Archive & topics
Everything you've published, in one move.
Your whole post history comes with you, imported in the background and sorted into the places where people will talk about it. Ten years of archive ready to become fresh conversations.
The whole archive
A background backfill pages through every article you've ever published, keeping titles, images, excerpts, original dates and the link home to your site.
And everything after
New posts arrive as you publish them. Edit a piece, change who can read it, unpublish it, bring it back. The Bonfire copy follows along.
Run it as often as you like
Imports match on canonical URL, so a second pass updates what's there instead of leaving you with two of everything.
Your publication gets a room
Choose one group or topic, and every imported article lands there. That room becomes the home of the discussion: people join it, follow it, browse everything you've published in one place, and carry a discussion on from one article to the next.
You also decide what comes over at all: everything you publish, or only the articles carrying the Ghost tags you pick.
Where an article ends up
And it keeps up with you
Every change you make in Ghost has a defined counterpart here, including the ones that take something down, which hide rather than destroy.
The community
Readers meet each other, and the people who write.
A byline stops being a name at the top of a page. Your writers get profiles people can follow and answer; your readers get profiles, feeds and rooms of their own. Everyone who turns up for one article leaves with people, not just a thread.
How far someone can come in
Read
Public pieces stay public. Gated pieces keep their gate, exactly as you set it in Ghost.
Reply
Under the article on your own site, with an account here, or from another fediverse server they already use.
Follow
Follow the writer whose beat they care about, get the next piece, and answer them directly.
Gather
Join the topic where that beat lives and keep talking between articles, with everyone else who reads it.
Contribute
Start a discussion of their own, run a poll, raise something worth covering. Readers become participants.
Bylines become people
Importing an article creates its author's profile and keeps the attribution attached to it, so a reader can follow that writer, see everything else they've filed, and reply to them directly.
Beyond your own visitors
With remote interaction switched on, people can take part from whatever fediverse server they're already on. No new account on your domain to put them off.
Conversations that stay put
A discussion belongs to the whole community. It survives an article being unpublished or removed, and it's still there when the next piece on the subject lands.
Tiers & access
What your paid tier can be worth.
Everything you've set in Ghost carries over untouched: what's public stays public, what's paid stays paid. And the tiers you already sell can start opening doors as well as articles.
Each tier becomes a circle that looks after itself
Every tier is mirrored as a Bonfire circle, and boundaries do the rest. Subscribers join their tier's circle, lapsed members drop out of it, and you never touch a list. Retire a tier and its circle is archived rather than deleted, so nobody's history disappears. What that circle is allowed to reach stays entirely your decision. This never assumes a policy on your behalf.
Things you could hand to a tier
Sign-in
One member list, kept in sync.
Your Ghost members are the guest list. Nobody has to sign up a second time, and you never maintain a parallel list of who's who.
They give their email
The same address they subscribed with. No second form, no new password to invent.
Ghost is asked about it
On your member list? A one-time sign-in link goes out. Not on it? They're sent to your Portal to subscribe.
They're in
Their account is set up for them, with whatever their tier unlocks already attached to it.
You decide who gets in
Everyone on your member list, or only the tiers you pick. Your writers and editors always get in, tier or not, and the login page carries your own words and a button to wherever you sell memberships.
Your member list stays yours
Every address gets the same neutral answer: subscriber, stranger or lapsed alike. The login form can't be used to work out who does and doesn't pay you.
A lapse doesn't lock people out
Someone who stops paying keeps their account, their posts, their follows and every conversation they've been part of. They lose only what the tier unlocked, and it comes back if they resubscribe.
In the wild
A magazine already did this.
Jacobin's German edition wanted readers who debate, organise and build solidarity together. They kept publishing on Ghost and gave that community a home of their own.
From audience to community
A comment section wasn't going to be enough, and neither was sending readers to a platform someone else owns. Articles keep coming from Ghost; the conversation happens somewhere their community actually controls: federated, in their own hands, with their own branding on it.
Everything included
Features that ship today.
5 areas, and every capability in them ships today, in the extension you can install this afternoon. Open a group to read through it.
Articles
Where discussion happens
Access & tiers
Accounts & identity
Operations & security
Getting started
Two ways in, and no lock-in either way.
Build it with us, or build it yourself. It's the same AGPL-licensed software in both cases. The difference is only how much of the work you'd like to do, and how much you want it shaped around your publication.
Not on Ghost? The comments widget already drops into any site: WordPress, Drupal, a static blog. And the deeper membership integration (single sign-on, tier and member sync) could be extended to other CMSes and Patreon-style membership tools. Tell us what you publish on →
Build it with us
We sit down with you, work out how your publication and its readers actually operate, and shape the space around that: your branding, your structure, your rules. We wire up the Ghost side, get your archive in, and hand it over as yours.
◼ We work closely with a handful of communities a year, so there's a queue. Worth starting the conversation early.
Or do it yourself
Nothing here is held back for paying customers. The extension is open source, the docs are public, and a technically comfortable team can have it running against their Ghost site in an afternoon. If you'd rather not touch a server, a managed host works too.
Starting with us doesn't tie you to us. A space we build together runs the same open code as one you install yourself, so you can take it in-house, hand it to another team, or carry on alone whenever you like.
Your readers are already here. Give them a room.
Tell us about your publication (how you work, who reads you, what you'd want them doing together) and we'll tell you honestly whether this fits.
