Connecting with the Fediverse

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how this site should tie into the Fediverse, ActivityPub, and my Mastodon posts. It’s all a bit confusing right now but there are tools available to do much or most of the integration. Some of them are already installed on this site…

Mastodon

My Mastodon handle is https://indieweb.social/@spigot. I post there and use a plugin called Import from Mastodon to pull those posts into this site. You won’t see them on the main page however. I didn’t want to flood and overwhelm the rest of the posts, so they’re all imported to a mastodon category and removed from the main feed. I used to do the same thing with a Twitter feed but to what end I really don’t know. I guess they’ll all be here if something goes down at indieweb.social.

ActivityPub

The ActivityPub plugin is also installed. I don’t recall when I did that or why, but it’s here. It wasn’t until I started poking around on Mastodon that it’s been connected to the Fediverse for quite some time. I searched @bryan and there’s been a profile for me there since 2016. Nobody follows that profile so I made sure to do that. The profile links back to my author page on this site. Which isn’t super helpful to anyone because I’m the only author on this site ¯_(ツ)_/¯

WebMention

The Webmention plugin is installed and functioning. It allows others to respond to a post with a post on their own site. How useful this is remains a mystery to me. I like the idea of the feature, but doubt it will ever get used. Nobody even reads this blog let alone bothers to leave a comment, or a POST on their own site.

The main issue I currently have with this plugin is that it messed with the comment section markup so now the entire comment section is full width and all kinds of wonky. So do I remove the plugin and restore the correct styling or leave it and re-style the new markup? I’ll likely leave it and fix the site.

What’s this all for?

I still struggle knowing if any of it is worth it. I like the idea of connecting with others in the Fediverse, but not sure how much I need or want it intertwined with this website. I’ll keep digging into the specifics because it’s interesting to me. And maybe I can help others as I can only assume I’m not the only one struggling with this:

Woof that’s ugly. It’s an embedded post from Mastodon. WordPress is trying but maybe I can get it styled bit better…