It's a new week and, once again, time for a fresh round of updates from your ever-frantic bunch of Fediverse explorers.

Last week we explored some Threads compatibility updates, how to find and follow people across the Fediverse, and the progress of the social web beta launch. This week, we've got more fixes and updates to share, as well as a painful and embarrassing story that we wish had never happened.

Oh, what's that? Delicious scroll-bait? Yes. Yes, it is.

What's new with ActivityPub?

Speed and bugfixes, mainly. We closed another 44 issues in the past week as we resolved problems that we noticed, and you reported. We also announced the social web beta on the main Ghost changelog, causing a second wave of publishers to turn on Fediverse sharing for the first time.

Fediverse Observer is now tracking 500+ Ghost servers in the wild, but the real number is over double that!

More publishers in the beta means more interesting accounts available to follow, and one of the most common pieces of feedback over the past few weeks has been that you're looking for more accounts to follow.

Good news: We've refreshed the list of accounts on the Explore page and there are now hundreds of Ghost publishers just 1-click away for you to discover.

We'll continue to refresh, update and refine explore over time, so keep checking back. It's a bit of a chicken/egg situation. We can only do interesting things with Explore when there are enough interesting publishers to populate it. So, the more publishers start using the social web beta, the more updates we'll make.

Threads compatibility

Following on from last week, and thanks to the team at Threads, we've made more major steps forward in sharing content between Ghost and Threads! Following and receiving notes (short-form content) now works in both directions: Notes from Threads show up in Ghost, and Notes from Ghost show up on Threads.

Note: You have to interact with Threads in some way to enable this connection. Once you follow, like, or reply to something on Threads from Ghost, then Threads will index the Ghost profile. They do this so that anyone who doesn't want to have their profile show up on Threads, doesn't have to.

There's still a long way to go, but this is already a huge jump forward compared to just a couple of weeks ago!

Fixing the most painful bug

Here's a fun (read: not fun) story for you, of how we fixed the most embarrassing bug.

Every now and then, over the course of developing our ActivityPub service, we've noticed that our follower count seemed... off. In particular, sometimes it would just drop out of nowhere, but then eventually it would always go back up again.

At first, we assumed that it was a bug in our code for counting followers. Later we thought it might be an issue with all the database drama we were working through. Then, a couple of months ago, we noticed that our own Mastodon profiles were repeatedly unfollowing this newsletter - without us clicking "unfollow".

After a lot of digging, we eventually discovered an issue with a niche synchronization service in the depths of our codebase that was accidentally triggering Mastodon instances to unfollow Ghost, en-masse.

In October 2024 we had ~6,000 followers here. By March of 2025 we were down to just 800.

Worst of all, because of the nature of the bug itself, there's no way to recover them. They're just... gone.

The only good news is that this bug only existed for Ghost instances with a large number of followers, which was literally just 1 instance:

Ourselves.

We found and resolved the issue eventually, but there are a lot of people out there right now who think they're following us and have subscribed to receive updates but, in fact, no longer are. Ouch.

So, if we can ask you a favor this week: Please share and repost this newsletter so that we may hopefully reach and regain some of our lost Fediverse companions.

We miss them.