Version 2.0.0 of the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress was released last week (release for WordPress.com is also ready). The main feature of this new version is the completely bidirectional/chained comment federation.
This is what he announced Matthias Pfefferle on Mastodon:
If you have connected your WordPress blog to fediverso with the ActivityPub plugin, version 2.0 allows someone who is reading one of your posts to comment on it. For example, from Mastodon. And the answer would travel one way to your blog and be posted in the comments section of the post. The new part is that any user who has an account on your blog will be able to respond to that message and the threaded comment will travel back to the fediverso publication where the initial response was made.
Below, you can see how the comment thread is displayed in Mastodon, after making a reply to the initial comment on the blog:
There is a limitation on how threaded and federated comments work. And it doesn’t work for blog visitors who don’t have an ActivityPub account. As Matthias Pfefferle commented:
That’s tricky, because they don’t have a real profile… we can try to give them a temporary profile, but we have to make sure we don’t run into a GDPR issue here.
M. Pfefferle
On the other hand, version 0.16.1 of the plugin introduced mentioning other ActivityPub users directly within your WordPress blog posts. When you publish the post, they should be notified of your publication within the fediverso client of their choice.
For example, if we mentioned here @pfefferle and to my Mastodon account @acambronero. I’ve added the Mastodon IDs of the ActivityPub plugin creator (now development team leader at Automattic) and my profile on that fediversa platform, respectively. In exchange, we would receive a mention on Mastodon letting us know that we are mentioned in this post.
However, this does not work at all, as the author of the plugin himself explained to me. The mention appears on the mentioned person’s timeline but does not trigger a notification.
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