wordpress-activitypub VS rss-to-activitypub

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/

- one by Darius Kazemi, the creator of Hometown, a fork of Mastodon with a focus on local community: https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub

Darius Kazemi, the creator of Hometown, made an AP server where you can register a feed and it turns into an actor (ie an account): https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub

I made my own thing, fetching an RSS feed and posting entries to an existing account. It makes the code much simpler, but is not practical if you have lots of feeds (you need yo create all accounts separately): https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/

https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub/

Feed that into an RSS to ActivityPub bridge like GitHub - dariusk/rss-to-activitypub: An RSS to ActivityPub converter.

I built this: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/. It posts RSS entries to a given account, and that account can now be subscribed to, entries can be commented, etc... It works well for one or two feeds but can get tedious if you want to follow many feeds and not spend too much time on that.

There is also https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub. It requires a bit more work to maintain, but the creation and management of feeds is way more straightforward.