ActivityPub on WordPress.com

activitypub 1 Minute

I’m really happy to see the ActivityPub plugin enabled for all free and paid WordPress.com accounts. I’ve been using the plugin on this blog for about a week, thanks to Matthias Pfefferle at WordPress, and I have some thoughts about it so far.

The first thing is that it’s definitely more like having a fediverse add-on to your WordPress blog than like using WordPress as your main fediverse portal. That’s OK, and I’d kind of like to see more applications integrate that way.

The second is that it’s extremely smooth. People who follow me on this blog (“@evanprodromou@evanp.me”) will get pushed blog posts when I post them. There isn’t anything else I have to do. The blog posts appear like native fediverse posts, not as links (although the link is included at the end).

Best of all, when I get likes or comments, they act like native WordPress likes and comments. I have a chance to approve them and manage them. The conversation turns out to be really natural in the blog interface.

I have been followed more than 180 times, which is pretty neat; and comments are pretty lively and active. I haven’t seen any get caught by Akismet, but I have seen some of them in the queue waiting for me to approve.

I am really excited to see what happens next here. Somewhere around 40% of Web sites run on WordPress. I don’t know how many of those are on wp.com, but probably a lot. It would be cool to see how well they start lighting up on the fediverse.

If you’ve got a WordPress blog that’s fediverse-enabled, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to start putting together a directory of recommendations.

Unknown's avatar

Published by Evan Prodromou

Research Director at Social Web Foundation. Past founder of Wikitravel, StatusNet, identi.ca, Fuzzy.ai. CTO of Breather, TRU LUV and MTTR. Co-creator of GNU Social, creator of pump.io. Co-chair of the Social Web Working Group at W3C. Co-author of ActivityStreams 2.0. Co-author of ActivityPub. Co-author of OStatus. In Montreal, from San Francisco. Greek, Arab, Palestinian, American, Canadian. Husband, father, cook, gardener.

Published

17 thoughts on “ActivityPub on WordPress.com”

  1. @evanprodromou @evanprodromou@evanprodromou.wordpress.com for personal blogs, some kind of connection btwn your ”regular" account and the blog feed seems like a logical next step. Hopefully that will be explored going forward, or through the other wp fediverse plugins. (in your case, for instance, there’s no visible connection btwn @evanprodromou & @evan).

  2. @evanprodromou I noticed that your handle links to your blog in this post. I expected to be able to follow from Mastodon/Mona by clicking on it. Not sure if that’s configurable & maybe a limitation of Mastodon/apps in recognizing a link that’s a handle. If so, shouldn’t there be a standard attribute of tags that allows links to be known as AP handles?

      1. In your site’s dashboard, you should be able to find a “Follow Me on the Fediverse” block that you can add anywhere on your site. You could add it to your site’s footer for example. That can be a helpful prompt to invite people to follow your site on the Fediverse!

  3. @evanprodromou I've ActivityPub enabled five WordPress sites now, three single-author sites, and two multi-author sites. For the "whole blog" account, the WP AP plugin creates a "forwarding" user that re-posts everything from individual authors. So I recommend setting up an "Authors" page that lists the authors' profiles with Fediverse ID. See https://kwpeace.ca/authors for example (no, I don't know why all Fediverse IDs aren't linked).

  5. @evanprodromou Very cool! I hope we can get some people to activate this plugin even when they are not active on the fediverse, to see if people here find their blogs and interact with their posts!

  6. @evanprodromou Are replies/interactions part of this? I.e. can your blog reply to this comment and have the comment be federated?I’m assuming not, but was curious.

  7. Hello Evan, glad to see someone else working on promoting this too. Here is the Mastodon Migration Blog list of Federated WordPress Accounts so far: https://mastodonmigration.wordpress.com/2023/10/16/federated-wordpress-blogs-edition-2-3/ .

    Also trying to get WP to look into a bug related to posts not coming through: https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/111247826233886988 . Curious if you are seeing the same thing?

    Let’s keep in touch.

    MM

    Reply

  8. @evanprodromou curious. If I reply here, the comment goes to your blog. But if you reply to that comment, does it show back up here?

  9. @evanprodromou my blog is linked in now, but I've not much experience of it as I've been unwell lately. But I'm looking forward to see how it goes!

  10. @evanprodromou Big fan of wordpress getting AP integration, it means I directly follow people who can't or don't want to cram their best thoughts into a masto thread.

  11. @evanprodromou G'day! I've just fediverse-enabled my WordPress Newsletter(/blog), and am about to do my first post. @hildabastian.wordpress.com

Leave a comment