Unlocking the Power of Federation: An Introduction to Connecting Your WordPress Website to the Fediverse

88b5fd63-e278-4f80-b407-4caa987d93e3 Unlocking the Power of Federation: An Introduction to Connecting Your WordPress Website to the Fediverse

Do you want to quickly understand what the federation is?

The WordPress.com video interview with Matthias Pfefferle ( The Magic of Federation | An interview with Matthias Pfefferle ) is good enough to deserve a special space here on the Blogpocket blog.

The possibility for independent content creators to connect their WordPress blogs to the Fediverse (that decentralized ecosystem of servers and platforms linked by the ActivityPub protocol) is fascinating. This WordPress.com talk, between DocPop and the author and lead developer of the ActivityPub plugin, is a great introduction to the world of federation and why the idea of ​​connecting a WordPress blog to the Fediverse is so awesome. The first post about this that I published on Blogpocket was in November 2022 and there is quite a bit of information about it. But I think it is worth dedicating a special post to a first-hand introductory talk -by the author of the plugin that allows you to connect WordPress to the Fediverse-.

In addition to the video, we have included here a Spanish transcript and summary of the talk.

We have obtained the Spanish transcription, with the AI ​​app Merlin, together with the summary and part of the text of this article, with the sole purpose of ensuring that you can perfectly understand, in Spanish, the conversation between @DocPop and Matthias Pfefferle. All of this was translated by Google (translation corrected and adapted by me, of course)

ther commenters was a fundamental part of enjoying the web?
Matthias Pfefferle is making commenting popular again with ActivityPub for WordPress, a plugin that seamlessly connects your WordPress website to the fediverse.
In episode 4 of The Fediverse Files, @DocPop and Matthias discuss fediverse applications that apply beyond social media and the future of the ActivityPub protocol.

Summary of the talk about the federation

Below is a summary of the talk about the federation.

Introduction:

Imagine effortlessly connecting with your audience and expanding the reach of your content with the magic of federation. Dive into the world of integration in the Fediverse!

What is the Federation and the Fediverse?

Federation enables seamless content distribution and user interaction by connecting websites to the Fediverse. The Fediverse is similar to a social media email system, allowing users to follow and interact on a cross-platform basis, leveraging the ActivityPub protocol.

Reviving interactive blogs

Joining the Fediverse improves blog interactivity through features such as commenting, liking, sharing, and following. Streamlined participation processes increase user engagement and content visibility.

Sharing content effortlessly

By integrating into the Fediverse, content sharing becomes efficient and widespread. A single shared resource can transcend platforms, keeping content alive and open for discussion everywhere.

Simplicity in WordPress integration

Effortlessly connect WordPress to the Fediverse with a simple installation of the ActivityPub plugin, and federate your website. Ideal for independent journalism sites, this integration allows content creators to reach a wider audience.

Owning your audience with ActivityPub

ActivityPub gives you control over your audience, regardless of platform changes. Direct sharing across the Fediverse, through federation, ensures content ownership and makes cross-platform content tracking easy.

Innovative possibilities and community participation

Explore creative applications of Fediversp, such as cross-platform games, and witness the growth of the community through diverse interactions. Take advantage of opportunities for expansive digital connections, through federation.

Matthias Pfefferle: a revealing presence

Check out Matthias’ blog in German and witness his enthusiasm for the addition of influential entities like The Verge to the Fediverse. Follow the journey of a Fediverse enthusiast at @pfefferle@mastodon.social 

Conclusion:

Embrace Fediverse integration to streamline content sharing, improve interactivity, and own your audience. The power of the Federation awaits your fingerprint!

Video Transcript

Index

  • Connecting your website to the Fediverse can reduce work and friction for users. 00:01
  • The Fediverse is like a social media version of email. 01:11
  • Fediverse integration improves interactivity in the blogosphere 02:30
  • Joining the Fediverse makes sharing content easier and more widespread 03:56
  • Connecting WordPress to the Fediverse is easy 05:07
  • Owning Your Audience with ActivityPub 06:41
  • Creating opportunities for content followers across all platforms 08:13
  • Matthias shares his online presence 09:36

Text

Connecting your website to the Fediverse not only reduces the work of distributing your content on social media, but it also reduces friction for new users who want to leave comments on your site, which is the goal. 

The reason we have our site is to interact with our users. Today I’m talking to Matthias Pfefferle, the creator of ActivityPub for WordPress, a plugin that makes it extremely easy to connect your WordPress website to the Fediverse. 

The Fediverse is an ecosystem of websites and applications that communicate with each other through a shared protocol called ActivityPub. Now, at this point, we tend to think of the Fediverse as primarily social networks, decentralized versions of microblogging platforms, or decentralized versions of image-sharing platforms. But it’s actually much more than that. 

And to prove this point today, we’re going to talk about what would happen if you were to connect your website to the Fediverse. This is very easy to do with the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress created by Matthias Pfefferle. And Matthias is going to join us today to talk about this. 

