Automattic has big plans for WordPress and ActivityPub. You can follow any blog that has ActivityPub functionality turned on – here’s how.
How to Follow WordPress Blogs From Anywhere on the Fediverse
In case you weren’t aware, there’s a plugin for WordPress that lets blogs talk to the Fediverse, and it’s sponsored / owned by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. You can follow a publication, see its articles pop up in your social feed, and comment on them from your own instance. If a blog has comments enabled, your responses will show up on the other end.
A comment originating from Firefish vs how it looks on here. You can scroll to the end of this article to see it!
We Distribute has been experimenting with this kind of thing for almost as long as we’ve been around, and we’ve migrated to the new 1.0.0 release of WordPress-ActivityPub. The guide below will clue you in on how to follow us.
Step 1. Find the Actor
To access our publication on the Fediverse, you’ll need to first find our account details. In ActivityPub, this is called an Actor. While there’s an increasing amount of WordPress blogs that support this, not every publication necessarily spells out what their Actor is.
To follow an Actor in the Fediverse, you only need an Actor’s handle or an Actor’s URL. One or the other will work fine.
Our Actor URL is:
https://wedistribute.org/@news
Our handle is:
@news@wedistribute.org
We highly recommend to WordPress admins using this plugin to publish these details somewhere that’s easy for readers to find. Because the plugin does nothing to change a website visually, readers may have no idea that this kind of functionality exists for a publication.
Step 2. Put it in Search
For most Fediverse platforms, the Search bar actually does more than just search for things – it can be used to pull in remote accounts and posts for you to look at.
The search form on Mastodon.
Paste whatever you copied from Step 1 into your search bar, and hit Enter. If everything worked correctly, you should be able to see a profile for our blog!
A WordPress ActivityPub Actor as seen by Mastodon.
The integration is still pretty limited on profile customization. For the most part, subscribers will only be able to see the site’s name, logo, and tagline in a profile view. Hopefully, more customization options will come in the near future.
Step 3. Follow Us!
Hit the follow button, and your request should come through. If you don’t see any posts in the feed, don’t worry! You can copy and paste links to any of our articles, and that will pull the post into your social feed.
What an Article activity looks like on Mastodon: a link, and a card preview.
One thing to keep in mind is that different Fediverse platforms all render articles differently. If a WordPress blog is just posting Article activities by default instead of Notes, Mastodon will default to just displaying the URL. Firefish, Akkoma, Friendica, and others will instead try to render the basic HTML and inline images.
The same post, shown on Firefish.
There are a few different options for admins to decide how to display federated posts. Unfortunately, there’s not a great “one size fits all” option – we choose to send out the entire Article contents for other blogging platforms to take advantage of. Other admins might prefer to change the output, and turn the posts into Notes with a brief description and a link.
Various options for rendering articles on the ActivityPub side.
GitHub - Automattic/wordpress-activitypub: ActivityPub for WordPress
ActivityPub for WordPress. Contribute to Automattic/wordpress-activitypub development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub