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.