This is the first release under the umbrella of #Automattic!
Thanks to Automattic and all the fantastic people who helped with this great release!
@mattwiebe for the amazing new blocks! @mediaformat for the http-signatures @jeremy for several Jetpack compatibilities @nuriapenya for the design of the settings and blocks @donnacavalier for all the texts and documentation @alex for a lot of big and small contributions
Just to repeat, this is now available to ALL WordPress blogs including free tier ones. The free tier has slightly different instructions, but effect is same.
At the State of the Word address this week, Matt Mullenweg was asked about support for the plugin, and he commented that less than 5,000 sites had installed it. So he wasn't sure how interested people are in it.
So... if you have a WP site, let's start installing that plugin and making more sites available via ActivityPub! 😀
ActivityPub for WordPress released version 1.0.0 thanks to @pfefferle 🥳
Enter the fediverse with ActivityPub, broadcasting your blog to a wider audience! Attract followers, deliver updates, and receive comments from a diverse user base of ActivityPub-compliant platforms.
UPDATE: Seems it already happened. Content from 2014-2023 has already been shared. So your opt-out will just be honoured going forward. If and how already sent content will be handled by the receiving 3rd party after you opt-out remains a mystery
You may have heard that WordPress is now federated with Mastodon. What does this all mean?
Well, very simply, people with WordPress blogs can now automatically publish their new posts to a Fediverse address where they are available to Mastodon.
I just had a look at #Meta's recent press release about #Threads, and something caught my attention right away.
For the very first time, they're acknowledging another #Fediverse platform alongside #Mastodon. Specifically, they're highlighting that #WordPress can now connect through #ActivityPub.
Now, you know Meta's PR department doesn't say things by accident. So here's why this is a big deal. Last time I checked, WordPress powers a whopping 43% of the Internet. Yeah, you heard that right! If you visit a website, there's a good chance it's using WordPress as its CMS.
Now, if even a fraction of those WordPress sites start federating, it could have a huge impact on the network effect of the Fediverse. Of course, Meta isn't oblivious to this. I've been talking about the potential of WordPress and ActivityPub for quite some time now.
But if you're particularly observant, you might also notice that they mention #Tumblr. We've known for a while that Tumblr is likely to integrate ActivityPub into their platform.
But here's an interesting tidbit: Did you know that one company, Automattic, not only owns Tumblr but is also the driving force behind WordPress?
I don't want to jump to conclusions, but once again, PR departments don't just drop hints randomly. I have a strong feeling that Meta has been having some high-level discussions with Automattic about the future of ActivityPub. It wouldn't surprise me if Meta has some insights into Automattic's upcoming plans for the Fediverse.
This morning, a VPS hosting a small e-commerce site (powered by WooCommerce on Ubuntu 22.04) experienced another out-of-memory issue. A colleague (one of the developers) urgently called me, asking to upgrade the VPS due to excessive load.
I pointed out (again, as has often happened in recent weeks) that a VPS with 32GB of RAM (!!!) and 16 dedicated cores (!!!) should not run out of memory with just five simultaneous visits to a small e-commerce site. We host much larger and busier websites on much smaller VPSs. There's likely a WordPress module with a leak, or some interaction between modules causing this issue.
The response: Okay, but just add more RAM and power to solve it.
The illusion of "infinite resources" in the Cloud has led to poor development habits. Sometimes I wonder how much energy and resources we waste (and pollution we generate) due to a lack of basic optimization.
Over in #WordPress news, we shipped in Jetpack our Social Sharing feature for Mastodon.
This will allow site owners to link to their Mastodon profile and automatically (or schedule) shares of their blog posts to their fediverse followers.
Automattic is both doing this and working on ActivityPub support for WordPress as two side of the coin. Whether or want your site to natively be on the fediverse or share to other profiles, we want you to do both.
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferleexplains:
“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”
This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.
Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.
Tay gently pushed the plastic door of the printer shut with an edifying "click".
Servicing Dark Printers had been illegal for years now. They enjoyed the seditious thrill.
It had started as a subscription grab after the printer companies tried hobbling third party toner cartridges.
"Subscribe for a monthly fee and you'll never run out of toner again."
"Let us monitor your printer so you don't have to."
People saw it for what it was - vendor lock in - but they had no choice really, not after all the printer companies started doing it.
Then came generative AI.
Everyone wanted to scrape every word ever written on the internet, tokenize it and feed it to an #LLM. #Reddit sold out, then #Tumblr, even open source darling #WordPress - selling out their user base for filthy token lucre.
So people started hiding their words, their art, their thoughts, their expression, not behind disrespected robots.txt, but through obscurity.
Rejecting Website Boy's "fewer algorithmic fanfares", they forked into the Dark Fedi.
Unscrapeable, unscrutable, ungovernable.
But people had forgotten about the printers.
The printers had to be connected 24/7, for "monitoring".
But you could tokenize postscript as easily as HTML.
And so every time a document was sent to a printer, it was harvested for tokens. Even secure documents. Documents not online.
Tay shut the metal door behind them, Dark Printer cossetted safely in its Faraday cage, and shuffled the hot stack of A4 paper it had borne.
It was a children's story, about how words were sacred, and special, and how you had to earn the right to use them.