Use This Plugin to Add Your WordPress Site to Fediverse
I miss blogging. Don’t get me wrong, I write professionally for various websites and run an email newsletter, but none of them give me that 2000s blog feel. The closest thing I found was Mastodon. Maybe it’s the sloppiness, maybe it’s the DIY approach, but scrolling through Mastodon reminds me of old-school blogs.
Turns out I can combine my passion for old school blogging with my love for Mastodon. There’s a simple plugin you can install on any WordPress site to make it part of Fediverse, the social media network that includes Mastdon and eventually Meta’s Threads . Users of these networks can follow your blog and receive all your posts directly in their feed.
To get started, all you need to do is install the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress . You can do this by going to the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard and searching for a plugin. Install and enable it and you’re done: your website is now available on Fediverse.
Every user of your WordPress site can now be followed by users of Mastodon and other social networks built on the ActivityPub protocol (collectively called “The Fediverse”). I confirmed this by viewing and subscribing to my Mastodon blog.
I kept an eye on myself too, just to see what it looked like. Full posts are available directly in the Mastodon feed, allowing people to follow my blog without leaving Mastodon. But the coolest thing in my opinion is that any reply that someone sends to your posts shows up as a comment on your site.
If you want, you can reply to comments directly in WordPress and the user will receive the reply just like any other reply. This allows you to blog the way you remember, while allowing everyone else to use the tools they prefer.
And you can go even further. If you want to follow people, even out of respect, you’ll needthe Friends plugin , which essentially turns your WordPress website into a full-fledged ActivityPub social network. You can even configure the plugin to work with Mastodon apps, including Mona, the best app for Mastodon .
However, this is only for advanced users. For most people, this is just an easy way to give potential readers another way to read and interact with your blog posts. This setup also means that Threads users will eventually be able to follow your blog without having to use Threads. Other services, including Tumblr, are also working on integration with ActivityPub. An ecosystem like this could bring back blogging—at least I hope so.