wordpress-activitypub VS social-app

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/

I wish I knew more about how one would stop instances full of malicious spam bots from flooding the services, but as for DMs, my understanding is the fact that everything is public through the AT protocol is probably why it doesn't yet have DMs (though maybe through public key crypto, one could have something). Maybe in the future, BlueSky will allow for messaging by tying accounts to some messaging protocol or services.

Apparently, DMs are low priority: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1114

But when I save and then check the feed from bsky.app nothing is presented.

The issue is that while all the intended posts consistently show up when viewing the feed in SkyFeed and deck.blue, they do NOT all show up when viewing the feed on the bsky.app or on the official bsky iPhone App. Some posts show up in the feed on the official tools while others just don't. This started on appx. Tuesday of this week.

What is Bluesky? https://bsky.app/ shows nothing but a sign-in page and wikipedia doesn't seem list it either.