July 18, 2024

ActivityPub Plugin

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.

Enter the fediverse with ActivityPub, broadcasting your blog to a wider audience! Attract followers, deliver updates, and receive comments from a diverse user base of ActivityPub-compliant platforms.

With the ActivityPub plugin installed, your WordPress blog itself function as a federated profile, along with profiles for each author. For instance, if your website is example.com, then the blog-wide profile can be found at @[email protected], and authors like Jane and Bob would have their individual profiles at @[email protected] and @[email protected], respectively.

An example: I give you my Mastodon profile name: @[email protected]. You search, see my profile, and hit follow. Now, any post I make appears in your Home feed. Similarly, with the ActivityPub plugin, you can find and follow Jane’s profile at @[email protected].

Once you follow Jane’s @[email protected] profile, any blog post she crafts on example.com will land in your Home feed. Simultaneously, by following the blog-wide profile @[email protected], you’ll receive updates from all authors.

Note: if no one follows your author or blog instance, your posts remain unseen. The simplest method to verify the plugin’s operation is by following your profile. If you possess a Mastodon profile, initiate by following your new one.

The plugin works with the following tested federated platforms, but there may be more that it works with as well:

Some things to note:

The blog-wide profile is only compatible with sites with rewrite rules enabled. If your site does not have rewrite rules enabled, the author-specific profiles may still work.
Many single-author blogs have chosen to turn off or redirect their author profile pages, usually via an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math. This is usually done to avoid duplicate content with your blog’s home page. If your author page has been deactivated in this way, then ActivityPub author profiles won’t work for you. Instead, you can turn your author profile page back on, and then use the option in your SEO plugin to noindex the author page. This will still resolve duplicate content issues with search engines and will enable ActivityPub author profiles to work.
Once ActivityPub is installed, only new posts going forward will be available in the fediverse. Likewise, even if you’ve been using ActivityPub for a while, anyone who follows your site will only see new posts you publish from that moment on. They will never see previously-published posts in their Home feed. This process is very similar to subscribing to a newsletter. If you subscribe to a newsletter, you will only receive future emails, but not the old archived ones. With ActivityPub, if someone follows your site, they will only receive new blog posts you publish from then on.

So what’s the process?

Install the ActivityPub plugin.
Go to the plugin’s settings page and adjust the settings to your liking. Click the Save button when ready.
Make sure your blog’s author profile page is active if you are using author profiles.
Go to Mastodon or any other federated platform, and search for your profile, and follow it. Your new profile will be in the form of either @[email protected] or @[email protected], so that is what you’ll search for.
On your blog, publish a new post.
From Mastodon, check to see if the new post appears in your Home feed.

Please note that it may take up to 15 minutes or so for the new post to show up in your federated feed. This is because the messages are sent to the federated platforms using a delayed cron. This avoids breaking the publishing process for those cases where users might have lots of followers. So please don’t assume that just because you didn’t see it show up right away that something is broken. Give it some time. In most cases, it will show up within a few minutes, and you’ll know everything is working as expected.

Installation

Follow the normal instructions for installing WordPress plugins.

Automatic Plugin Installation

To add a WordPress Plugin using the built-in plugin installer:

Go to Plugins > Add New.
Type “activitypub” into the Search Plugins box.
Find the WordPress Plugin you wish to install.
1. Click Details for more information about the Plugin and instructions you may wish to print or save to help setup the Plugin.
2. Click Install Now to install the WordPress Plugin.
The resulting installation screen will list the installation as successful or note any problems during the install.
If successful, click Activate Plugin to activate it, or Return to Plugin Installer for further actions.

Manual Plugin Installation

There are a few cases when manually installing a WordPress Plugin is appropriate.

If you wish to control the placement and the process of installing a WordPress Plugin.
If your server does not permit automatic installation of a WordPress Plugin.
If you want to try the latest development version.

Installation of a WordPress Plugin manually requires FTP familiarity and the awareness that you may put your site at risk if you install a WordPress Plugin incompatible with the current version or from an unreliable source.

Backup your site completely before proceeding.

To install a WordPress Plugin manually:

Download your WordPress Plugin to your desktop.
- Download from the WordPress directory
- Download from GitHub
If downloaded as a zip archive, extract the Plugin folder to your desktop.
With your FTP program, upload the Plugin folder to the wp-content/plugins folder in your WordPress directory online.
Go to Plugins screen and find the newly uploaded Plugin in the list.
Click Activate to activate it.

FAQ

tl;dr

This plugin connects your WordPress blog to popular social platforms like Mastodon, making your posts more accessible to a wider audience. Once installed, your blog can be followed by users on these platforms, allowing them to receive your new posts in their feeds.

What is the status of this plugin?

Implemented:

blog profile pages (JSON representation)
author profile pages (JSON representation)
custom links
functional inbox/outbox
follow (accept follows)
share posts
receive comments/reactions
signature verification
threaded comments support

To implement:

replace shortcodes with blocks for layout

What is “ActivityPub for WordPress”

ActivityPub for WordPress extends WordPress with some Fediverse features, but it does not compete with platforms like Friendica or Mastodon. If you want to run a decentralized social network, please use Mastodon or GNU social.

