wordpress-activitypub VS instances

On a semi related note, WordPress recently acquired an activitypub plugin that does exactly what it sounds like. [0]

So as a corporation you don't really need a mastodon instance to broadcast your stuff. I think most organisations will go this route. (and i suspect threads hopes to piggyback of this for content).

[0] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

There is an ActivityPub Plugin for Wordpress; I believe the author has recently been hired by Auttomatic.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

The Indieweb Crew of course did this first. The principle POSSE – Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere – was coined by them and is the guiding principle behind the Indieweb movement and it is exactly what you’re trying to do. You should click around a little bit in their wiki:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Most of the time the Indieweblings are doing their own “protocol“ by receiving and reacting to webmentions with rich data structures in Microformats syntax in their HTML. Some parts of Indieweb a rather opinionated about technologies. But a lot of them also interact with different federation services, for example see:

https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub

Finally there's an ActivityPub Plugin for Wordpress, so you might want to check that out.

Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol, which is implemented by /r/Pixelfed, /r/Peertube, Calckey, WordPress, and more.

Its a bittersweet feeling. Blogging was an information dissemination revolution that was made possible by the web. Giving individuals unprecedented ability to self-publish on any niche subject and reaching remote audiences anywhere in the world (the famous long-tail).

The revolution was suppressed. While easy enough to setup by writers (especially if not self-hosted) and accessed by readers, the combination of bookmarks, rss, blog comments and web based search and discovery was ultimately overtaken by the "super-easy" setups offered by the social media walled gardens (social graphs, follows, viral "likes", algorithmic timelines and a race to the short-form bottom).

But not all is lost. The extreme commercialization, privacy concerns and algorithmic oppression of social media has all but ruined it as a platform. People have been thinking and working on somehow reinstating the original promise of the web as a decentralized platform for self-publishing. While not quite yet mainstream, projects such as the Wordpress activitypub plugin [1] suggest we could dream of a new blogosphere blooming.

Here's to the next 20 years!

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

Mastodon

A good way to find an instance that works for you is the site: Mastodon instances https://instances.social/

Firstly, you can start by searching for instances of interest here.

The latter. Source is at https://github.com/gallizoltan/usercount which states:

> A bot which counts users from all instances listed at https://instances.social then posts statistics to Mastodon.

> User Count Bot for all known Mastodon instances

For those on the fence, but know more about how instances work, this resource may help you pick a relevant one. There is also this Github resource that enlists all academia-based instances.

I used this site for finding specialized Mastodon servers. I used a variety of search string and did not find any Mastodon servers specialized to Indigenous People's concerns.

Go to this place to find a place to sign up: https://instances.social/

Find and join communities in Reddit alternatives. Here's a list of Mastodon communities, and here's an online tool to find and parse through the different Mastodon communities. This is a list of popular Lemmy servers. However, do keep an eye out as some existing subreddit's moderators may create new communities on these sites.