Wordpress.com Now Supports ActivityPub (opens in new tab)

If ActivityPub gets really popular, there won't be a single service that's winning. For example, if each Youtube profile is suddenly a fediverse account which you can follow, the owner of that Youtube profile doesn't need a separate Twitter or Wordpress account - simply the act of uploading the video to Youtube will appear in user timelines of twitter, mastodon and all other services. Same would happen with blogs, instagram accounts, etc.

And if we get to such future, it's possible that we won't even need a Mastodon/Twitter account to have a timeline. iOS and Android could build native support for following accounts and displaying timelines in the operating system.

I agree. Wordpress powers something like 40% of all websites. 40% of the web having a low friction way of publishing to the fediverse is a big deal. Sure, this doesn't mean that almost half the web is suddenly "on the fediverse"; the more ad-dependent a site is, the less likely it seems that they'll enable this unless they can do so in a way that brings users to them.

I want to be able to have a fediverse feed that's as much RSS feed as news feed, but that's my preference. I'm really glad WP is making it easy for folks to use ActivityPub.

I'd love for that to be true, but social media has been trending away from blog-type textual posts for a long time. Last stat I saw, wordpress.com published around 77 million posts per month. I think twitter needs less than 4 hours to hit 77 million tweets.

Also, the brand is in really bad shape. Super outdated and stale. I know a lot of people wish it didn't, but that kind of thing really matters when you're trying to get lots of people to think your product is worth investing time into.

While I wish this were true... considering how long it took to get Gutenberg, I wouldn't hold your breath.

well luckily WordPress would be interoperable with Mastodon and maybe Threads if they stick to their commitment to federate with the ActivityPub protocol.

Bluesky insists on building its own protocol and is making empty promises (https://atproto.com/specs/atp#future-work) to turn it over to the IETF or W3C at some undetermined date.

I really think it's a mistake to assume that there will be one thing which replaces Twitter. This has ~never happened (I think possibly the only example would be the Digg->Reddit migration); normally people leave a dying social network for a _variety_ of other things, not for a copy of the dying thing.

In an ActivityPub world, this is particularly unlikely to happen. Arguably, we've actually had a social media ecosystem a bit like this before; there was a time when Wordpress (self-hosted or service), MovableType and a few others could interact via things like pingbacks (a sort of early quote-tweet).

It would be great if conversations weren't siloed inside one corporation's servers, but I don't think WP will change anything re: Twitter.

Twitter and Mastodon are cognitively low-maintenance tools. The authoring is very simple, and designed to be within 280/500 characters. Wordpress is the opposite. The UI assumes you're there to write, not view other people's sites and comment on them.

Automattic owns Tumblr, and that type of UI is probably what would get people thinking of posts as "tweet-length info" instead of full-on blog posts.

can you elaborate? Wordpress or (personal) blogs in general?

WordPress is much easier to self host but much worse if you try to use it as social media. Most people who use Mastodon will want some Twitter-like experience. I don't think WordPress articles are going to replace toots any time soon.

On the other hand, Tumblr is supposedly working on ActivityPub integration, and that could become a major Fediverse player with the ability to replace Mastodon.

This plugin isn't for WordPress per say (yet?), it's for wordpress.com, so not self-hosted.

That would be great for news sites which have the problem that most of the conversation around articles happens on social networks.

This sounds great! Until spammers and grifters discover it. Is there a plan for them?

We have decided to do it like that, because it is an easy and nice way to have a unique ID that works with or without a custom domain.

For example: `openprotocolfanblog@wordpress.com` makes only sense if you use the wordpress.com subdomain. If you have your own domain, you want to have something like `username@domain` not `username@wordpress.com`.

Besides of that, you will be able to activate user-accounts (next to the blog-account) on higher plans. That means we had to choose something that is consistent but causes no collisions with usernames.

And finally Mastodon and others only show the part before the @, that makes the ID very similar to what Bluesky is doing. https://mastodon.social/@pfefferle/111220452911718192

I assume that would create confusing overlaps with @wordpress.com email addresses which may or may not exist? Maybe just "blog@NAME.wordpress.com" would suffice.

The trouble with that is moderation. Presumably there exists some Nazi who has a Wordpress blog. If they're a particularly noisy Nazi, that could get Wordpress.com banned on a lot of instances, because the Fediverse's primary and easiest moderation route is nuking badly-behaved instances, and many instance admins are _particularly_ sceptical of corporate ones (some instances have _preemptively_ banned threads).

This way, every Wordpress blog is for practical purposes its own instance.

That said, the username component does seem unnecessarily unwieldy.

You would need a server application of some kind for two things: sending your new posts out as activities to your followers, and accepting activities (at least Follow) from the outside world. That application would also need somewhere to store the list of followers and their inboxes (endpoints where you send activities). That's basically it. The actor object itself can be a static file, just don't change its URL.

I encourage you to try building your own minimal ActivityPub server — here's a tutorial to get you started: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas...

The sending and receiving parts aren't required to run on the same machine. You can send activities from your laptop, but the receiving side needs to be on a server with a public IP, a domain, HTTPS and all that.

Here's a novel solution to use Mastodon/Fediverse replies as a comment section on a statically-generated blog.

https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastod...

When I looked into do exactly this a while ago I quickly realized that it would be a lot of work to do properly. There is no such thing as a static ActivityPub service by design.

However, there are premade services that will take an RSS feed and do all the work to allow subscriptions, etc.

There is a bridge from any blog to Fediverse called Bridgy Fed that you can use: https://fed.brid.gy/web-site

You probably can't easily integrate "in the same way"; I suspect this was a large engineering effort. However, you could do a barebones cross-post to Mastadon using something like IFTT: https://ifttt.com/explore/how-to-crosspost-mastodon-twitter.

The full post is sent to the Fediverse.

For example, if you follow @blog@shkspr.mobi you'll see my blog's posts in your social feed. They appear just like any other message.

I've written a bit about it at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/09/this-blog-is-now-on-the-fed...

The blog appears as a profile in whatever way your ActivityPub instance displays profiles. Posts appear however your instance displays posts.

>> "It is more accurate to say that the ActivityPub plugin[1] which was acquired by Automattic has hit 1.0 and is available to be used on WordPress.com."

Welcome to one of those rare times when you need to read the article.

This is announcing built-in support that doesn't need the plugin. You can still optionally install the plugin if you have the more expensive plans. The plugin was already usable on WordPress.com and has been for months: https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/03/17/making-the-social-web-...

Correct, but the ActivityPub plugin has been available for a long time for open source WordPress. This news today now makes it available to the millions of people who host their sites on WordPress.com - and without them having to install a plugin or anything else. It's just now part of the WP.com hosted platform. And that's rather awesome!