Hey, ya’ll. I haven’t really been posting much nor do I have any posts lined up for the near future. However, I wanted to talk a bit about the recent update of WordPress allowing blogs to join the Fediverse. You can read WordPress.com’s official post about it here.
I won’t get too much into what the Fediverse is for those who don’t know about it. I’d leave it up to you to do your own research. Though, you might be interested in reading this blog post from Chikorita157, a fellow aniblogger who started their own Mastodon server. Essentially, the Fediverse is a massive group of “federated” social platforms. “Federated” just basically means that all these different platforms can interact with one another (imagine being able to see and interact with posts from Instagram and X on your Facebook timeline).
So, by connecting your blog to the Fediverse, people can now follow your blog on any Fedi platform. They can also directly reply to your posts and even easily boost (the Fedi equivalent of a retweet) them. This should potentially do wonders for improving your reach—if you’re fine with leaving the small bubble of the WordPress aniblogging community, that is.
The instructions for connecting a WordPress.com blog is in the above-mentioned article. However, if you’re on a self-hosted WordPress blog, I believe you have to install the ActivityPub plugin yourself. Note that you don’t need any existing Fedi accounts to do this. Your blog will automatically connect to the Fediverse by itself.
(Btw, “ActivityPub” is the name of the protocol that all Fediverse platforms use. This is what enables them to connect with one another. Essentially, the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress allows your blog to use this protocol to connect with Fedi platforms.)
There’s also a new widget you can add to your blog that allows people to follow you on the Fediverse:
You can see in the last image how my comically long and hard-to-type domain name has finally bitten me in the butt with how long it made my Fedi handle (dopeydopierdopiest.wordpress.com@dopeydopierdopiest.wordpress.com). Those using free WordPress.com accounts definitely won’t be blessed with good handles. You can also see how Fedi handles resemble email addresses, with tail-end of it referring to your Fedi server. In this case, your server is just your website.
So, yeah! I hope that more blogs join the Fediverse as that would make it easier for me to read more blogs if they’re on a platform that I already use. For the record, I recently moved to Sakurajima.moe, a Mastodon server hosted by the aforementioned Chikorita157. It’s a server (or instance, as we call them on Fedi) aimed specifically at otaku-culture and aniblogging. There’s also Urusai.social, another Mastodon instance aimed at otaku-culture. However, as far as I know, they don’t allow self-promotion of blogs the way that Sakurajima.moe does.
You can follow my blog on the Fediverse with the handle @dopeydopierdopiest.wordpress.com. You can also follow my personal account @dopey_kun@sakurajima.moe.
If I’m following you on WordPress and you also joined the Fediverse, let me know so I can follow you on my Mastodon account!
Update: By the way, here’s an example of what your blog would look like on a Mastodon instance, though this would still vary from platform to platform and client to client:
As you can see, the whole post is viewable. So, it’s not just posting a link to your blog. In this case, the post is collapsed but it can easily be uncollapsed to see it in full. Other clients don’t allow long posts to be collapsed, such as this one:
Hmm, I saw the post from WordPress about joining Fediverse, but I’m still on the fence about whether I should or not. My biggest concern is that this is only a temporary wordpress/fediverse cooperation. WordPress has made agreements with other media companies before, but those agreements only lasted a few months and then whatever I had connected to that other company or service ended up being lost, broken, or at least all messed up when the agreement with WordPress ended. I just don’t want to put in a lot of work, only to have it ruined by WordPress again in a few months.
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That’s a valid concern. I don’t really know the history of these other integrations.
I will say that the ActivityPub plugin is open-source. Even if WordPress.com itself abandons it, it will continue to get worked on by contributors as long as people want it.
Secondly, there’s really very little work to be done on our part. The plugin kinda takes care of itself. You can just turn it on and forget about it. I don’t think there’s really much to lose.
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@dopeydopierdopiest.wordpress.com this is just a reply test. Don’t mind me.
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