Ghost ⧉ is a very popular free open source platform for creating websites, blogs and newsletters. It includes a paid subscription option, and is intended as a more ethical alternative to Nazi-hosting Substack ⧉.
You can now follow Ghost-powered sites from Mastodon etc as Ghost’s software has added Fediverse compatibility.
How to follow Ghost-powered sites from Mastodon etc.
- Go to explore.ghost.org ⧉ (if you already know which Ghost site you want, skip to step 4 below)
- Click the category tab you want (swipe the tabs right to see more categories)
- Click on a site to open a preview, click on the arrow-in-box icon to go to the site itself
- Copy the domain or subdomain of the Ghost-powered site you want to follow (such as example.com or blog.example.com)
- Go to Mastodon and paste the address @index@(domain or subdomain) into the search box
- The Fediverse account for the Ghost-powered site should appear, click on the account and then click Follow
If this doesn’t work, it may be that the Ghost-powered site hasn’t switched on its Fediverse compatiblity. However, most of them seem to have it activated.
This is really fiddly! Isn’t there an easier way to discover Ghost sites to follow?
Yes, you can browse a human-curated list of good Ghost sites with their Fediverse addresses ready for you to copy-paste into Mastodon etc over on Fedi.Directory’s Ghost section ⧉.
Also, as more people follow Ghost sites they will start showing up in search results on Mastodon etc alongside all the other kinds of Fediverse accounts. If you see a Ghost site in search results, you can just click on it and don’t need to copy-paste anything.