Decentered S1E8: WordPress-ActivityPub with Matthias Pfefferle
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This is a special episode near and dear to my heart. We Distribute heavily makes use of the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin that Matthias Pfefferle develops, and it’s now a sponsored plug-in by Automattic! We delve into the challenges of building protocol support into a platform that pretty much everybody customizes, and some of the benefits of bringing publishing to the Fediverse.
If you’d prefer to watch a video version of the interview, you can check it out on PeerTube!
Show Notes
- Matthias actually discovered WordPress through its predecessor, B2evolution.
- His love of blogging in the early 2000’s drove him to develop plugins for the WordPress ecosystem.
- ActivityPub is not the first protocol he brought to WordPress: he also integrated IndieWeb and OStatus plugins.
- His work on the ActivityPub plugin would eventually get noticed by Automattic, the parent company behind WordPress! He now works on the integration full-time!
- Why ActivityPub and not AT Protocol? Developers want assurance that the standard they adopt is from an established organization. Plus, it was a natural progression from OStatus.
- What’s the hardest thing about developing this plugin? Two things: shared hosting environments, and conflicts with other plugins.
- What does the future look like? Probably similar to what’s happening today: the plugin provides integration with other plugins, like Friends and Enable Mastodon Apps.
- Another consideration is to provide good default outputs to be compatible with other Fediverse platforms – there’s ongoing work to make Events in WordPress compatible with Mobilizon.
@news @pfefferle that was a nice listen!
A couple of thoughts that struck me: first, the “posts can be marked as a reply to another post” idea reminded me not just of microblogging platforms but also how #Medium was a few years ago! Now they’ve kind of separated things out, but otherwise a Medium comment was just another Medium story with a reply marked as such 🗨️
@news @pfefferle related to that, I’m curious to see how #Ghost implements their #ActivityPub offering. I’ve thought about the mapping between #publications and #Fediverse users myself and it can get confusing 🫠
Also, the “you have to fill a form to comment” barrier makes so much sense! #Disqus solved that in one way, but #ActivityPub does it better. In fact, I started filling the form on We Distribute to write this answer, but then thought “let me try searching this post in #Akkoma” and here I am 😉