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Burningbird Social Media

Yes to ActivityPub, but no to Friends

I decided to disable the Friends plug-in when I realized it was inserting every new feed item as a new post in my database. This could easily become unmanageable. Considering you can use a feed reader to read weblogs AND Mastodon accounts, it just didn’t seem worth the database burden.

I do still have ActivityPub activated. I agree with my friend Karl that I could wish it would not pick my profile name as account name, because this could make it easier to hack into our WordPress accounts, but it’s beta, it will improve, and it’s interesting.

I realized this week that I checked Twitter only twice and that primarily to see what was happening with the Speaker vote. Most of the folks I followed on Twitter are now on Mastodon, and I just don’t miss the bird site that much.

I’m now considering keeping my mastodon.social account. It’s cheaper for me to support mastodon.social than it would be to spin up a new Linode for a Mastodon instance. And I’m really not interested in installing software I can’t ‘read’ since I don’t speak the language. And no, I really don’t want to learn Ruby. I’m done with my programming language learning days, and content to stick primarily with markups, PHP, and JavaScript.

Update

I have temporarily disabled ActivityPub. I’m currently restoring all my old weblog posts using the Wayback Machine. I realized after about the 15th post yesterday that I was sending copies of each to Mastodon.

I’m not sure if the folks that follow me on Mastodon really want to know what weblogging was like in early 2004. It is interesting in that I stopped just on the verge of discussing my move to a new weblogging tool: WordPress.

I’ll re-enable the plugin when I’m finished.

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2 replies on “Yes to ActivityPub, but no to Friends”

I’ve also been messing with the Friends and ActivityPub plugins for WordPress on my blog, and I share your concerns about the former bloating the database with feed items. You can control this somewhat by setting retention values in days or a number of posts, but you have to go into each friend’s Feeds tab and do it manually–there’s no default setting.

After reading your post, I’m also considering disabling Friends in favor of a feed reader, especially because (as you also noted) there are gaps when with favorites and comment conversations bridging between WordPress and Mastodon servers. Like you, I’m not keen on installing a single-user Mastodon instance or other fediverse server that requires managing an unfamiliar programming language.

I’m also trying to do this in tandem with a suite of IndieWeb plugins, and I’m running into an issue with my friends feed page not showing any posts when the Post Kinds plugin is activated. I really want to keep this plugin because it lets me interact better with other IndieWeb sites as well as the Bridgy POSSE/backfeed service connecting me to other social networks.

My ideal is a personal website where I write everything, including long-form articles, short statuses, and replies like these. Folks can then find me via a single identifiable address and then subscribe/follow the entire firehose of content or choose subsets according to post types, topics, or tags. They’d then be able to reply or react on my site or their favored platform, which my site would collect regardless of origin, with subsequent replies and reactions getting pushed out to them. Oh, and it should work with both ActivityPub clients and servers, IndieWeb sites, and syndicate/backfeed to other social networks either with or akin to the Bridgy service I mentioned above.

So far I haven’t seen anything that ticks all these boxes, and I’m getting itchy to write my own. Perl is my favorite programming language, so I’m looking at the Yancy CMS as a base. But I know that it would still be a hell of a project, and one of the reasons I chose WordPress for blogging was that it was well-established and -supported but still easily extensible so that I could concentrate on writing instead of endlessly tweaking the engine. Unfortunately, I’m starting to fall into that trap anyway.

Yeah, I’m just not into learning Ruby. I also know Perl and am comfortable reading Perl programs, but haven’t used it enough to be comfortable with programming in it. My languages tend to be ECMAScript (Node) and PHP, specifically because of WordPress.

I don’t want to invent all new stuff. I am thinking of checking into how open the ActivityPub plugin folks are for outside contributors. The one aspect missing right now is this reply won’t appear in Mastodon, though your Mastodon reply appears here as a comment.

(Akismet is trapping the Mastodon replies as spam, however.)

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