WordPress blogs can now be followed on Mastodon and other federated platforms

https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/11/wordpress-com-blogs-can-now-be-followed-on-mastodon-and-other-federated-platforms/

by carapace • 3 years ago

77 18 3 years ago

computer23• 3 years ago

Here's a link to the ActivityPub Wordpress plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

3PS• 3 years ago

The plugin works with the following tested federated platforms, but there may be more that it works with as well:
Mastodon
Pleroma/Akkoma
friendica
Hubzilla
Pixelfed
Socialhome
Misskey
Firefish (rebrand of Calckey)

Surprising that they mention so many different federated platforms - most of which I haven't heard of - but not Lemmy/kbin. I wonder if it's just a less straightforward integration or if it didn't occur to them to try those.

maegul• 3 years ago

From what I’ve gleaned it’s a link aggregator v microblog division where Wordpress is targeting the microblogs because, largely through mastodon, that’s where the majority are.

Technically, AFAIU, this comes down to whether a platform is based on using the Person or Group actor. Microblogs, and Wordpress, are using the Person actor. Lemmy is based on the Group actor, an obvious side effect of which being that you can’t follow a user/Person on lemmy. Similarly, mastodon’s support for Groups is basically a kludge and breaks down fairly quickly. Most of the platforms listed are similar to mastodon in this regard (with the notable exception of friendica and hubzilla which have a distinct lineage on the fediverse).

Interestingly, I think this highlights two issues. One is whether or he choice of the Person actor over the Group actor makes sense. Arguably supporting both would make a lot of sense for whenever a blog/page is not simply a single person.

The other is whether it makes sense to have a major fediverse platform that doesn’t have good support for both Person and Group actors (like Facebook, friendica and hubzilla, eg). Given the promise or pitch of the fediverse, arguably interoperability and format diversity are fairly central to the fediverse’s value proposition, which means covering multiple bases and allowing the uses to mould the feed and format, which works for them, out of the protocol and ecosystem is kinda the point of the whole thing. In this case, it would mean that it shouldn’t matter whether Wordpress chose the Person or Group actor and that we don’t need to clarify which platforms are supported and why, which sounds good to me.

hbcondo714• 3 years ago

The official announcement from Wordpress.com is also discussed here from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37847782

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

[dupe]

tambourine_man• 3 years ago

I really hope we get back to blogging.

The web can be awesome again, not this handful of megacorp sites.

warkdarrior• 3 years ago

Nobody is going to write blogs anymore. They'll just post ChatGPT prompts that you can run yourself.

telephone3• 3 years ago

Wow. It begins. ActivityPub could change the shape of the future web completely.

sickcodebruh• 3 years ago

I would love to do something like this with a project I’m working on but I know very, very little about ActivityPub beyond some basics from using kbin. Can anyone recommend a good primer for a developer?

mathgorges• 3 years ago

I tried to add ActivityPub support to my personal website a few months ago.

Unfortunately I found myself reading the W3’s documentation [1] for the most part. Fortunately they weren’t that hard to follow :)

In the end I got lazy and integrated with https://fed.brid.gy which was dead simple since I already had WebMentions setup

1: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

xnx• 3 years ago

Blogger is one of those Google products that they've quietly abandoned, but it would be great to see them add ActivityPub support just to stick it to Meta/Twitter.

netruk442• 3 years ago

This got me looking into what it would take to start publishing my own static file GitHub Pages-based blog using ActivityPub. It's something I've wanted to look into for a while.

It looks like at the very least ActivityPub requires a host that responds to POST requests, so GitHub Pages is out. But I found a blog post of someone using serverless functions to handle the ActivityPub part of their static site. I might try that out.

Does anyone here happen to have any experience with setting up ActivityPub for static pages? I'd be interested to know how you set things up.

3np• 3 years ago

If you have RSS, maybe something like this can do the trick?

https://github.com/jehna/mastofeeder

theanonymousone• 3 years ago

It is great. But what if the blog is a static, fully client-side websited hosted on e.g. GitHub psges or vercel?

netruk442• 3 years ago

This looks useful, thanks!

I’ve attempted to follow my blog from Mastodon, but so far no posts have popped up yet. I know it can take a while, though. I’ll check back tomorrow. It would be great if I didn’t have to write and maintain something.

edandersen• 3 years ago

Does this basically turn Mastodon clients into RSS feed readers?

robjan• 3 years ago

It's a little more than that because you can also interact with the post and take part in a conversation.

dang• 3 years ago

Recent and related:

Wordpress.com Now Supports ActivityPub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37847782 - Oct 2023 (50 comments)

WordPress blogs can now be followed on Mastodon and other federated platforms

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