I love Ghost, but I simply can’t get their ActivityPub functionality to work in a self-hosted configuration.

I have done extensive testing:

  • using the New Install (i.e., Docker) option
  • on both Digital Ocean and Vultr
  • with this domain and fresh domain
  • using self-hosted and Ghost’s own ActivityPub infrastructure
  • using a Ghost admin domain at site.tld/ghost and admin.site.tld
  • proxying and not proxying using Cloudflare

Nothing works.

When using Ghost’s infrastructure, I receive Policy Violation errors. When I use my server’s own ActivityPub service at :8080 I get HTTP 403 errors. It’s a little disappointing.

However, when self-hosting, the native analytics with TinyBird worked as advertised and were really well presented, though not as in-depth as Plausible.

When not self-hosting I tried one of the fresh domains above with Ghost(Pro) and the ActivityPub functionality worked. It was marvellous.

I’m really hoping these issues are just early 6.0 bugs for self-hosters.

Some credit to Cathy Sarisky for helping the community.