WordPress.com Embraces the Fediverse and Activity Pub
Posted on October 24, 2023 by Aywren
Since I’ve done my share of talking about things I disapprove of when it comes to WordPress.com, I feel it’s also fair to give them props when they do something good. Recently, WordPress.com has provided all users with a way to connect to the Fediverse and share their content with Activity Pub networks, such as Mastodon.
I was quite surprised to see that even free users have this option (though I do wonder if it’s cutting into the number of shares you have per month?). I was even more surprised that when you enable the option, it gives you a Fediverse username.
For example, my free WordPress.com blog has a username of:
@aywren.wordpress.com@aywren.wordpress.com
Which is rather bulky and repetitive, but functional. Of course, that’s when WordPress.com starts nudging you to pay up for a domain name to make this more customized, right?
Sales tactics aside, this is far more functionality than I expected from this integration. But how does it actually look from the Mastodon side?
Here’s an actual update post from this WordPress Fediverse account on Mastodon, and it looks pretty good to me. You get the first bit of text in the post, a link, and then the normal page card with an image and all that. When you click the Browse more on the original profile link at the bottom of the feed, it takes you to the main blog page, which is nice.
I tested a reply to this shared post on Mastodon. It appears to function like a normal comment would and filter back into blog’s comments section on WordPress.com.
It’s kinda hard to tell what all it does because I do have comments turned off on my blog site. However, I tried to reply to the Mastodon comment, and I didn’t see the reply to my comment show up as a notification in Mastodon.
So, all conversation generated by the initial comment seems to take place on the blog itself – there’s not a back and forth that I can see. Still, while the conversation piece is limited, the overall setup is pretty nice considering it’s built in and they’re not charging for it (yet, anyhow).
I don’t know that it’s going to encourage folks who haven’t yet jumped on the Mastodon social network to move that direction, but it’s good for those who want to use it.