This blog is now on the Fediverse!

You can now have this blog federated to your social media site by following @blog@shkspr.mobi

If you're on Mastodon, it should look something like this:

You should be able to follow it on Lemmy, kBin, PixelFed, and some cool social network I've never heard of.

How

This blog runs on WordPress. Thanks to the tireless work of Matthias Pfefferle, there's now an official WordPress ActivityPub plugin.

It's pretty easy to set up - just install and click on settings. But there are a few niggles you should know about if you run a blog in a subdirectory - for example, this site uses /blog

First, you'll need to add the following to the .htaccess file in your website's root:

RedirectMatch "^\/\.well-known/(webfinger|nodeinfo|x-nodeinfo2)(.*)$" /blog/.well-known/$1$2

That means if someone visits example.com/.well-known/webfinger to find your ActivityPub account, they'll be automatically redirected to example.com/blog/.well-known/webfinger

Secondly, you might need to change your blog's ActivityPub username. For example, I log in to this blog using the username "Master_Control_Program" - but I don't want that displayed as the user. So I went to Settings → ActivityPub → Settings and unticked the "authors" box. I then gave my whole site the unsurprising name "blog":

If you do have multiple authors, each one of them can have their own unique Fediverse account.

Why

You can follow this blog using RSS or Atom - that means you need a feed reader configured to pull from my site every time you want to see if there's an update.

Or you can subscribe via email - every time I publish a blog post it will appear in your inbox.

And, now, if you spend all day on social media you can get my blog's updates directly in your feed.

Fancy features

It is early days for the plugin, but there are a few nice features.

If you hit reply to a blog post in the Fediverse, it become a comment on my blog. This is similar to how Brid.gy syndicates comments.

You can see how many people followed you. And you can remove followers if you want to.

If you don't want to share the entire post, there are several settings which let you choose exactly what you do want shared.

Editing the WordPress post also send the edit out to the Fediverse.

The "joined" date is the date of your earliest blog post. See if you can find my oldest one!

Issues

Aside from a few glitches when setting up, there are a few points to be aware of.

There's no way to set a unique user avatar - it will go with whatever your blog is set to display.

It will only show blog posts from after you installed the plugin. So you can't scroll backwards into your archives.

Although you can see how many followers you have, I don't think there's a way to expose that to your users. And there's no simple way to say "Follow me at…"

As I mentioned, replying to a post converts that reply into a comment. But at the moment it doesn't support threaded comments. If I reply to a comment on the blog, it doesn't get sent back to the user as a reply on the Fediverse. Similarly, there's no way to track how many people repost or favourite your content.

ActivityPub doesn't support inline images. And some clients don't support formatting. So a federated blog post can look a bit weird.

If someone reads a blog post on the Fediverse, then they're not reading it on my website. I don't run any adverts - but I might miss out on people clicking around and reading other articles.

So I think I might only post an excerpt onto social media. I'm not sure yet. Thoughts?

What's next?

If you've seen this post Federated over ActivityPub - please reply! I'd love to know how far it has travelled.