22 #YoungAdult publishers that accept unagented submissions https://authorspublish.com/22-young-adult-publishers-that-accept-unagented-submissions/ Not all of these are currently open to submissions but a majority are, so check the sites individually! #WritingCommunity #Publishing
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Mastodon: Giving Journalists Options Away From Big Tech
IJF brings together people from across the news industry to talk about the issues they face and celebrate the work they are doing. This year, Big Tech was one of the topics that dominated the panel discussions.
Andy Piper speaking at the event. Source: Saskia WelchMastodon, represented by Andy Piper, Head of Communications, Felix Hlatky, CFO, and Philip Schröpel, Head of Staff, brought together supporters of the open social web, Big Tech-disbelievers, and curious locals to a small bar nestled in the old walls of Perugia.
Understanding that many in the audience were unfamiliar with Mastodon, Piper introduced the social platform to the room, highlighting the benefits for journalists. This included the work to highlight article authors, using the byline feature that rolled out in July last year, and emphasis on the value of links to external publications.
Mastodon promised new tools to track referrals through links would be rolling out across the network soon but were already live on mastodon.social – the server run by the Mastodon team.
Hlatky spoke of Mastodon’s future as an organisation and their ongoing work to transition from a German gGmbH to a new European nonprofit. He acknowledged internal work to restructure and remove single ownership from Mastodon claiming, “No one gives you money if one owner can run away with it.”
There was a strong message that Mastodon wanted what is best for their users, rather than their pockets. A stark contrast to the Big Tech platforms that had been discussed across the Festival.
To echo the sentiment, Mastodon then invited Björn Staschen from Save Social to speak.
Björn Staschen presenting Save Social at the event. Source: Saskia WelchSave Social is a predominantly German-speaking effort to turn away from Big Tech social media platforms and strengthen alternatives. In less than three months, their petition has reached 200,000 signatures.
“We, as a society, have to be part of the solution,” said Staschen. “We want to strengthen alternative platforms. Ensure freedom of expression by creating diversity and transparency.”
When it came to joining Mastodon, Schröpel admitted there are “multiple ways”, but that the Mastodon team are able to support individuals and organisations in setting up their own instance or offer advice on the network.
Philip Schröpel presenting ways to join Mastodon. Source: Saskia WelchHowever, joining the platform continues to be a barrier for many users. A group of Italian women who attended the event abandoned their short effort to join the platform half-way into the presentation, confused about where to go and which app to use.
Alongside presenting Mastodon as an alternative platform, the aperitivo offered one of the only opportunities to take tangible action against Big Tech at IJF – attracting doers, rather than the commentators that lined the panels of the main event.
“There’s a mix of people in this room right now with the same instincts we have to save democracy,” Piper said in his closing remark, encouraging collaboration and action.
Based on the panels at IJF 2025, journalists are more worried than ever about the role they play in democracy. Witnessing the actions of the White House, many journalists are now calling for an “EU alternative” to Big Tech platforms.
Mastodon now has the opportunity to present themselves as the EU alternative and help journalists protect democracy.
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Hands on with Ghost’s New ActivityPub Beta
Recently, Ghost announced that their new ActivityPub offering is available in public beta. The company has been famously public with documenting their development, soliciting feedback from the wider community about how their integration should work. We took some time today to explore the beta, and showcase what the system can currently do. Keep in mind, these are still early stages for the platform, and there’s a lot of development happening behind the scenes.
The first big change you’ll likely notice is that Ghost’s dashboard now incorporates a timeline under the Home tab. The layout is simple and minimalist, and breaks out into several different sections: Inbox, Feed, Notifications, Explore, and Profile.
One interesting design choice involves how content is split up between views. Long-form articles from your subscriptions show up in the Inbox, but general statuses instead land in the Feed. This seems like a good design decision, since Ghost is trying to straddle the line between being a social reader, and a general microblogging platform. You can easily keep track of your subscriptions and reading list, while also being able to move at a much faster pace on the timeline.
Inbox, left. Feed, right.In our testing, we followed a variety of different actors from across the Fediverse, including our ActivityPub-enabled WordPress site. Happily, our articles showed up in the Inbox without a hitch, and clicking on one opened up a clean reader view. This all happens without navigating away from your position in the Inbox or the Timeline.
Clicking on profiles also renders a social view for any Actor recognized by Ghost’s platform. There are still a few hiccups here: remote profiles can be a bit slow to load, and posts don’t always show up right away. Given that this is still a beta, it’s very likely that Ghost will continue to focus on performance improvements.
So, what does the experience of using Ghost’s social dashboard feel like? Honestly, it’s pretty slick. It’s hard to measure exactly how well the design nails the overall experience, considering I just set my own Ghost site up two days ago. As more interactions come in, this will be easier to measure.
A form for status updates sits at the top of the feed, and it’s minimalist and unobtrusive. At the moment, it’s not particularly fleshed-out: hashtags, mentions, polls, visibility scopes, quote posts, and attachments don’t currently exist. This is something that I really hope to see improve in the short term, given that most of the Fediverse supports these basic features.
Notifications are also pretty simple here, but they look nice and can stack together when multiple people perform the same interaction. It might be nice to have the ability to filter notifications and view them by type, but this is a pretty decent start.
One really nice affordance Ghost makes involves how comments work. Prior to this new development, Ghost historically did not natively support comments, and the main workaround most people relied on was to integrate Disqus or another third-party commenting system. Now, social commenting is supported in several places: on the feed, in side discussions, and on article entries themselves.
One slight annoyance here is that the commenting system technically supports threaded conversations, but doesn’t do the best job at showing which parts of a thread have replies. You kind of just have to click in to a section and hope to see some responses.
Currently, search and discovery are pretty limited. Ghost offers an Explore tab that highlights a number of featured accounts across the Fediverse, but it’s a short list. Search, on the other hand, just lets you look up people through their ActivityPub handles. It works, but it would be nice to be able to pull in remote content the way other Fediverse platforms do.
The biggest opportunity here involves Ghost’s expansive user base. There are a huge amount of Ghost publications out there. As more people and organizations opt into the beta, it would be great to see a similar design to how Ghost’s publication explore page works.
Top of the landing page for Ghost’s publication directory.This is more of a “wish list” than it is a set of defined expectations, but we think there are some things Ghost could do to really shine.
Overall, the future is looking really bright! Ghost has done a phenomenal job in talking about their progress and findings in their ActivityPub Newsletter, and their product is really starting to take shape. I ended up migrating my personal blog over for testing purposes, but I think I’m going to stick with it. What Ghost is promising in slick, polished, and works incredibly well. If they can focus on smoothing the rough edges, it will be a huge win for Fediverse publishing.
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