Achilles and the Tortoise met once more, this time sitting on a bench under the shade of a large oak tree. The air was filled with the soft rustling of leaves, but the topic of the day was not stoicism, but something more modern and technical: WordPress blogs and the fediverse.
“Turtle,” Achilles began, adjusting his position to look at her better, “I’ve heard that blogs can now connect to the fediverse thanks to something called ActivityPub. But, as always, I’m having a hard time fully understanding how it works.”
The Turtle, with his usual calm, smiled and nodded slowly.
—Ah, Achilles, always so curious. Let me see if I can explain it in a simple way. Suppose you have a WordPress blog and you have installed the ActivityPub plugin. This allows you to connect your blog to the fediverse, a decentralized network of platforms like Mastodon, Pleroma, and others. Now, your readers can not only visit you on your blog, but they can also follow your blog from their accounts in the fediverse. Are you following me this far?
Achilles nodded, somewhat intrigued.
—Yeah, sure. So you can see my posts in your timeline, just like you would if you were following anyone else?
“Exactly,” the Turtle replied. “Every time you post something, it appears in their feed. And this is where the magic really begins. If one of them replies to that post from their account in the fediverse, their comment doesn’t just stay there, on their platform. No, no! It also appears as a comment on your WordPress blog.”
Achilles frowned, clearly impressed.
—That is, if someone comments on Mastodon about my post, that comment will also appear on my blog as if it had been made directly there.
“That’s right. And not only that,” the Turtle added with a slight nod. “From your blog, you can reply to that comment, and that reply will be sent back to the fediverse. It’s a seamless loop. You and your followers can have an ongoing conversation, regardless of whether they’re on your blog or another platform.”
Achilles burst out laughing.
—It’s like our old never-ending race! Always catching up, but never quite there. This system creates an eternal, almost frictionless dialogue, where comments pass from one platform to another without ceasing.
The Turtle, amused by the comparison, nodded.
—Exactly. An eternal loop of communication. Although, unlike our career, there is no frustration here. It is a cycle that simply flows between platforms, taking the dialogue from one place to another, without end.
“And there is no way to escape this cycle?” Achilles asked, still with a smile on his lips.
The Turtle shrugged, his expression one of ancient wisdom.
—There is no need to escape, Achilles. It is a fragile and beautiful cycle. As long as there is interaction, the comments will continue to cross back and forth. Perhaps it is not a philosophical dilemma to be solved, but simply something to be enjoyed.
Achilles, satisfied, nodded once more.
—You’re right, Turtle. Maybe this loop isn’t a trap, but a new way of being in constant dialogue with the world.
About this scene from Achilles and the Tortoise
In this scene from Achilles and the Tortoise, the characters of Zeno’s paradox are not talking about stoicism but about WordPress blogs and the fediverse 😉 . The style of this short story is inspired by Douglas Hofstadter’s introductory chapters in his work “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal and Graceful Loop”, with a series of conversations between these characters.
As with the ebook The Art of Stoic Living (in spanish), I used GPT-4o, ChatGPT Plus’ advanced artificial intelligence model, to write this story. My work was the idea and co-writing, combining my long experience and extensive knowledge of WordPress and the fediverse with GPT-4o’s text generation and information processing capabilities. This synergy has allowed me to create an interesting resource that I hope will be very useful for all those who seek to understand what it means to connect a WordPress blog to the fediverse.
I have worked meticulously on the story to ensure that the information provided is accurate, relevant and applicable. AI has been a key tool in this process, helping to organize ideas, generate content and review details, but always under my supervision and editorial control.
Zeno’s paradoxes are a set of philosophical problems generally believed to have been posed by the Ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (c. 490–430 BC) to support Parmenides’ doctrine that, contrary to the evidence of the senses, belief in pluralism and change is erroneous, and in particular that motion is merely an illusion of the senses.
In the Achilles-Tortoise paradox, Achilles is racing a tortoise. Achilles gives the tortoise a head start of, say, 100 metres. Assuming they both start out running at a constant speed (one very fast, the other very slow), after a finite amount of time, Achilles will have run 100 metres, reaching the tortoise’s starting point. During this time, the tortoise has run a much shorter distance, say 10 metres. It will take Achilles a little longer to cover this distance, during which time the tortoise will have moved a little further; so Achilles still has some more time to reach this third point, while the tortoise is still moving forward. So every time Achilles reaches somewhere where the tortoise has been, he still has some distance to cover before he can catch up.
Source: Wikipedia
Real example of interaction in the Fediverse, between a federated WordPress blog and a Mastodon user
The image below shows a screenshot of Mastodon and, more specifically, the interaction with a post published on my personal blog Tokyo (in spanish).
The post Ready to climb the Tourmalet (in spanish) was published on my WordPress.org blog. And since the blog is federated, the post was seen on Mastodon by all those users who follow my blog there. The user “El Hombre Muerto” replied from his Mastodon account to my post and his reply appeared as a comment on my blog. Once I accepted the comment, I wrote a reply back from the blog that appeared as a reply in the thread started, on Mastodon, by El Hombre Muerto.
This post contains images and text created using AI. At Blogpocket, we believe in ethical and responsible use of AI.
Leave a Reply