

Since you have other Fediverse accounts you’re using, you might be able to follow the same general pattern I’d documented with Twitter for threading comments between my site and Twitter: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/
Generally, you’d post on your site where it’s seen in the Fediverse via the ActivityPub plugin and/or optionally boosted by your native Mastodon account. Replies to your post (on Mastodon) show up on your site as comments and you reply to them there in your site’s comments section. Then you manually copy/paste the text of your reply from your website into your native Mastodon account and include the comment/reply permalink in that reply. If you’ve got Webmention set up with Brid.gy for Mastodon, replies to your replies on Mastodon should then make their way back to the proper threaded spot in your website’s comments section.
An example of this at work can be seen on my earlier mistake:
Related, I’ve been playing around with mirroring my WP site as an instance with the ActivityPub plugin and have boosted posts with my more broadly followed mastodon.social account the same way you mentioned that you were doing with yours. Somehow I’m anecdotally finding that I get more responses/reactions with native posts that with these boosts. I’m curious what your experience has been with this strategy so far? I’m still just starting my experimentation here, but I do like the fact that I’m able to include richer presentation of wrapped links in my WordPress native posts which are seen in the Fediverse while Mastodon seems to strip them out or not allow them (see an example of this in the post above this reply).
I suspect that some version of this option I’ve done before will work, though I haven’t tried updating it recently: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/
Our friend @jimgroom@social.ds106.us has recently written up some details that get around the t.co shortener problems: https://bavatuesdays.com/archiving-twitter/
I’ve also heard that @darius@friend.camp is working on something for a public release soon: https://friend.camp/@darius/109521972924049369. He may still be looking for beta testers if you’re interested.
I’ve got lots of friends in a supportive online community who can help: https://indieweb.org
Keep in mind that the output of these feeds will be instance specific, and the tag feed will only get mentions from your instance and instances yours can “see” (or gets by follows with federation). So if you use a different instance, you may see more or less in your feeds. Because of its size and depth of federation, this makes mastodon.social a good bet for these sorts of subscriptions, but your experience may vary depending on your needs.
TO: app developers considering #Mastodon and other #ActivityPub related apps and interfaces
Perhaps spend a day or two to add Micropub support to the platform first, then your app could potentially be used to publish to ANY website/platform that supports the W3C spec. #OpenWeb #IndieWeb #FTW
I wonder if anyone is documenting the amount of course material that disappears and dies in LMSs the way that some track the loss of data and content when social media silos disappear? Our institutions need to do more to help us here.
Kathleen Fitzgerald recently asked about crossposting to Mastodon from her WordPress site and getting replies back. She’s documented some parts recently, and I’ve outlined a few pieces preliminarily including ways you can make your WordPress site look like it’s a Mastodon instance with a few plugins. I suspect Kathleen will have some further thoughts soon after she spends some time tinkering. If you had previously set up to syndicate to Twitter and get responses by via the Brid.gy service, that same sort of workflow will definitely work with Mastodon if you like. (Though it bears mentioning that some of the updates to Mastodon 4.0 this past week or so have introduced some bugs depending on which instance you’re on. I’m sure they’ll be sorted shortly.)
If you’ve not puzzled it out yet, the adding of the requisite rel="me"
class to your Mastodon URL link on your website (in the header, footer, via plugin, via menu item, other) is broadly described here (including some details for the classic editor): https://g13g.blog/2022/11/09/how-to-verify-your-wordpress-site-on-mastodon/. I’m personally using the IndieWeb Plugin to accomplish this and have added the URL for my mastodon instance into a field which gets added to my WordPress Profile at /wp-admin/profile.php
. I’m happy to help if you need other ideas about how to do it as there are maybe too many potential options—it was all the different options and ways of doing it that confused me when I did it.
In addition to the broader Domain of One’s Own ideas that the “Twitter migration” is spurring, I’m always glad to see more people exploring ways we can have “A Twitter of our Own“.
Also in reply to syndicated copy at:
On the deadnaming and related issues, it would be interesting to create a webmention mechanism for the h-card portions so that users might update these across networks. To some extent Automattic’s Gravatar system does this in a centralized manner, but it would be interesting to see it separately. Certainly not as big an issue as deadnaming, but there’s a similar problem on some platforms like Twitter where people will change their display name regularly for either holidays, or lately because they’re indicating they’d rather be found on Mastodon or other websites.
The webmention spec does contain details for both editing/deleting content and resending webmentions to edit and/or remove the original. Ideally this would be more broadly adopted and used in the future to eliminate the need for making these choices by leaving the choice up to the original publisher.
Beyond this, often on platforms that don’t have character limits (Reddit for example), I’ll post at the bottom of my syndicated copy of content that it was originally published on my site (along with the permalink) and explicitly state that I aggregate the replies from various locations which also helps to let people know that they might find addition context or conversation at the original post should they be interested. Doing this on Twitter, Mastodon, et al. is much harder due to space requirements obviously.
While most responses I send would fall under fair use for copying, I also have a Creative Commons license on my text in an effort to help others feel more comfortable with having copies of my content on their sites.
Another ethical layer to this is interactions between sites which both have webmentions enabled. To some extent this creates an implicit bi-directional relationship which says, I’m aware that this sort of communication exists and approve of your parsing and displaying my responses.
The public norms and ethics in this area will undoubtedly evolve over time, so it’s also worth revisiting and re-evaluating the issue over time.
And all three for their kindness and thoughtfulness in technology spaces.