The Phoenix Trap

Code, music, philosophy, etc.

WordPress, ActivityPub, and Friends

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Mark Gardner

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I’ve also been mess­ing with the Friends and ActivityPub plu­g­ins for WordPress on my blog, and I share Shelley’s con­cerns about the for­mer bloat­ing the data­base with feed items. You can con­trol this some­what by set­ting reten­tion val­ues in days or a num­ber of posts, but you have to go into each friend’s Feeds tab and do it manually–there’s no default setting.

After read­ing that post, I’m also con­sid­er­ing dis­abling Friends in favor of a feed read­er, espe­cial­ly because (as Shelley also not­ed) there are gaps when with favorites and com­ment con­ver­sa­tions bridg­ing between WordPress and Mastodon servers. Like her, I’m not keen on installing a single-​user Mastodon instance or oth­er fedi­verse serv­er that requires man­ag­ing an unfa­mil­iar pro­gram­ming language.

I’m also try­ing to do this in tan­dem with a suite of IndieWeb plu­g­ins, and I’m run­ning into an issue with my friends feed page not show­ing any posts when the Post Kinds plu­g­in is acti­vat­ed. I real­ly want to keep this plu­g­in because it lets me inter­act bet­ter with oth­er IndieWeb sites as well as the Bridgy POSSE/​back­feed ser­vice con­nect­ing me to oth­er social networks.

My ide­al is a per­son­al web­site where I write every­thing, includ­ing long-​form arti­cles, short sta­tus­es, and replies like these. Folks can then find me via a sin­gle iden­ti­fi­able address and then subscribe/​follow the entire fire­hose of con­tent or choose sub­sets accord­ing to post types, top­ics, or tags. They’d then be able to reply or react on my site or their favored plat­form, which my site would col­lect regard­less of ori­gin, with sub­se­quent replies and reac­tions get­ting pushed out to them. Oh, and it should work with both ActivityPub clients and servers, IndieWeb sites, and syndicate/​backfeed to oth­er social net­works either with or akin to the Bridgy ser­vice I men­tioned above.

So far I haven’t seen any­thing that ticks all these box­es, and I’m get­ting itchy to write my own. Perl is my favorite pro­gram­ming lan­guage, so I’m look­ing at the Yancy CMS as a base. But I know that it would still be a hell of a project, and one of the rea­sons I chose WordPress for blog­ging was that it was well-​established and ‑sup­port­ed but still eas­i­ly exten­si­ble so that I could con­cen­trate on writ­ing instead of end­less­ly tweak­ing the engine. Unfortunately, I’m start­ing to fall into that trap anyway.

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Mark Gardner Avatar

Hi, I’m Mark.

Hi, I’m Mark Gard­ner, and this is my personal blog. I show software developers how to level up by building production-ready things that work. Clear code, real projects, lessons learned.

Comments

17 responses to “WordPress, ActivityPub, and Friends”

  1. Kevin McCurley Avatar
    Kevin McCurley

    @mjgardner @burningbird @kmartino I start­ed to fall into that trap of writ­ing my own #ActivityPub serv­er. I first looked at installing my own mastodon serv­er, but that’s heavy­weight and I’m not a fan of ruby. Then I installed the ActitityPub plu­g­in for my word­press blog, but I’m remind­ed by how frag­ile word­press is (I took five years off from using it because of this). Then I start­ed writ­ing my own serv­er, but real­ized that the ActivityPub pro­to­col is poor­ly spec­i­fied in the stan­dards. I’d like to think that ActivityPub has a future, but it feels like it is in its infan­cy stage and the lack of fed­er­at­ed search makes it a non-​starter for most users.
    activ­i­ty­pub

    1. Mark Gardner Avatar
      Mark Gardner

      Fine, but as I men­tioned one of the things I’m try­ing to do is POSSE to wher­ev­er fol­low­ers and read­ers are. If they’re not using the fedi­verse because it cur­rent­ly lacks search­ing every­thing every­where, I’ll still reach them. But i also want to reach folks via ActivityPub. It’s not a zero-​sum game.

  2. Ricardo Avatar
    Ricardo

    @mjgardner @burningbird @kmartino feels like #Tanzawa minus the #activ­i­ty­pub part.
    activ­i­ty­pub
    tan­za­wa

  3. James Van Dyne Avatar
    James Van Dyne

    @mjgardner @burningbird @kmartino It’s a fun trap to fall into. That’s why I start­ed Tanzawa a cou­ple years ago. I’ve long held off on native syn­di­ca­tion sup­port, instead rely­ing on Brid.gy, but I think it’s about time to get ActivityPub sup­port in there.

  4. marqle Avatar
    marqle

    @mjgardner @AgileAttorney I’m not sure I’ll ever write that much again. I used to write reviews, but I haven’t for years. It’s nice to know the option’s there.

  5. Tripping the Oliphantastic Avatar
    Tripping the Oliphantastic

    @marqle @mjgardner @AgileAttorney Blogs get released abbre­vi­at­ed in Mastodon, any­way, with a link to the full blog.In Hometown fork, how­ev­er, the Article types are dis­played inline.Any oth­er long (ver­ti­cal) post/​note has a break for ​“Read More’ done auto­mat­i­cal­ly by Masto.Notes are what Masto uses, but Article is used by WriteFreely and oth­ers and is dis­played dif­fer­ent­ly by Masto.What you’re see­ing are super-​long Notes. Hacking the char­ac­ter lim­it is fair­ly easy to do, even with Masto.

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