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.