Tags
I have activated ActivityPub plugin on this blog. The plugin integrates this blog to the fediverse (“federated universe”). If you read this as fedi user, hi! The plugin has been available before for self-hosted WordPress blogs. Recently WordPress.com itself has added ActivityPub integration for all accounts here.
Does it work as expected? Depends on your expectations I suppose.
First, the plugin turns the blog into another ActivityPub-enabled account (like Mastodon, but also Pleroma, Pixelfed, Friendica, or others). You can see how it looks from a Mastodon web app below:
You can see that the account has “joined” since 2006 (creation date of the blog) and it has 111 posts. But it doesn’t show older posts published before activation of the plugin. The default name is rather awkward, though you can change it to a shorter handle if you own a domain (available only for WordPress.com paid plans).
The launch of the ActivityPub feature wasn’t smooth. Some people have reported that sometimes they failed to follow WordPress.com accounts. Also I found some delay between publishing a blog entry and showing up in fediverse timelines, but this was probably expected.
Replies from ActivityPub accounts show up as comments in WordPress. However when I reply back, my comments don’t appear in fediverse timelines. So, readers who commented from Mastodon, for example, can’t read my replies from WordPress. As a result some conversations don’t show up in the fediverse, and conversations on the blog This problem is known and has been reported. It’s probably won’t be solved until developers can agree how to control who can reply to a post.
Blog edits transmit to ActivityPub network. However edit history seems not to show up.
WP tags are converted as hashtags in Mastodon (and others). I think this is rather cool, especially because hashtags are important in the fediverse to discover topics of interest.
You can see that there is still room for improvements for the plugin. I am still happy with it though, and see it as another tool to share my thoughts to readers (and friends!) in the fediverse.