Interesting note in the latest fediverse blog post update for Ghost:
Will members who use ActivityPub (rather than email) count toward Ghost(Pro) billing? And so far the answer is yes, because ActivityPub is (quite significantly) more expensive to support than email. But, this is all very early days, and hopefully we’ll figure out ways to get some of the costs and complexity down.
If I’m reading this correctly and the pricing holds, that effectively means you will pay more for hosting if you have lots of followers on the fediverse. This would be a first; I’ve never heard of a social network charging for followers before.
So if you’re using the $11/month Ghost hosting that allows 500 members, you could have (for example) 100 email subscribers and 400 followers in the fediverse. As soon as you had more subscribers or followers, you would need to bump up to the $19/month plan. If you got up to 10k and more followers, you would be paying hundreds of dollars a month.
Of course this is all beta and as Ghost further optimizes it, the pricing could change. It comes from Ghost’s early testing that showed how resource-intensive ActivityPub is. I can definitely attest to that with Micro.blog as well.
Tim Apple I don't know why they just didn't set up commenting to link to a fediverse instance of the users choice along with sharing their posts. Then no overhead for them except the code itself to implement it.
Matthias Pfefferle 
Emelia 👸🏻 @manton my curiosity here is "how can we make AP less resource intensive?”
prealpinux 
John Spurlock @pfefferle @manton
seems to be similar to the way most hosted mastodon services charge as well, although those are entire "instances", where ghost is splitting that up among each customer, depending on the interaction count
Laurens Hof @pfefferle @manton well good news for you Matthias haha. I was open to considering ghost for Fediverse report, but pricing per follower makes this extremely expensive and a complete non starter for me, so I’ll happily stay with Wordpress
Adam Tinworth It’s probably worth remembering that this is ghost(pro) pricing — you can also self-host Ghost, and there are plenty of other hosters out there, too, who might take a different pricing approach. And they have made it clear that ActivityPub support is coming to the self-hosted version.
Pratik I think this is more of an ActivityPub design problem than a Ghost pricing issue.
Manton Reece @thisismissem Totally worth exploring. I've always thought of ActivityPub as "chatty" but I've never spent enough time to really measure it.
Matthias Pfefferle @laurenshof @manton and that is good news? only because of the money?
😋
Steve Sawczyn I know it's likely not practical at all, but I wish I could have my own Fediverse instance and micro.blog all rolled into one. I guess I sort of have this with m.b already, the missing part is not being able to use Mastodon clients that might make it easier to do certain things. One identity, one feed. I can't even begin to imagine how resource intensive that might be though. Still, as the Fediverse gains popularity, might be an interesting add-on subscription type possibility.
Manton Reece @SteveSawczyn Thanks, it's mostly all there except Mastodon clients, as you said. I've experimented with that but I'm not sure what the best path forward is, since Mastodon features and Micro.blog features don't exactly match up.
Numeric Citizen Well, I’m a bit surprised by this announcement. But I’m willing to take a wait and see attitude here. It’s too early to decide. The good thing is that my followers count is probably very low, so no issue for me! 😂
Steve Sawczyn I think that's one of the biggest challenges with the Fediverse, mismatches between platforms and their features. In my case, I could see myself using Mastodon clients to interact with my feed while using the m.b client to compose longer form posts and to do other things that are mb specific. I'm admittedly a bit of an edge case though as the advantage of certain Mastodon clients for me would offer more efficient navigation, especially between posts, with VoiceOver.