Generally, I reserve this blog for, you know, blog stuff. Long form, where I ramble about things and post code snippets and multiple links to things I’m thinking about. For quite a while, now, I’ve had the ActivityPub plugin enabled on this site, as I tried to figure out how to engage with the Fediverse after I deleted my other social media accounts. Today, I saw an explainer video that contained an interesting comment about how a WordPress blog could, in effect, be a single-user Fediverse instance. So I started poking around.
Read more: Experimenting With FederationThe ActivityPub plugin takes care of publishing blog posts in the ActivityPub format. This means that people on other Fediverse instances can follow my blog by following @pirateguillermo and that works just fine. However, that’s only half the equation, right, because that’s essentially shouting into the void and not ever listening. When I first started doing Fediverse/Mastodon stuff, that was all I had so I wound up setting up an account on a “local” Mastodon instance, sfba.social. That isn’t bad, really, but it means that I wind up having two places where I type stuff and where people can engage with me.
Today I learned about the Friends plugin for WordPress, and it takes care of the listening half of the federation process. It adds a tab to the WordPress bar on my blog where I can see a feed of posts from accounts I follow. So, that’s cool. I already mostly use MarsEdit to compose posts, as I really hate having to use a web browser to do that. If I could get the reading and actions to work within an app as well, then I’d be a happy camper. As it is, this blog is not a Mastodon instance, and the swell native apps that are Mastodon clients will not pretend that it is. That means that, if I were to migrate all my Fediverse presence to this blog, I would be able to post from a variety of tools that I like, but I’d be stuck reading via a web browser, which is not the way I want to do it.
It might be acceptable for some folks, just not for me.