WordPress Blogs Can Now Be Followed in the Fediverse, Including Mastodon (techcrunch.com) 23
An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:
In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse — the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon and others — with the acquisition of an ActivityPub plug-in that allows WordPress blogs to reach readers on other federated platforms. Now, the company is announcing ActivityPub 1.0.0 for WordPress has been released allowing WordPress blogs to be followed by others on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies back as comments on their own sites.
Since the acquisition, the company has improved on the original software in a number of ways, including by now allowing the ability to add blog-wide catchall accounts instead of only per-author. It also introduced the ability to add a "follow me" block to help visitors follow your profile and a "followers" block to show off your followers, noted Automattic design engineer Matt Wiebe, in a post on X... For the time being, the software supports self-hosted WordPress blogs, but Wiebe teased that support for WordPress.com blogs was "coming soon."
Last year Automattic's CEO Matt Mullenweg announced Tumblr would add support for ActivityPub, the article adds. "But more recently, Mullenweg told us he's been investigating not only ActivityPub, but also other protocols like Nostr and Bluesky's AT Protocol."
Since the acquisition, the company has improved on the original software in a number of ways, including by now allowing the ability to add blog-wide catchall accounts instead of only per-author. It also introduced the ability to add a "follow me" block to help visitors follow your profile and a "followers" block to show off your followers, noted Automattic design engineer Matt Wiebe, in a post on X... For the time being, the software supports self-hosted WordPress blogs, but Wiebe teased that support for WordPress.com blogs was "coming soon."
Last year Automattic's CEO Matt Mullenweg announced Tumblr would add support for ActivityPub, the article adds. "But more recently, Mullenweg told us he's been investigating not only ActivityPub, but also other protocols like Nostr and Bluesky's AT Protocol."
Off topic: "Twitter rival Mastodon" (Score:1)
Has anyone on any instance running any fediverse software ever arrived at the conclusion that some part of the fediverse or all of it really wants to eat Twitter's market share?
The analogy is so shallow. It's as unconvincing as describing 2 wildly different websites as rivals solely because of similarities comment section functionality.
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That's one of the reasons I never really understood the appeal of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. They're all front ends for generating vanity pages... there's no real need to have a restrictive format or be restricted to a particular platform.
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That's one of the reasons I never really understood the appeal of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. They're all front ends for generating vanity pages... there's no real need to have a restrictive format or be restricted to a particular platform.
The restrictions are part of the appeal. A message sent via micro-blogging carries a very different connotation than the same message sent via a social network meant to connect "friends" and family. A message on historic Twitter even means something different then a message on X. After all, the medium is the message [wikipedia.org].
Few people actually talk about the fediverse because the diversity and lack of restrictions makes it harder for it to generate a brand. And without the biggest differentiating factor the fediver
Re: Off topic: "Twitter rival Mastodon" (Score:2)
Good point. Facebook and Twitter have predictable user interfaces and site-wide behaviour. That uniformity is key to their reach.
AI-based content summarisation techniques may make it viable to implement the 'restrictions' where they really belong - on the client side. I.e. Tom Citizen uses software to make disparate content uniform to suit his needs and expectations, the way Facebook and Twitter once did
Re: Off topic: "Twitter rival Mastodon" (Score:1)
It depends on what you use them for.
Social media is the user space for layer 6 evolution. UID's, UUID'S, IPC, GiF,..... all were pioneered for user portals before the term Internet was coined. Include early versions of blockchain, crypto therefore NFT's as well. The C language even included GUI style input boxes and prompts from PDP-8 applications..... but that's all backend. The public gets a "love me now" app and it is designed to keep them none the wiser.....
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Mastodon wants to rival Twitter, the owner of the project doesn’t really hide that under anything. The problem remains that people don’t want ‘another Twitter’, especially not one ruled by tons and tons of unaccountable mini-dictators, we have Twitter which is a centralized not-free (both in price and in speech) platform, Twitter-clone but with even less free speech and more cost is not really attractive.
Truly decentralized is where the money is right now, once people can have a way
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I'm rather liking Bluesky - though we'll have to see where it goes after federation. The architecture there is that anyone can run labeling services, and you can subscribe to any labeling services you want to moderate the content that you see. Also, unlike Mastodon, it's set up to function like a single, highly connected universe than a bunch of tiny fiefdoms. While this does require some heavyweight indexing/distribution services that you're not likely to see widely replicated (though can be replicated), i
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Make your case for how current twitter has less free speech than previous twitter.
It's not enough IMO but almost everybody thinks more people have voices on there after the mass bannings and open-sourcing The Algorithm.
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I'm not saying it has less free speech, it still does not have complete free speech. Musk is still a rather left-wing guy and his moderation policies are according. He also cooperates with many government edicts still and does not disclose ongoing meetings with the White House and FBI.
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No, it is not free, there are paid options and your information is sold. Just because it is gratis does not mean you do not pay, whether that is through privacy or something else, you trade in something of worth.
It is miles ahead of any competitor, it's still a rather left-wing moderated site.
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I do all my social networking on the Fediverse. So basically I do Mastodon instead of Twitter, Lemmy instead of Reddit, Pixelfed instead of Instagram, PeerTube instead of Youtube (at least of uploading my own videos).
I'll tell you my overall understanding of Fediverse services vs the Big Data alternatives: Twitter / Reddit / Instagram see potential rivals. Mastodon / Lemmy / Pixelfed don't give a shit and do their things.
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I have been running a Mastodon instance since late 2017.
There are several design choices that Gargron (Mastodon's main developer) has made that are pretty explicitly because he wants it to be Twitter, But I Made It. Feature requests to change these choices keep appearing and keep getting denied - if you want to up the character limit past 500, or have markdown/other rich text, you will have to fork them and add it yourself, or perhaps switch to the "Glitch" fork, which is maintained by one of the leading co
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This is Big News (Score:2)
The best part of Twitter was (A) an aggregated newsfeed and (B) Microblogging with rules and a limited character count. Publishing was so easy even Donald Trump could post, meaning a very low barrier to entry. Eventually Twitter even did video. Now anyone with a Wordpress blog can fully manage and own their own content and still be a part of that fediverse thang.
Now Wordpress would be wise to limit aggregated content to teasers, ala Drupal. But wait, hey, where's Drupal? (Not to worry worry, some competent
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What does the first amendment have to do rampant censorship by the fediverse hosts?
The first amendment gives people the right to free speech, not free hosting of said speech, because the hosts get to vote with their feet.
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What does the first amendment have to do rampant censorship by the fediverse hosts?
...because the hosts have their own first amendment rights, so they can easily vote with their feet when they disagree with content they've been requested to host and effectively promote, (which might also costs the hosts money, legal hassles, etc.).
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PHP lives! (Score:3)