Recently some things have transpired in the social media sphere that have prompted a healthy chunk of us to look for new digital “3rd places” to haunt with one another.
All debates around how worthwhile spending time on social media actually is aside, the WordPress community has quickly coalesced around Matthias Pfefferle‘s ActivityPub plugin and IndieWeb’s WordPress plugin, to which Matthias contributes.
I’m still very much learning about the intricacies of ActivityPub, IndieWeb, and the Fediverse after diving in a couple weeks ago. However, it’s not terribly complicated to get your WordPress site configured to participating in the Fediverse, and likewise, have interactions with your site across the larger web brought back onto your WordPress blog.
Got any good guides?
There seem to be no shortage (hey that’s Wabi!) of ad-hoc tip sheets for interacting on Mastodon and the broader Fediverse, but WordPress onboarding is a little more sparse. That does seem to be changing. George Hoteling’s tinkering has proven an invaluable educational resource in the WordPress-to-Mastodon department. I still can’t get Mastodon to verify my website, though. Donncha O Caoimh also has a nice write-up on getting going with ActivityPub and Webmentions.
Each new day seems to reveal some previously unturned stone that brings WordPress blogs closer to functioning as their own nodes as part of a larger social-ish network. Today I learned about Alex Kirk‘s Friends WordPress plugin, in fact.
Jason Tucker‘s got a nice little explainer for getting familiar with Jan Boddez’s “IndieBlocks” plugin. I’ll admit, like a lot of the other plugins mentioned above, it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Jason’s bit of unauthorized documentation is extremely helpful in reducing the learning curve.
Someone (provenance unknown) has compiled a matrix of mobile Mastodon apps with an exhaustive feature comparison. As noted in the post below, because of the fluid nature of app development and sudden interest in Mastodon and the Fediverse, the matrix is likely to become inaccurate very quickly unless the author is watching over 20 apps very closely, which seems unlikely.
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