There has been a fair amount of buzz around Automattic’s acquisition of the ActivityPub for WordPress Plugin. There are also a good number of tutorials on how to install, activate, and set up the plugin.
But I haven’t seen a lot about why you would want your blog to be part of the “fediverse”, or what happens if you do link your blog to, let’s say Mastodon.
What is the Fediverse Anyhow?
The first thing I need to get my head around is what it means to be “federated.”
Glen Fleishman wrote an excellent explanation of the Fediverse in TidBITSwhere he distinguishes between centralized services (Facebook, X), decentralized services (DNS), and distributed services (email, Mastodon, Pleroma).
Knowing that email is a type of federated service is a big help in understanding what federation means. Anyone with a gmail account can communicate freely with anyone who has an Apple account or a wildrye.com account. Individual email servers can also block other servers if they choose.
Mastodon servers work the same way as email. I’m thinking that the cellular phone network is another type of “federated” service.
Why Federate Your Blog (part one)
As I understand it, the ActivityPub plugin lets you transform your WordPress blog into a federated server. Once you link your server to another server, such as a Mastodon instance, your blog is no longer part of a decentralized network, it is now part of a distributed network.
This means that people can read and comment on your blog in Mastodon or they can read or comment out on the web. This changes your content from being “pull media,” where you simply hope you can attract people to your site by word of mouth or SEO ranking. By linking your content into the Fedivers it is now more of a “push media,” where you are injecting your content into a conversation where hopefully people find it relevant and appealing.
Why Federate Your Blog (part two)
If you’re hoping to make money through your blog, either by ads or a tip jar, then it makes sense that you’d want to use push marketing to get the word out.
But there are other reasons why you might want to inject your blog posts into the Fediverse. One of these is that you want to “work with the garage door open.” You have a project that you’re working on and you’re happy to explain it to any neighbor who passes by.
This is what Elizabeth Tai is doing in her blog post Some flaws with ActivityPub and wordpress.com integration, which has been very helpful to me as I work through this decision.
Why You Wouldn’t Federate Your Blog
For me this comes down to comments. I don’t see much point in hassling with the ActivityPub plugin unless I’m going to open the comments section of my blog.
I closed the comments on my blog years ago because I was getting overrun with comment spam. I’m a little reluctant to open them up again, even though WordPress and other services have tips and tools for blocking comment spam.
Another argument against federation is that I’m not 100% convinced that federating my blog into Mastodon will be any easier or more effective than simply posting links to my blog from my primary Mastodon account. I think I will probably need to continue cross-posting even when my blog is part of Mastodon.
Finally, I don’t have a real strong vision for where I want to take my blog. I’m a little concerned that this is going to amount to a lot of fiddling around for no good purpose.
Where I’m Leaning
What I’m think I’ll do is start by re-opening comments on my blog. If comment moderation seems manageable, then I’ll give ActivityPub a shot.
It’s not that I’m expecting a ton of comments to come flooding in. I’m more concerned about how much time I’ll have to take fighting spam.
We’ll see how it goes.
