For the past 6 months I’ve had the ActivityPub WordPress plugin installed here on my site and have been federating its content. I’ve learned a lot over that time about how it all works (I am still fuzzy on a few of the bits, but overall I think I understand it much better than before) and I’ve enjoyed seeing some of the interaction from Mastodon trickle in.
That said, I have my reservations about whether or not blogs – or, more specifically, my blog – should federate content into social networks this way.
Because my website isn’t a full-blown Mastodon instance, keeping up with replies, boots, and other interactions is a bit of work. I found myself needing to open Ivory (my Mastodon client of choice), navigating to my blog’s Mastodon account, and seeing if there was any interaction there.
In addition to that, for the interactions that did come into my blog (and I approved them), when I replied via my site it would reply on Mastodon as my website’s account.
This is all very cool, mind you, and technically interesting. But I think it leads to a bunch of confusion. Not the least of which is that I’m left with multiple accounts on the fediverse. I kinda sorta wish I only had one! Even though I’m a fan of ActivityPub, and perhaps an even bigger fan of Mastodon, I don’t think every single thing we do on the web needs to be federated via ActivityPub.
It reminds me of the struggles I’ve had for many years around POSSE. I’ve written about it before. Trying to syndicate my content to a slew of social networks just feels like work. My North Star continues to be Jeremy Keith‘s homegrown syndication solution that, somehow, he finds the time and energy to build and maintain and share. I don’t know how he does it – while also playing some awesome tunes and building great websites.
I haven’t yet uninstalled the ActivityPub plugin but I am considering it. For now I’ve removed the references to my site’s endpoint here on my site and on Mastodon. My site’s content is syndicated with RSS and that should be enough for the open web to subscribe to, digest, etc. I’ve also kept commenting open on my blog for new posts for a while now. I think that should be plenty and will stand the test of time.
Florian Ziegler recently wrote about this same topic.
I’m guessing that the answer to “should I federate my blog with ActivityPub?” will be different for every blog and every one. And I haven’t yet made up my mind for mine, but I’m leading towards no.
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