Mastodon's Newsletter Challenge: Federation Complicates Delivery

Mastodon's newsletter feature hits a technical bottleneck. Delivering messages across its decentralized network—where creators and readers live on different servers—requires solving unsubscribe handling, bounce management, and CAN-SPAM compliance through ActivityPub, a protocol designed for public posts, not guaranteed delivery. Ghost already solved this in a centralized system. Mastodon's engineering discipline will determine if federation can scale it.