Ghost funds Fedify

I am happy to announce some great news! Fedify, an open source project I've been working on since this spring, has been funded by Ghost, a global publishing platform.

What is Fedify?

First, let me explain what Fedify is.

Fedify is an ActivityPub server framework. ActivityPub protocol is behind the technology that allows disparate social media services like the Mastodon, an open source project, and Threads from Meta to come together and communicate. This federation of social media is called the fediverse.

ActivityPub may seem like a simple protocol at first glance, but it's actually quite complicated to implement interoperability with other services. I was looking for a framework that would take care of those tricky parts for me, and since none existed, I created one.

Ghost's adoption of Fedify

Until a couple of months ago, Fedify was more of a toy for people's hobby projects, but it still had a small community of users, and one day someone told me about Ghost's adoption of ActivityPub and suggested that I should try to sell Fedify to the Ghost team, since Ghost is also written in TypeScript. I was hesitant at first, wondering if it would work, but when I heard that the person who encouraged me to sell to Ghost had sent an email directly to the Ghost team, I got the confidence to contact them.

I was surprised to find out that the Ghost team was reviewing Fedify in a positive way, and they told me that they had indeed decided to go ahead with Fedify. It was a surprise, and I was thrilled!

Funding

After that, I stayed in close contact with the Ghost team, especially the team building ActivityPub into Ghost, and it wasn't long before they approached me with an offer to fund the Fedify project and implement the features they wanted to see added to Fedify. I was in the middle of a job hunt and was sending my résumé to various companies, so this was quite a tempting offer.

I agreed to work with them for about a couple of weeks and got a little funding. I was able to work on Fedify while preparing for my job search, and I found it to be very immersive and enjoyable. Eventually, I expressed my interest in working on Fedify full-time if I could be funded for a longer period of time, and the Ghost team responded positively.

So I've been able to continue working on Fedify with funding for quite some time now. I once worked on an open source project full-time at my previous job, but this is the first time I've ever worked on an open source project I started in a funded way, and I'm excited about the future.