If you’re actively blogging on WordPress and have been playing with Mastodon et al. in the past few months, you probably came across the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress.
The plugin implements the ActivityPub protocol for your site. It allows others to follow your blog from their Mastodon / Pleroma / GoToSocial account. If they reply to one of your blog’s posts there, their reply will be posted as a comment on your blog.
This is already pretty neat! But starting today with the release of version 0.16.1 of the plugin, you can even mention other ActivityPub users in your posts. When you hit Publish, they’ll be notified of your post inside their client of choice.
This is all happening thanks to @pfefferle, developer of the ActivityPub plugin, and @alex who suggested and implemented the feature in this Pull Request.
A big thank you to those 2 people for their work on this!
The 2 links above are examples of what you can do. I added the ActivityPub handles of those 2 fine people in my post, and in return they received a mention in their ActivityPub clients, and you get to see a link to their ActivityPub profile!
If you were looking for a reason to give the ActivityPub plugin a try, this is a great day to start! 🙂
By the way, you can follow my blog on the Fediverse by searching for @[email protected] in your Mastodon / ActivityPub client 😉
5 responses
@jeremy @alex are you still on version 0.16.0? There is a bug with empty content there :(should be fixed with 0.16.1
@jeremy an awesome step forward with all things #ActivityPub!
@jeremy and then we broke your website it looks like.
@jeremy @pfefferle @alex do you think that in time the current #activitypub WordPress plug-in will integrate similar ideas than the Friends WP plug-in? (ability to follow other users and consume the content from inside WP)
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin by Matthias Pfefferle has been updated. It now allows you to @mention ActivityPub users and they will be notified of the mention in your blogpost, through ActivityPub.
This is useful. Yet, Im holding out on using the plugin myself until three things are possible:
Set the user name of the ActivityPub account: Now the username is the login name of the user doing the posting. I recognise using WP user names is a straightforward way of turning WP into an ActivityPub client, and prevents having to add addditional stuff to the database. As I use non-obvious user names for additional website security, having those exposed as ActivityPub users is undesirable however.
Refuse follow requests: currently the plugin allows follows, and defaults to accepting all follows. As on my separate AP account I want to decide personally on follow requests.
Determine flexibly which postings get shared through ActivityPub, and through which ActivityPub user account. The current set-up is that all postings get shared through ActivityPub. Id rather be able to determine not just on a post by post basis what gets shared but also to have specific categories of postings to be shared through a specific account.
I want to actively use the affordances ActivityPub allows on top of those WordPress as blogging tool provides. For me that is the ability to use the different activity types that AP can support, and to use dealing with followers and follows to selectively disclose content to different groups of people.
My current usecase for this is to have a separate AP account that shares my travel plans (posted in an unlisted category on my site) with accepted followers. The first part requires selectively sharing a category of postings, the second part doing so to a group of accepted followers on an AP account that is meant for just this type of postings and not my general AP account.
The plugin will develop in this direction, but is not there yet. I am slowly going through the code of the plugin myself to understand its architecture and choices. Perhaps it will give me an idea either on how to build on its core to create the functionality locally I want for myself, or maybe (though my coding skills are likely not adequate for it) add to the plugin itself.