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Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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

Makes sense since Automattic own Tumblr and WordPress.

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.

> 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!

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.

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

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