A customer emailed us earlier today. Their site had gone live the day before, they'd switched on Ghost's Social Web feature, and their profile was discoverable from Mastodon. But it showed Posts: 0.

They'd already tried the obvious thing: unpublishing a few posts and publishing them again, to see whether that shook something loose. It didn't.

The short version, from running this across Magic Pages sites since May 2025: it's working. Ghost only ever sends a post to the people following you at the moment you publish it, and Mastodon never goes back for the rest.

It works like your newsletter

Ghost already does this with email. When you publish a post, it goes to the people subscribed to your newsletter at that moment. Someone who subscribes next week doesn't get last week's issue, and you don't expect them to.

The social web works the same way. When you publish, Ghost sends the post to whoever is following you right then.

So a site that went live yesterday has nobody following it yet, which means that when you hit publish there is nobody to send the post to, and it sits on your website where it always was.

That is also why unpublishing and republishing didn't help. There was still nobody to send anything to.

Why the profile says "4 posts" and then shows none

Our customer followed their own site from another account. The profile updated to Posts: 4, and the page underneath stayed empty.

When a Mastodon server meets your site for the first time, it asks a couple of quick questions. One of them is "how many posts does this account have?", and your site answers honestly: four. Mastodon writes 4 at the top of the profile.

But it never asks to see them.

The request to change this is ten years old

Somebody asked Mastodon to go and fetch the back catalogue on 10 September 2016. That somebody was Eugen Rochko, who built Mastodon. The request is still open, with hundreds of comments on it.

Backfill statuses from remote accounts when first subscribed · Issue #34 · mastodon/mastodonYour self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community - Backfill statuses from remote accounts when first subscribed · Issue #34 · mastodon/mastodonGitHubGargron

The reason is mostly cost: if every server went off and downloaded the full history of everyone its members follow, the network would spend most of its time and storage on posts that nobody asked to read.

There is a gentler reason underneath that one. Somebody who follows you today asked for what you write from today. They didn't ask for three years of your archive landing in their feed.

People have argued about this for a decade and it isn't settled.

What actually fixes it

Publish something.

That's the whole fix. Once one person on a server is following you, the next thing you publish arrives there, and your profile starts filling up.

On a server where nobody was following you before today, your back catalogue is not going to appear. There is no setting on your end that changes that.

So if you are setting up a new site, switch the social web feature on before you start publishing, rather than after, and consider creating an account on popular ActivityPub instances you can use to follow yourself. That way you can "force" a server like mastodon.social to fetch your posts.