribution layer that sidesteps these limits. That potential hasn’t been fully realized yet, but it points toward a model where content circulates across networks without relying on a single company to deliver it.

Setup: Mostly Smooth, a Few Rough Edges

Right now, our setup is optimised for broadcast. We publish in Ghost and the content flows automatically to the open social web, but the engagement layer remains fragmented. There’s no straightforward way to reply to people or interact directly from within Ghost, so any engagement happens natively on each platform and isn’t integrated back into our publishing workflow. Our bridge to Bluesky presents yet another layer of abstraction from our readers there.

Long-form publishing is also still maturing across the Fediverse. On Mastodon or PeerTube or Threads, readers see a title and excerpt with a link to the full article, which works well as a fallback. The ideal is native, full-article reading across apps, but that requires coordination between platforms. It’s a broader ecosystem issue, not just a Ghost limitation, and it’s one Ghost is aware of. The Social Web Foundation and ActivityPub implementers worked in the better part of 2025 to address long-form text.

We also ran into some predictable quirks. Handles generated from domains are long. Mentions don’t always convert cleanly. Logging in to reply on Bluesky through a bridge isn’t even possible (yet?). None of these are dealbreakers, but they are the kinds of issues that come with working with tech that’s still evolving. Our goal is to push the boundaries of the tech so that we can help it expand.

Reflections: Participating in an Evolving Ecosystem

The strongest reason to publish in the open social web is discovery that aligns with our values. ActivityPub provides a way out of the link suppression and opaque algorithms of main-stream social networks. Email lists and ActivityPub both run on open rails, which means no single company can throttle your reach or cut you off from your audience. That’s good for publishers and good for the public.

Publishing long-form content in the Fediverse today is still mostly one-way, but the foundations are solid. ActivityPub is a two-way protocol, and the network becomes healthier when publishers also read and engage. Ghost’s decision to build a reading experience is a step toward making that cultural shift easier.

We started this newsletter with the open social web at the center. Audrey joined to strengthen the workflow, and together we’ve seen how far the tools have come, and how much promise remains. The integration already expands our reach beyond traditional channels, and the engagement model is steadily improving. Still, there’s plenty of room to grow. We want engagement to aggregate back to a single view so small teams (like ours) can keep up. We want native long-form reading across major apps. We want simpler ways to reply to readers where they are. 

Our plan is simple: keep publishing, test new features as they roll out, and share what we learn along the way. The goal of IX is to further the field of public interest technology, and we see publishing on the open social web as a central part of that mission. We’re doing this as active participants in the ecosystem: contributing to its growth, learning from others, and sharing what works—and we’re proud to be funding this work through Exchange Point!

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It’s a small way to say thank you for supporting feminist perspectives on internet governance, privacy, security, and the technologies shaping our future.

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