LarrySanger.org

An ActivityPub WordPress plugin

Matthias Pfefferle has made a WordPress plugin that converts your blog into a very, very stripped-down Fediverse server. What this means, basically, is that if you install this plugin on your WordPress blog, then your blog posts will appear as posts in ActivityPub Fediverse servers, such as (most famously) mastodon.social. You just install and activate it and then go to …wp-admin/profile.php, and you’ll find you have a handy-dandy Fediverse profile ID made for you. Mine is @[email protected].

This represents a practical step toward fixing social media, as I described, by making the Fediverse more robustly peer-to-peer (as in individual-to-individual, not just server-to-server federation), but it really doesn’t do much yet. Matthias is to be congratulated for getting this far. I hope he will make this into another whole front end for the broader Fediverse. That might be a bit much to ask, but…wouldn’t that be cool?

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Larry Sanger

“Internet Knowledge Organizer.” Currently President of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, started Wikipedia and various other educational and reference sites. Ph.D., Philosophy, Ohio State, 2000. [read more]

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One response to “An ActivityPub WordPress plugin”

  1. Lori

    Ever since I found out what ActivityPub/Fediverse was, I’ve searched high and low for an ActivityPub client written in PHP. That is because PHP (or “LAMP stack”) hosting is generic enough to be a commodity, and is easy to shop for, whereas the usual ActivityPub client is in Rails so naturally everyone and their sister hosts a Mastodon instance on a free tier Heroku or similar, resulting in expired “dyno hours” (whatever that is) or maybe getting kicked out for abuse of the free tier, resulting in a high-turnover landscape of Mastodon instances. Seems with the “droplet” type hosting providers the next tier up from free tier is something like $60/month whereas I’m paying (probably overpaying) for LAMP stack hosting at 8 something a month (including domain name). Perhaps the biggest obstacle so far to my own adoption of Mastodon was creating and shortly after losing (to instance disappearance) three Mastodon accounts. I seem to have found a stable home at https://queer.party/@n8chz although it seems to be running a bit slow tonight.

    A watered down ActivityHub server as a WordPress plugin sounds like progress. Admittedly I’d rather have a full featured server written in PHP and without WordPress as a dependency. I may have to write it myself, but last time I looked at the API for ActivityHub I couldn’t figure out a single thing. I guess I’ll take what I can get. Thanks for the heads up. I intend to give this thing a try.

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