  • Matthias, how are you? What are you doing today?
  • Hey, I’m fine. Thanks for inviting me. 
  • Let’s start by simply describing what the Fediverse is. If I were to describe ActivityPub to someone, I might say something like, it’s a two-way version of RSS, but that might not be widely understood. How would you like to describe the Fediverse?
  •  I like to compare it to email because I would say that email is the decentralized protocol that everyone knows. So it’s kind of the social media version of email. No matter where you create your account and what tool you use to post things, you can just follow everyone else who is on a platform that supports ActivityPub. 
  • So what are the reasons why a website owner would decide to add their website to the Fediverse?
  • In the WordPress community, we had a lot of discussions about that. Comments is what mostly the classic WordPress or blogging ecosphere didn’t include in RSS. So, you could just subscribe to someone’s content, but it was just a one-way solution. You could read someone else’s blog post in your reader, but to comment and interact with that content, you had to leave your tool and visit the site to start a comment. With ActivityPub, it’s just kind of the same experience, but you can use your tool where you subscribe to content to also interact. So, it’s a tool to subscribe, comment, like, share, follow. So you have a very simple user interface to do all that social stuff, and that ultimately brings interaction and discussions back to the blogosphere.
  • So, Fediverse integration will reduce the steps needed to leave a comment, thus improving interactivity.
  • Exactly. It is, if you use your example from the beginning with RSS 2. 2 is the tools part where, at the end, you bring the ability to comment into the RSS reader tool. By reducing the friction of commenting, joining the Fediverse can make it even easier to share your content because you won’t have to go to one platform and paste and then go to another platform and paste and then sign up for a new platform and then paste there. You just share once and it gets distributed everywhere. Right?
  • Yeah. And I would say that it’s not shared anymore. It’s kind of like the post makes you a first-class citizen, in the end. Because if you compare that to the old cross-posting, when you actually had to share a post on Twitter, you had to put a copy of your post inside the little Twitter box to post it. And all the communication that happens on Twitter only happened on Twitter. And with Activity Pub and the Fediverse, actually, your content lives all over the Fediverse. And if it’s commented on, you’ll have that comment in the comments section of your blog. And that’s really amazing.
  • We’ve talked about the magic of the ActivityPub protocol and the benefits of sharing with the Fediverse. So let’s get into it. How do you connect a WordPress website to the Fediverse?
  • Literally, it’s just installing the plugin and activating it. We built it to have the best possible default settings. So, it’s just activating the plugin. We also provide some widgets, which are called blocks in the WordPress ecosystem, that help you create simple follower widgets and display a list of your followers, but simply to post stuff, you just activate the plugin. 
  • Do you think any particular type of site could specifically benefit from joining the Fediverse?
  • I would say independent journalism. Journalism in general, because most, most new sites are trying to grow their audience on Twitter or Facebook or something like that. And there’s a big risk in that when your site gets blocked or your account gets blocked or something changes with the use of APIs. And yeah, there’s a lot of chances of, yeah, content being blocked at the end. So it’s a big risk to just use third-party platforms for that. And with ActivityPub, you own your audience at the end, if that makes sense. And if you decide to change your platform to change the software that you use, it doesn’t affect your audience because you just take that with you.
  • I love that you mention that, those news sites. Join the Fediverse and share directly to the Fediverse. I see some websites that share links to things like posts in threads and Mastodon, but I would love to see websites, sharing directly to the Fediverse, where they can have more control of their content and followers can have better interaction with them. They can comment directly on the content. Matthias, since you mentioned owning your audience, can you explain what that means? 
  • So if you were relying on social media before the whole idea of ​​the Fediverse came about, you were very dependent on the closed social network working well and not blocking your account or, yeah, disappearing at the end. So we already had that back in the MySpace days. So there’s always the possibility that a social network will shut down completely. So it doesn’t matter if a platform of some of your followers will shut down because you use it, users on that platform can change their platform and still follow you at the end. So you create the opportunity for others to follow your content where they want to follow you at the end. And if they decide to change platforms, they can subscribe to your content again on the new platform and vice versa. 
  • We’re talking about social media apps, Activity Pub and the Fediverse, what are some of the coolest apps you’ve seen that have connected to the Fediverse using ActivityPub?
  • The most creative one I saw is a chess game built on top of ActivityPub. I think they built it so that you can use all the common ActivityPub platforms to play chess with each other. And if you use that tool, you’ll see a nice chess board. 
  • That sounds amazing. I have to try it out. Matthias, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciated chatting with you. How can people follow you online?
  • I would say, because my blog is in German, it’s my, my last name. ,PFEFFERLE on Mastodon dot Social.
  • That’s it for this episode of the Fediverse archives. We’ll be posting links to everything we mentioned in the description below. Stay tuned for more discussions and interviews as we continue to explore the world of federated content and open protocols. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments below. But what I want to know is what website do you want to see join the Fediverse? I’m waiting for The Verge. That’s the one I’m excited about. That would be Oprah joining Twitter, if you were around in 2012 when that happened, that would be the big one for me. Verge joining. That’s it. That’s what we want.

Information about the Fediverse on Blogpocket

The following links will take you to existing information on the Blogpocket blog about the Fediverse and federation.

I read you in the comments.

For the writing of this post, Merlin was used to obtain the video transcript and summary. The images were generated using Copilot Designer’s AI. At Blogpocket, we believe in an ethical and responsible use of AI.

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