Tag: Mastodon

Installed and Configured ActivityPub for WordPress

ActivityPub is an open standard protocol for decentralised social networking. It enables various platforms to communicate and share content, allowing me to follow and interact with users on different platforms.

ActivityPub's decentralisation empowers users like me, offering greater data privacy and control. Developers can implement ActivityPub in their applications, encouraging compatibility and innovation. Notable platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube already use it, providing alternative social media experiences.

Given my background in information security architecture, ActivityPub aligns with my interests in decentralisation and data control, my love for open-source and the IndieWeb ideal of a people-centred alternative to the "corporate web".

ActivityPub represents a step toward a more open, user-centric, and privacy-conscious Internet experience by facilitating federated communication across various social media platforms.

In 2017, I started using several IndieWeb plug-ins for WordPress. The goal was to make my website a more significant part of what was happening while adding capabilities. I syndicated (POSSE) most of my blog posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram using Webmentions, Semantic Linkbacks, and Post Kinds. I experimented with IFTT and Zapie to PESOS my content posted elsewhere back to my blog.

This arrangement worked well until Facebook shut off the API for personal accounts, and Twitter and Instagram started making the use of their API more challenging. I had read about Mastodon and saw that many Twitter users were leaving the platform and moving to Mastodon. I started learning about ActivityPub and thought, why not add that capability to my website?

I have installed Matthias Pfefferle's ActivyPub for WordPress plug-in. With the ActivityPub plug-in installed, my WordPress blog functions as a federated profile, @islandinthenet.com@islandinthenet.com, and my author profile at @khurtwilliams@islandinthenet.com. Anyone Mastodon user who follows the @khurtwilliams@islandinthenet.com profile will see any blog post I create on my website in their Home feed.

Mastodon Screenshot

The ActivityPub WordPress plug-in lets my WordPress site join the federated social web using the ActivityPub protocol. I publish blog posts and articles on my site, which users can share and interact with on other ActivityPub-compatible platforms by following either my author or sitewide profiles. It will enhance the reach of my posts while promoting decentralisation, giving me more control over my data. This plug-in ensures compatibility with other ActivityPub-enabled services, making it easier for me to connect with a broader online audience while adhering to data ownership and decentralisation principles.

I have also set up a Mastodon photog.social account to share the blog posts from this website. You can follow me at @khurtwilliams@photog.social. I need to determine how much value I will get from ActivityPub as I use Mastodon sparingly. I have no other Fediverse accounts, so this is more about staking my claim in the Fediverse.

micro.blog and mastodon?

Micro.blog + Mastodon (manton.org)

For some time, we have been considering how we could open up compatibility between Micro.blog and Mastodon. Any feature that could be disruptive needs to be approached carefully. In this post I want to talk about how Micro.blog supports Mastodon, why I think it’s useful, and anticipate some questi...

I read a post by Cassian and wondered, if this is true, why @manton added support for linking micro.blog to mastodon.

The network grew to over 1 million accounts, about 150,000 of which are active right now. And there’s a pattern. Gargron makes a unilateral decision, writes a feature very quickly, another dev reviews it and approves it, it gets merged, a release candidate comes out, he updates his instance with the feature (one of the largest and busiest)… and people either like it or they don’t. If they dislike it for safety reasons, there is an understandable strong and sustained community objection. There are many users who have been harassed and abused on Twitter, have reported people to no avail, and moved to Mastodon because they were told it would be safer. Often they have nowhere else to go, so they have to fight.

In the face of that objection, instead of listening Gargron tends to dig his heels in and argue details and dismisses problems that he doesn’t want to think about. He ignores people’s experiences. It’s his view that Mastodon is his personal project that he can handle however he wants, and the nearly $4,000 per month that he gets through Patreon and Liberapay are kind donations from people who support his decisions. Two months ago it was a “people you might like to follow” feature, before that it was whether CWs should hide sensitive content when a post is embedded elsewhere on the internet, and in the past couple of days it was a “trending tags” feature. Someone made a Trending Tags mock-up that he liked, and even though he’s said in the past he would never implement anything like that, he wrote the feature, merged it, and put it on mastodon.social, the flagship instance with 160,000 accounts.

Anyone against the idea and who understood how to use Github went to the issue list and objected there. They said that trending topics on Twitter is used to attract and abuse vulnerable people. It was all quite vague, but instead of asking for specific examples of abuse so that he could judge whether the software can prevent (or be made to prevent) abuse of members, Gargron dug his heels in. Then he made fun of the victims of social media abuse, making it clear that he doesn’t take their concerns seriously, while also complaining openly about people objecting vocally to his decisions and boosting toots by people publicly supporting him and condemning the wave of objection. He was petty and passive-aggressive. He complained that people were taking his words out of context and using them to attack him. That may be true, and if it is it’s unfair, but it’s also clear how he feels about the anti-abuse goals in the mission statement: he will only recognise abuse if it happens to him, because he is only building a social network for himself.

And all that @this@that.com stuff just seems like incomprehensible nonsense designed for a geek audience. But, one should expect that. It's geeks -- I'm one of theme -- who are designing ALL of these social network experiments. Perhaps that's why they eventually all have the same problems.