I miss blogging. Don't get me wrong: I write professionally for various websites, and I have email newsletters, but none of them give me the feel of a 2000s blog . The closest thing I've found is a mastodon. Maybe it's the clumsiness, maybe it's the do-it-yourself mentality, but browsing Mastodon reminds me of old school blogging.
It turns out I can combine my passion for vintage blogging with my love for Mastodon. You can install a simple plugin on any WordPress website to make it part of Fediverse, a network of social networks that includes Mastdon and eventually Meta Threads. Users of these networks can follow your blog and get all your posts in their timelines.
First, you just need to install the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. You can do this by going to Plugins in your WordPress dashboard and searching for the plugin. Install and enable it and you're done: your website is now on Fediverse.
Every user of your WordPress site can now be followed by users of Mastodon and other social networks built on the ActivityPub protocol (collectively, “The Fediverse”). I confirmed this by searching and following my Mastodon blog.
I followed myself too, just to see what it was like. Complete posts can be found directly in the Mastodon timeline, allowing people to follow my blog without leaving Mastodon. But to me, the coolest thing is that any reply anyone sends to your post will show up as a comment on your site.
If desired, you can reply to comments directly in WordPress and the user will get the reply just like any other reply. This allows you to write your blog the way you remember it, while allowing others to use the tools they prefer.
And you can go further. If you want to follow people, even just out of respect, you'll need the Friends plugin, which basically turns your WordPress site into a full-fledged ActivityPub social network. You can even set up the plugin to work with Mastodon apps, including Mona, Mastodon's best app.
However, this is only available for advanced users. For most people, this is just a simple way to provide potential readers with another way to read and interact with a blog post. Setting this option also means that Threads users will eventually be able to follow your blog without you using Threads. Other services, including Tumblr, are also working on integrating with ActivityPub. An ecosystem like this might make blogging popular again - at least I hope so.
