Federatin’ Down at the WordPress ActivityPub

While many people are slamming WordPress because of its baby in charge, I’m focussed still on the open source software I run on my own sites that are not impacted by the tantrums. Lately I have been putting to work on several sites, the WordPress ActivityPub plugin that makes your site publish to and suck in responses from Ye Not So Olde Fediverse.

Just to stake my paw in the space, I started making this work all the way back in 2022 making use of IFTTT and a nifty recipe for posting from RSS to Mastodon (which still works)

Gizmo-ing Stuff to Mastodon

I did have a run with the very first release of the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin (before it was automattic-ed), first on a WordPress.com test blog and here on the home front. While it did work, I found it awkard to be represented in the ‘verse as the “so good they named it twice” handle like @cogdogblog.com@cogdogblog.com. But more, I felt like my blog should push stuff to my own mastodon stream, after all, it’s my stuff.

That’s why I took the other path of rigging up gizmos to post from not only WordPress, but also flickr (I have a tag for my dog Felix in flickr that triggers a post to his own mastodon account) plus I have ones that post things I tag in PInboard as cooltech as stuff in my Mastodon stream tagged #cogdogcooltech. Oh and I have a tag in Pinboard to send stuff through Zapier to our OEG Connect Community Space.

I’m not sure if I am losing my 3 readers in detail, but this is a very efficient small pieces taped together system for link sharing. I use the Pinboard bookmarklet to tag a site I am viewing (along with a description), I can give it tags that organize it for me. At the same time, some of those tags trigger sharing to other channels. If ChatGPT can do that for you, well go right ahead.

I had put this in play too for the DS106 Daily Create once Twitter put the death knell on the API which made it work beautiful for maybe 10 years.

In the meantime, I had noticed that the WordPress ActivityPub plugin had been adding features that made it / makes it more viable now, thanks to much effort by its original developer Matthias Pfefferle and I returned to it first for the podcast site I do for OEGlobal, OEG Voices which you can tune into on the Fediverse by searching profiles for @oegvoices@podcast.oeglobal.org and also putting it back to use here in the Dog Blog home as @barking@cogdogblog.com.

But of course the real gain is that if for some crazy reason someone on Mastodon replies to your federated post, it comes to your blog as a comment. And you can even reply back as if your blog was talking (which it is, right?)

A key feature is setting up how the blog publishes. The default is by author, meaning your presence on the ‘verse is by federating only thr posts you author under a handle defined by your wordpress user name.

Almost all my sites, I am the only author, or the only one who actually posts, so I now go with the blog profile only option meaning the blog has one voice.

Now this gets interesting, as when you go back to the welcome tab, for Blog profile, you can make the first part of the fediverse handle by any name I want. So I have gone on most my sites with some kind of verb like @sharing@…. or here it is appropriately @barking@….. That may be of no significance to you, but to me, it’s a small human touch. It shows up on the welcome tab of the Activity Pub plugin like

As the link says, the real fun comes in the Customize the blog profile tab. Here you can do everything, choose the custom handle, create a background image, write the bio, and add the links that appear on your fediverse profile.

This really makes the profile stand out.

So far my fleet of sites I am federating now via the ActivityPub plugin includes:

• The home based dog house mother ship, this blog CogDogBlog federating as @barking@cogdogblog.com
• The SPLOT that no one wants to contribute to, but heck I will keep at it, Sadly Robotic AI Metaphors, federating as @splotted@sadlyrobotic.cogdogblog.com
• OE Global Voices, the podcast I do for OE Global federating as @oegvoices@podcast.oeglobal.org/
• Open Education Week, the global major important significant world-wide event for OE Global I organize and shamelessly promote, federating as sharing@oeweek.oeglobal.org. This a brand new experiment, and actually because of some tech issues I keep asking to get fixed, is not quite fully federating. But I am excited to not only be federating posts (my cheesy news items) but the calendar of events themselves as submitted, using a new WordPress Event Bridge plugin (“federate your events”) that extends the ActivityPub plugin to work with the Events Calendar plugin we use to run the event sharing.
• The DS106 Daily Create the non-stoppable daily creative challenge that has published one every day since January 8, 2012, federating now as @creating@daily.ds106.us – note that about two years ago, I yanked the guts that tried to work through Twitter, to push to Mastodon using an IFTTT gizmo sending out as @tdc@social.ds106.us but I have been putting it back to federating out with the ActivityPub plugin so any direct replies are now appended to a post as a comment (see a most “brazy” example, thank you Paul Bond for being a fine model). Much still has to be done on the site to make it work to track actual responses to the challenge from the chit chat.

The only way to find these I know of now, is searching in Mastodon for the blog’s username, and selecting “Profiles Matching” – I wish there was a direct link to open in Mastodon the profile.

The one thing I am having a challenge with (okay one of many) is– how can I have a hyperlink from a WordPress site that is federating via ActivityPub that opens it’s post in Mastodon? In Mastodon, all of the share links are back to the WordPress URL, I need to have a link that opens in the Mastodon interface.

If someone can answer that, I will mail you a jar of home made jelly.

The other problem that comes up for many is– in the world of federation we end up with so many different handles. In the excitement of people jumping from Instagram to Pixelfed, I heard this complaint about why their username could not be the same as their Mastodon one. Heck, I had that oen too early, which is why for this purpose the Gizmo-ing to Mastodon with IFTTT, Zapier, and a personal favorite, Make.com can make sense to publish things to your timeline.

My strategy now though, is to accept the Many Accounts I will have, and its on me to boost them from my main account. Guess what? I have a blog post for this:

Federated/Fragmentated 

But going forward, I am all on with using the ActivityPub plugin in WordPress, and its features keep growing.

Why are you not Getting More Federated? It’s easy in WordPress. And while answering the question, get yourself the un-official shirt.

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Featured Image: Pexels Photo by Felipe Liberal free to use under the Pexels “Why-Can’t-They-Just-Use=CC” License modified by Alan Levine. I used Photoshop Generative fill to add street content to left and right, it does a decent job, plus I brushed out the Ha’Penny Bridge text and added my own “W’ORDPRESS ACTIVITY” to the name of the Pub, and slipped in a Wikimedia Commons WordPress logo licensed GNU General Public… what is the result? I toss my derivative into the grand commons via CC0.