Today I learned how a blog can become a social media profile…

Willem Prins

… and how that differs from using a social media channel to promote your blog content.

I recently attended a talk about WordPress as a social network, but as I nodded along and even took notes, I only understood the outlines of the idea. It was only after I installed the ActivityPub plugin for this blog and wondered “Now what happens?” that it clicked for me.

In this post, I’ll try and guide you through the mental steps towards this modest Aha! moment.

The premise

What if social media didn’t mean uploading all your stuff to servers belonging to one of a few very big tech corporations? With them potentially making money off of the audience that you attract and data that you generate as a ‘content creator’?

What if, instead, it worked in a way reminiscent of ham radio, where the airwaves carry messages from and to everyone who has the right equipment. The ideal of the Open Web is that the internet was never meant to be controlled by a handful of global entities. It’s supposed to be decentralized. E-mail traffic already works like this. The Fediverse is an initiative to achieve this goal with social networks,

And what if you had an app on your phone that made it easy to publish ideas, pictures or other types of media on a system that you own and control? And, more specifically, what if this app was WordPress?

From premise to practice: can I use my blog to publish content on a social media profile?

From the talk, I knew that the key to the Fediverse is the ActivityPub protocol and I knew that WordPress – of course – has a plugin for that. After installing ActivityPub on my blog, I expected that I could use it to publish content onto my existing mastodon.social account. But after navigating through the plugin settings, it dawned on me I had missed the point.

My mastodon.social account exists because I created it on a very large platform which is part of the federated web. It is not a server I control. If all the ActivityPub plugin would do is push my content to Mastodon for publishing, it would not be all that different from the way solutions like Nelio Content offer a way to broadcast blog posts to Twitter or Facebook.

Instead, the ActivityPub plugin turns your site into an independent node (or: server) in the Fediverse, with its own Fediverse profile. This allows other people in the Fediverse to discover and follow your site content from platforms like Mastodon or any other federated server, and directly comment on it. These comments then appear on your site, thanks to the ActivityPub protocol.

By default, ActivityPub creates the author-based handle [email protected], and I’ll stick with that for now. Since this website is (mainly) a blog with a single author, I could change the plugin settings to create a single profile for my entire site. I have not yet managed to make my profile appear, so I’ll need to fix that first – I’ll write an update to this blog when I’ve figured out what the problem was. Until then, I’ll have some time to think about the types of things I would like to publish on my new Fediverse-enabled blog!

Microblogging for WP: which content format(s) make sense for (willemprins dot) me?

I’m old enough to have joined Facebook in my early twenties (17.5 years ago (*audible gasp*) when it still felt innocent. It’s fascinating to read back the things I shared publicly back then. Apart from links to music I liked, I often shared single-sentence wordy jokes or references that would have made sense to me and only a handful of my friends – if at all. As Twitter rose to fame as the adult version of Facebook for journalists, tech professionals and other nerds, I quickly got on there too, but I mostly used it to share links and commentary related to my work for cultural organizations.

Even though I am curious whether I could get back into more spontaneous posting, for now, I will start my experiment with ActivityPub with long-form content like this, even when it does not quite fit inside everyone’s feed:

ActivityPub adds a post preview mode to see what your post would look like in a Fediverse client. For this post, it only shows the title and the introductory paragraph, or the excerpt if you’ve set that manually.

I will then have to figure out how I can combine the publications from this blog with post boosts and other regular Mastodon/ActivityPub posts. I have no idea yet how that will work for me, so it will take some time before I can merge the two into a coherent, federated online presence.

Epilogue: the video series I should have watched before writing this blog

It is so easy to forget that most of the time, you just need to do something before you get something! And, more often than not, doing the thing will occasionally lead you to discover resources you wish you had known about before you started. Like this video about ActivityPub from a pun-packed series called “The Fediverse Files” by DocPop, hosted on the WordPress.com YouTube channel. The series is only a few months old and in it, you will also find videos on connecting your WordPress site to the Fediverse using ActivityPub, which I wish I’d watched before embarking on this trip.

It’s a fun rabbit hole so far, and I look forward to exploring the possibilities of the Fediverse some more in future posts.

Matthew Exon

Nice to see some long form content! How are you displaying reactions?