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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Is there a good way to get my blog onto the fediverse? It sort of seems like the protocol (ActivityPub) is built in a way that it can support blog-style content as well as toot-style content, and it would solve many of the problems people have with discoverability, RSS dying, shared private posts, etc. I'd be interested in getting my blog (which is self-hosted and using a static site generator) publishing in a way that fediverse users can follow.

I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the critical mass thanks to Mastodon.

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This is a really nasty way of doing this, but if you do have a Mastodon account, you can use feed2toot[0].

An "upgraded" version of it would be to parse another RSS/Atom feed for your blog. Make an excerpt of the content that's 496 - <link_length> and then construct the toot to be "<excerpt>... <link>".

Of course, native integration would be far better, but it would go way out of the scope of static site generators.

[0] https://gitlab.com/chaica/feed2toot/

Plume, I think, is an ActivityPub-based blog engine. I haven't looked at it yet, though.

https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume

I'm aware that Micro.blog (mentioned elsewhere) is looking at ActivityPub support of some kind soon. I think the IndieWeb movement and the federated blogging/don't-call-it-tweeting movement are close enough that they should be working toward interoperability.

If you're running a WordPress blog, then the [OStatus](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/) plugin connects your site to the fediverse. I don't know if there's such a thing for your static generator, though...

OStatus is currently implemented by Mastodon but essentially none of the rest of the post-Activitypub fediverse - we’ve more-or-less standardised on Activitypub as a protocol which solves many of OStatus’s problems.

I don't know about the Fediverse but you could look into micro.blog, which is focused on microblogging but supports longer-form content (long-form content shows up in a micro.blog feed as the title plus a link to the full post). micro.blog is part of IndieWeb.

"The fediverse" seems to be the name people are using to refer to the maxclique of federated Mastodon and Mastodon-compatible (Pleroma, etc.) instances. Mastodon uses ActivityPub as its server-to-server protocol, although it adds some features or at least conventions that I think are not in core ActivityPub (content warnings, emoji, usernames of the form @geofft@xoxo.zone instead of https://xoxo.zone/@geofft, etc.). But I think that it's possible for any Mastodon user to subscribe to something that's just publishing blog posts via ActivityPub and not actually acting like a Mastodon server, and posts will show up in their timeline.

(Mostly I'm interested because in practice I tweet about my blog posts after I publish them and this seems to be how discovery works, so I might as well make my blog participate in the same protocol as this Twitter-replacement everyone seems excited about.)

somewhat unrelated but I've never heard the portmanteau maxclique for maximal clique before, and I'm going to steal it.

Static sites will have trouble, about the only thing I think they can support are ActivitySteam representations of their HTML content.

The ActivityPub part requires dynamic processing of messages from peers, as well as sending or forwarding messages.

I am writing an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will let you federate with Mastodon, PeerTube, etc. If you're interested, I'll be posting updates at @jdormit@mastodon.technology.

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