The ActivityPub plugin team at Automattic has been doing some amazing work. Over the past few years, this single-person project has shifted from a single-person effort to a team of full-time developers. With the release of the 7.x branch of the ActvityPub integration plugin, project devs announced that they would be working on bringing remote following capabilities to the plugin itself.

Today, version 7.1.0 was released with a very early sneak peak at this new feature. While it’s currently hidden behind an “Advanced Options” toggle, it’s now possible to use the ActivityPub plugin to directly follow other Actors on the network.

This is still a relatively new feature, and the plumbing hasn’t been completely fleshed out yet. Team member Konstantin Obenland explains further in the announcement:

There’s really no functionality around it yet, beyond following accounts from other instances, as we have yet to start processing incoming posts and adding the ability to interact with them. But if you just can’t wait to show your appreciation for other accounts by following them, go wild!

Why is this Important?

The connection from WordPress to the rest of the Fediverse has always kind of been in a weird place. While the main ActivityPub integration for WordPress generally works great for sending articles to subscribers, following people directly from the WordPress dashboard has been messy. Right now, if you wanted to use your WordPress blog as an actual Fediverse account, you would need the following things:

• Friends – a social dashboard for WordPress, still in the early stages. This piece is primarily used for following other people in the Fediverse.
• Enable Mastodon Apps – This implements a substantial amount of the Mastodon API, so that you can post microblog updates directly to your WordPress site.
• Event Bridge for ActivityPub – This technically adds support for federated Events, by converting your site’s events calendar into something people on the network can subscribe to and indicate their attendance.

With these three pieces, it’s possible to cobble together something that comes close to being a complete Fediverse user experience. Still, this process takes time to set up, can be prone to configuration issues, and sometimes has missing features. Having different plugins that all touch the ActivityPub integration can also be harder to test code and report issues.

By introducing remote following functionality directly into the ActivityPub plugin, the project team will effectively provide standard mechanisms for other plugins to directly rely on. In the near future, this might mean that you won’t have to rely on Friends to be the broker of your social connections. Instead, Friends can just use what’s already put in place by the core plugin, and focus on ways to just work as a social dashboard.

Also, Starter Packs!

One other thing worth mentioning involves preliminary support for the Fediverse Starter Kits, a proposed recreation of Bluesky’s Starter Pack functionality. While there have been a number of attempts to make something similar for the Fediverse in the past, there has yet to be a Fediverse standard for lists filled with recommended users to follow. However, the WordPress team has put in the effort to support Pixelfed‘s Starter Kit Data Schema as a point of reference.

In all, this release iterates on the current ActivityPub stack for WordPress, and could provide a stable foundation for a lot of future functionality that we’ve all come to expect from platforms such as Mastodon, Misskey, or even Bonfire.

 Share