Wordpress.com Now Supports ActivityPub | Hacker News Reader

Wordpress.com Now Supports ActivityPub

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275 pointszoul51 comments

This might become bigger than mastodon itself. Wordpress is much easier / cheaper to self-host.

Along the same lines there is talk about discourse and nextcloud extensions which also have large installed bases and amenable to single-click type installs.

In a sense any self-hosted server that publishes stuff is a candidate to get integrated into the fediborg.

What would be really sweet is to pre-emptively embed activitypub federation into generic platforms like django, phoenix, laravel etc. Right now various teams work in uncoordinated projects all implementing similar functionality.

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.

It seems like the work on Tumblr support for ActivityPub is on ice, I don't think it's going to happen https://mastodon.social/@_jv_/110692572741573511

Unfortunate, but not really unexpected.

What complicates matters (in a nice way as it opens up more possibilities) is the increasing role of client apps. You maybe are thinking of the current Wordpress and Mastodon web UI's but a dedicated client (as those that already exist for mobile) can create any timeline illusion.

But it is true that all these different type of servers have different specializations as to what type of content is easy to produce and distribute on them. A further intriguing aspect is to federate with video, image or audio sharing servers (peertube, pixelfed, funkwhale).

It could lead to decentralization of both consuming and publishing. There could be a native timeline UI integrated into iOS/Android. Mobile network operators could host fediverse instances for text/audio/video and bundle them into phone plans which everyone already pays for. The possibilities are endless.

In such scenario search engines would also play a bigger role because if people are hosting videos on 50 different services instead of just Youtube, you need a separate search engine which crawls all instances.

I think the current fediverse servers like Pixelfed and Mastodon are emulating centralized services because we are used to how they function and it would be too confusing. If it catches on, then those services can slowly morph and adopt the benefits of the new paradigm

I mostly use Mastodon through an app, same with Lemmy and a bunch of other apps that have perfectly fine web UIs. On phones, apps just work better in most cases (though that strongly depends on what kind of company is behind those apps).

From what I can tell by the comments on this article, WordPress has implemented ActivityPub for publishing posts, but you can't actually follow other people. Maybe the next update will fix all that, but no client app will ever be able to compensate for unimplemented APIs like that. Comments do federate, but it's not as "social" as most of the Fediverse.

Makes sense since Automattic own Tumblr and WordPress.

I was always suprised people were giving Meta a lot of flak for not building ActivityPub fast enough yet completely missing the fact Matt announced it for Tumblr ages ago and it they did nothing.

> 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

Is WordPress exposing AP to plugins? If so, I'm brushing up my PHP to author a plugin to host a Twitter-like experience on the WordPress site. Let's bring back Pingbacks back! This time, on the Fediverse. I could make dozens of dollars on MRR. Dozens!

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

Nevermind - I've installed the standalone plugin:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub

Replies appear to work, too: “In addition, replies to your posts from these platforms are automatically turned into comments on your WordPress blog, creating a more interactive and dynamic conversation around your content. Synchronicity for the win!”

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

News sites don't want conversation and comments on their articles. They want it to be a one way conversation.

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

Replies from the Fediverse are moderated in the same way as normal comments.

So if a spammer on Mastodon replies to your post, it will be caught by Akismet (or whatever spam filter you're running).

Don’t follow the spammers and grifters, I guess. Replies that you make are posted to your feed.

I'd place more money on Wordpress being the future of Twitter than I would Bluesky, Threads, or Mastodon.

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.

Corporate publishers are probably feeling the burn of the enshittifcation of Medium and then Twitter, and annoyance from the Instagram ad volume and Threads uncertainty. I bet they would welcome an something more boring like a Wordpress blog that was totally under their control. The critical part that's missing is an easy way for end users to subscribe (e.g. a popular/easy RSS/Atom/feed reader standalone product or feature).

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.

And GB was rushed out the door, not even half-baked. Too often tt's a beta product pretending to be production worthy.

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?

Not OP but I think this mainly due to the newly supported cross platform fediverse profile capability. From the article:

"Your WordPress blog can now become a profile for the fediverse. This means your readers can follow you and receive all the latest posts from your blog directly on their preferred platform. More so, they can engage in enriching conversations by replying to your posts, with their replies reflecting as comments on your blog post, creating a synchronized and interactive experience."

It's great they are adopting the standard but those aliases are ugly.

Instead of openprotocolfanblog.wordpress.com@openprotocolfanblog.wordpress.com it should be openprotocolfanblog@wordpress.com

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 respect you and Automattic being transparent about your thinking here on HN.

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.

we also thought about using something generic like `blog@NAME.wordpress.com` or `feed@NAME.wordpress.com` but this would have made autocomplete useless. Mastodon users would see a list of thousands of `blog` or `feed` users when searching for a WordPress.com user.

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.

Definitely interesting development.

How does it work tho? It's just like the 'old' RSS->tweets kind of thing? or does the whole blog post get sent into the fediverse as a post? Making it kind of unwieldly? Microblogging is dead? Long live microblogging.

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.

I have my own statically generated website/blog. I won't switch to Wordpress. How can I integrate ActivityPup into my blog in the same way?

Edit: I am fine with adding dynamic features to the site. I see there are implementations [1], which kind of are in the ballpark.

[1] https://github.com/toddsundsted/ktistec https://github.com/davecheney/pub

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.

this post doesn't seem to be published via activitypub, which seems like a missed opportunity

I haven't been keeping up with Wordpress, but do they still support pingbacks as a first-class construct? Those could be interesting in an ActivityPub context; they're arguably the progenitor of things like quote tweets.

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. Yes, Mastodon implements (most of) ActivityPub but it's hardly the only platform on the web that does.

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/advanced/

>> "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-...

Just remember …

WordPress.com != open source WordPress

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!

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