Congrats pfefferle! Very nice to see this being widely rolled out.
(for context, he’s been working on this and other plugins to integrate WordPress more with various flavors of Social Web for quite a while, and earlier this year Automattic hired him specifically to bring this along further. With wordpress**.com** not allowing random plugins to be installed in the cheaper tiers, having it in the platform makes it available to a lot more users)
many others are less ActivityPub compliant because they rely on implicitly mandatory additional idiosyncrasies (e.g. nodeinfo) or just don’t respond to proper AP requests e.g. as basic as accept their own follow request. I am currently struggling with this and the lack of interest by most developers of being federated with as I implement seppo.social.
People seem to have a tendency to settle on one system / product. I imagine there are a lot of reasons, but I think the sorta cyberpunk-ish utopia of lots of custom or semi-custom systems talking to one another just isn’t what most people want. Like, if you’re going to be talking to a bunch of people on Mastodon, why not just use that instead of trying to make an alternative work?
Short answer: freedom; why not let people to use whatever they think fit? If you already have a WordPress blog, you can enter the Fediverse by clicking a toggle.
Sure, but if it’s extra work, then most people are just going to support the one or two popular options. I mean, maybe they should have called this “Mastodon on Wordpress.com” since, presumably, any server that acts exactly like a Mastodon server will work.
The nice thing about using a standard instead of a specific product is that the minority that does want to do something different than the people who settle on one system / product can.
I have implemented my own ActivityPub server (which has an interface that is very unlike any other), and I have added rudimentary ActivityPub support to my own blog engine. People won’t have a tendency to use my implementations, for sure (I am the only user of both), but I still get interoperability - which is fun, for me.
I made these servers for myself, not to be the most used or the one system / product that people choose, but because a) it’s fun, and b) I get to decide how they work, and can make them just the way I want them.
I spent quite some time figuring out quirks of various ActivityPub-implementations to be able to talk to them, and sure, that was frustrating at times, but much better than having to use one system / product the majority chose, that doesn’t suit me.
I definitely support that, but I do think that a company like Automattic (the Wordpress folks) just isn’t going to be more spec-compliant than the most common implementations. After all, Wordpress is a mass market product.
Congrats pfefferle! Very nice to see this being widely rolled out.
(for context, he’s been working on this and other plugins to integrate WordPress more with various flavors of Social Web for quite a while, and earlier this year Automattic hired him specifically to bring this along further. With wordpress**.com** not allowing random plugins to be installed in the cheaper tiers, having it in the platform makes it available to a lot more users)
many others are less ActivityPub compliant because they rely on implicitly mandatory additional idiosyncrasies (e.g. nodeinfo) or just don’t respond to proper AP requests e.g. as basic as accept their own follow request. I am currently struggling with this and the lack of interest by most developers of being federated with as I implement seppo.social.
Other than mastodon, what about https://codeberg.org/streams?
The problem of interop is also rooted in the standards not having compliance tests a la html/css/atom validator or ssltest.
So neither visitor nor operator can check the compliance.
edit: typo
People seem to have a tendency to settle on one system / product. I imagine there are a lot of reasons, but I think the sorta cyberpunk-ish utopia of lots of custom or semi-custom systems talking to one another just isn’t what most people want. Like, if you’re going to be talking to a bunch of people on Mastodon, why not just use that instead of trying to make an alternative work?
Short answer: freedom; why not let people to use whatever they think fit? If you already have a WordPress blog, you can enter the Fediverse by clicking a toggle.
Sure, but if it’s extra work, then most people are just going to support the one or two popular options. I mean, maybe they should have called this “Mastodon on Wordpress.com” since, presumably, any server that acts exactly like a Mastodon server will work.
I see what you are saying, I feel is just similar to the linux distros situation, everyone wants their own.
The nice thing about using a standard instead of a specific product is that the minority that does want to do something different than the people who settle on one system / product can.
I have implemented my own ActivityPub server (which has an interface that is very unlike any other), and I have added rudimentary ActivityPub support to my own blog engine. People won’t have a tendency to use my implementations, for sure (I am the only user of both), but I still get interoperability - which is fun, for me.
I made these servers for myself, not to be the most used or the one system / product that people choose, but because a) it’s fun, and b) I get to decide how they work, and can make them just the way I want them.
I spent quite some time figuring out quirks of various ActivityPub-implementations to be able to talk to them, and sure, that was frustrating at times, but much better than having to use one system / product the majority chose, that doesn’t suit me.
I definitely support that, but I do think that a company like Automattic (the Wordpress folks) just isn’t going to be more spec-compliant than the most common implementations. After all, Wordpress is a mass market product.