Tag: ap

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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, I’m 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. I’d 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.

INDIEWEB.SOCIAL is a #Mastodon-based Fediverse instance that is a home for those who build, study, promote – or are just fascinated by – a wide variety of #openweb, #indieweb, #federated and #humanetech practices and technologies.

We seek to promote innovation and shared evolution and promotion of such technologies as well as to offer this instance itself as a platform to experiment with integration and early implementations of these.

Originally registered by Jeannie McGeehan, now co-administrated by Tim Chambers

To me it’s more logical to run ActivityPub individually, either directly from your own domain, or by having a separate single-person instance (such as in my case). Yet, I can see how having a group instance like this can be useful.

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I’ve added a plugin, Mastodon Autopost, to crosspost from this blog to my Mastodon instance.
This won’t bring back any reactions to this blog, unlike Twitter reactions which do get back to this blog through Webmention. For that I would need to use Bridgy Fed. However that has as a disadvantage that it would turn my blog into a separate ActivityPub account, an activitypub user in its own right.

For now I’d rather have a separate Mastodon account (on my personal instance). Not everything I post on my blog I want to post to Mastodon, and not everything I post on Mastodon I want to have in my blog (e.g. responses to or reposts of others). I can definitely see me using this blog as the one and only hub for my online communications, but for that to work, I want to be able to keep ephemeral postings outside my regular site and my rss feeds, and more importantly be able to determine intended audiences per posting. Another requirement is that I can post tweets about a blogpost without that tweet being a separate blogpost (now I use the post excerpt for that and send it to twitter)

Currently I have my Mastodon (and my first Twitter account) set to me needing to approve every follower. My audience for a message is somewhat known to me that way, and I can shape a message accordingly. We all talk differently to different people and have conversations in different settings and contexts. This is true for online conversations just as much as for offline conversations. My microblog account does post everything from my blog but I also interact there independently from my blog.

With this plugin, for each posting I can determine if it is cross posted to Mastodon. I already had a similar setting for Twitter (and Flickr, which I don’t use). See the images.

[UPDATE]
It works as intended. I set the excerpt of this posting to “If all works as intended, this blogpost should show up in my Mastodon instance #wordpress #activitypub”, and set the plugin to post title, excerpt and URL.


[/UPDATE]

Discovery in networks is always a bit difficult. You can for instance traverse the follower list of the followers of your followers (ad infinitum), which I often do, or you make voluntary lists like webrings, or blogrolls (my blogroll is in the right side bar). Trunk has some interesting thematic lists with (real 😉 )people’s activity pub and Mastodon accounts on them for a wide variety of topics. From retro-gaming to sustainability, from cyberpunk to fountain pens, and from witchcraft to gardening.