What if you are running your blog in a subdirectory?

If you are running your blog in a subdirectory, but have a different wp_siteurl, you don’t need the redirect, because the index.php will take care of that.

Constants

The plugin uses PHP Constants to enable, disable or change its default behaviour. Please use them with caution and only if you know what you are doing.

ACTIVITYPUB_REST_NAMESPACE – Change the default Namespace of the REST endpoint. Default: activitypub/1.0.
ACTIVITYPUB_EXCERPT_LENGTH – Change the length of the Excerpt. Default: 400.
ACTIVITYPUB_SHOW_PLUGIN_RECOMMENDATIONS – show plugin recommendations in the ActivityPub settings. Default: true.
ACTIVITYPUB_MAX_IMAGE_ATTACHMENTS – Change the number of attachments, that should be federated. Default: 3.
ACTIVITYPUB_HASHTAGS_REGEXP – Change the default regex to detect hashtext in a text. Default: (?:(?<=\s)|(?<=<p>)|(?<=<br>)|^)#([A-Za-z0-9_]+)(?:(?=\s|[[:punct:]]|$)).
ACTIVITYPUB_USERNAME_REGEXP – Change the default regex to detect @-replies in a text. Default: (?:([A-Za-z0-9\._-]+)@((?:[A-Za-z0-9_-]+\.)+[A-Za-z]+)).
ACTIVITYPUB_CUSTOM_POST_CONTENT – Change the default template for Activities. Default: <strong>[ap_title]</strong>\n\n[ap_content]\n\n[ap_hashtags]\n\n[ap_shortlink].
ACTIVITYPUB_AUTHORIZED_FETCH – Enable AUTHORIZED_FETCH. Default: false.
ACTIVITYPUB_DISABLE_REWRITES – Disable auto generation of mod_rewrite rules. Default: false.
ACTIVITYPUB_DISABLE_INCOMING_INTERACTIONS – Block incoming replies/comments/likes. Default: false.
ACTIVITYPUB_DISABLE_OUTGOING_INTERACTIONS – Disable outgoing replies/comments/likes. Default: false.
ACTIVITYPUB_SHARED_INBOX_FEATURE – Enable the shared inbox. Default: false.
ACTIVITYPUB_SEND_VARY_HEADER – Enable to send the Vary: Accept header. Default: false.

Where can you manage your followers?

If you have activated the blog user, you will find the list of his followers in the settings under /wp-admin/options-general.php?page=activitypub&tab=followers.

The followers of a user can be found in the menu under “Users” -> “Followers” or under wp-admin/users.php?page=activitypub-followers-list.

For reasons of data protection, it is not possible to see the followers of other users.

Changelog

2.6.1

Fixed: Extra Fields will generate wrong entries

2.6.0

Added: Support for FEP-fb2a
Added: CRUD support for Extra Fields
Improved: Remote-Follow UI and UX
Improved: Open Graph fediverse:creator implementation
Fixed: Compatibility issues with fed.brid.gy
Fixed: Remote-Reply endpoint
Fixed: WebFinger Error Codes (thanks to the FediTest project)
Fixed: Fatal Error when wp_schedule_single_event third argument is being passed as a string

2.5.0

Added: WebFinger cors header
Added: WebFinger Content-Type
Added: The Fediverse creator of a post to OpenGraph
Improved: Try to lookup local users first for Enable Mastodon Apps
Improved: Send also Announces for deletes
Improved: Load time by adding count_total=false to WP_User_Query
Fixed: Several WebFinger issues
Fixed: Redirect issue for Application user
Fixed: Accessibilty issues with missing screen-reader-text on User overview page

2.4.0

Added: A core/embed block filter to transform iframes to links
Added: Basic support of incoming Announces
Added: Improve attachment handling
Added: Notifications: Introduce general class and use it for new follows
Added: Always fall back to get_by_username if one of the above fail
Added: Notification support for Jetpack
Added: EMA: Support for fetching external statuses without replies
Added: EMA: Remote context
Added: EMA: Allow searching for URLs
Added: EMA: Ensuring numeric ids is now done in EMA directly
Added: Podcast support
Added: Follower count to “At a Glance” dashboard widget
Improved: Use Note as default Object-Type, instead of Article
Improved: Improve AUTHORIZED_FETCH
Improved: Only send Mentions to comments in the direct hierarchy
Improved: Improve transformer
Improved: Improve Lemmy compatibility
Improved: Updated JS dependencies
Fixed: EMA: Add missing static keyword and try to lookup if the id is 0
Fixed: Blog-wide account when WordPress is in subdirectory
Fixed: Funkwhale URLs
Fixed: Prevent infinite loops in get_comment_ancestors
Fixed: Better Content-Negotiation handling

See full Changelog on GitHub.