WordPress blogs can now be followed on Mastodon and other federated platforms

I’ve attempted to follow my blog from Mastodon, but so far no posts have popped up yet. I know it can take a while, though. I’ll check back tomorrow. It would be great if I didn’t have to write and maintain something.

Technically, AFAIU, this comes down to whether a platform is based on using the Person or Group actor. Microblogs, and Wordpress, are using the Person actor. Lemmy is based on the Group actor, an obvious side effect of which being that you can’t follow a user/Person on lemmy. Similarly, mastodon’s support for Groups is basically a kludge and breaks down fairly quickly. Most of the platforms listed are similar to mastodon in this regard (with the notable exception of friendica and hubzilla which have a distinct lineage on the fediverse).

Interestingly, I think this highlights two issues. One is whether or he choice of the Person actor over the Group actor makes sense. Arguably supporting both would make a lot of sense for whenever a blog/page is not simply a single person.

The other is whether it makes sense to have a major fediverse platform that doesn’t have good support for both Person and Group actors (like Facebook, friendica and hubzilla, eg). Given the promise or pitch of the fediverse, arguably interoperability and format diversity are fairly central to the fediverse’s value proposition, which means covering multiple bases and allowing the uses to mould the feed and format, which works for them, out of the protocol and ecosystem is kinda the point of the whole thing. In this case, it would mean that it shouldn’t matter whether Wordpress chose the Person or Group actor and that we don’t need to clarify which platforms are supported and why, which sounds good to me.