One of my ongoing experiments with #WordPress involves blurring the lines further between blogging and social media interaction. There’s actually some really neat stuff you can do with the #ActivityPub plugin, the Friends plugin, and the Mastodon Apps ...

Sean Tilley

One of the main questions I’m trying to answer right now is: “Can We Distribute effectively do both? Can we be a publishing platform that’s also doing all of its social media from the same place?”

I think this attempt is very much in the spirit of #IndieWeb, where people kind of hack together their own systems by extending existing ones. Given that this can also do some automated POSSE stuff in addition to federation, the reflection feels apt.

julian

@[email protected] that's an interesting experiment, and I wish you the best of luck!

WordPress' theme catalog is vast, and there's lots you can do with it!

For what it's worth, I actually blog on NodeBB itself (yay for dogfooding!) You've probably seen my posts on fedi, but they're also long-form posts on the forum itself.

This could be styled differently (more blog-like) using our own themes, although we don't have themes like that at the moment.

Sean Tilley

@julian Yeah, the WordPress ecosystem is kind of overwhelming at times. So many seemingly simple features are abstracted away into paid plugins, and search engines are so SEO-poisoned that it becomes harder to figure out how to do things.

There’s definitely multiple ways to solve a given problem, too, which can make the concept of “best practices” feel vague at best. We’re currently experimenting with things the ActivityPub plugin can currently do, but some things I’ve put together so far are super hacky demonstrations that don’t quite work the way I want yet.

Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻

Hi @deadsuperhero,
being a fan of https://indieweb.org/POSSE since long, I constantly wonder how elitist, ableist the 'own server' is or how it's possible to popularise. What would make an ‘own server’ attractive for my niece?

David B. Himself

@[email protected] Thanks. I've been looking more and more into turning a WordPress installation into a micro-blogging platform was feasible, and yes, so far the UI was the main hurdle (I'm not too sure about things like resource usage and such, though, that's probably beyond my technical skills)

Sean Tilley

@mro hard to say, for certain. I will state that having the money, knowledge, and know-how to run your own server can certainly have elements of gatekeeping to it, in the sense that it’s not readily available to everyone.

As far as making it attractive to someone goes, that’s a harder question. I think giving a person the power to shape and control their experience of the Web is a compelling value proposition, if it’s easy enough for most people to use. We’re not quite there yet, but the rise of the developer community building all sorts of cool things for the Social Web gives me hope.

Sean Tilley

@DavidBHimself I don’t imagine that resource usage would necessarily be much worse than a typical blog, but it’s hard to say when you apply the kind of frequency that social networks have with constantly posting, fetching updates, and creating notifications.

To me, the wider question right now is: “okay, I can assemble a crappy version of this myself using existing plugins. What would it take to tie all this together into a single package for federated microblogging?”

For now, my focus is just making a theme display stuff correctly. In time, though, I might have to roll several different plugins together into a single thing, if I want to provide something easy for other people.

Sean Tilley

@DavidBHimself The other headache right now is that the main plugin for social stuff, Friends, is…kind of rough right now. No disrespect to the developer, but having to store a stream of other people’s posts in my WordPress dashboard every time I follow somebody just feels weird.

Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻

Hi @deadsuperhero,
the hard requirements could be surprisingly low - signing a < $5/month shared hosting contract and getting (disclaimer, developer here) https://seppo.social.

But for whom is this attractive? I sometimes have the impression, all that people want, is a free sign up button and they're eager to give in any agency if any commitment can be avoided.

However, I believe there must be a middle ground between this and #POSSE, too.

Is there?

Sean Tilley

@mro Truthfully, I’m not sure. I think we’ve been conditioned for a very long time to be used to things seemingly being free, at the expense of our personal data and annoying advertisements.

I think for the interim, we’ll probably continue to see a mix of free community instances, paid services, and people that self-host. Some of those services might experiment with different approaches to pricing, like offering a free account where you can buy upgraded storage.

I think this is one of those things where we’ll have a clearer picture as the network continues to grow and change. My personal belief is that it’s not enough to simply provide an alternative to get people to try it, but to offer a superior experience that maybe embraces new ideas that aren’t possible on regular networks.

David Somers

@deadsuperhero @mro Th developer community has always, despite what they say, developed for other developers first and users last. Plus, what normal person wants to get involved with setting up a server, installing, configuring, and maintaining some software, DNS, and all the other things.