

One of its benefits is to help WordPress sites show up in Fediverse databases like https://the-federation.info/wordpress, which should also give you a broader listing of the (currently 405 nodes with 9273 users) WordPress instances in the Fediverse for advertising on your site.
Good luck!
Bore da. Chris dw i. Dw i’n dysgu Cymraeg. 🏴 #ymarfer
I’ll have to figure out how to automate POSSE of my Welsh-related posts to my new account: https://toot.wales/@chrisaldrich. Until then it’s manual until it hurts.
But first, figuring out how to work this into my practice…
I wish that Mastodon’s list functionality was easier to use, but this method works well too. I won’t say anything about the irony of using the OG social network of the blogosphere to spread this useful information. 😉
If you’re interested, comment or reply to this post, or add your interest and preferred dates to the IndieWeb wiki.
We’ll focus discussion on personal libraries on one’s site(s) and how they can interact with each other. How can we pool data and resources for the common good? How can we provide Goodreads like functionality in a decentralized manner? What pieces are we missing? How can we add them? Are there any easy ways we can standardize the pieces for better site-to-site interoperability? How can we interoperate with other projects like Mastodon and BookWyrm or data sources like Open Library?
Organizationally, depending on attendees and needs we may break our time up into two or three facilitated sub-sessions to focus on and cover specific topics of interest. If you have an idea for a sub-session topic (we’ll operate Bar-Camp style the day of the event) you’d like to see or facilitate please indicate it below.
If you’d like to help facilitate the session or volunteer in running it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Want to start discussing the topic prior to the session? Feel free to meet up online in the IndieWeb chat.
We’ll try to announce a date around mid-January to provide time for people to reserve the time.
In particular, I quite enjoy the micropub client IndieBookClub for posting reading updates to my WordPress site (it supports other platforms with Micropub support too.) More details: https://indieweb.org/indiebookclub. Here’s an example of how I’m tracking what I read on my own site: https://boffosocko.com/kind/read/ or if you want just the books.
If you’d like a non-WordPress hosted solution, you might take a look at Manton Reece’s excellent Micro.blog platform which has a nice book/reading UI: https://micro.blog/discover/books or https://micro.blog/discover/books/grid. (It uses IndieWeb technologies including micropub, so you can use IndieBookClub with it. You can also syndicate to it from your WordPress site if you prefer to have your own infrastructure and just join the community there for the conversation.)
I’m happy to help if you’d like further tips/pointers for any of the above.
On the Mastodon front, you might take a look at Mouse Reeve‘s Bookwyrm (GitHub) which is one of the best custom set ups in the ActivityPub space.
In particular take a look at the great, and intuitive UI she’s got at the bottom of her post:
Join the conversation on Twitter. Or, if you liked this article and think others should read it, please retweet it.
Just click on the link, reply and go. It would be nice to see other social platforms allow this sort of interaction. Setting it up for Mastodon should also be pretty simple too.
I was trying to syndicate from my website so that the post on Mastodon would credit my website for the post and link back to my homepage as the application that made the post. You’ll notice at the bottom of the post there’s the post date and a globe icon, which indicates the post is public, followed by my website name ‘BoffoSocko.com’ and details about replies, reposts, and favorites.
I assuredly won’t release a public plugin for WordPress that does this. But since some have asked how I did it, I thought I’d share some of the internals of a few WordPress plugins that one can quickly modify to achieve the same thing.
That I can currently see, there are three plugins in the repository that will allow one to syndicate content to a variety of Mastodon instances. They are Mastodon Autopost, Mastodon Auto Share, and Share on Mastodon. The first two are closely related and essentially replicate the same codebase.
Similar to using Twitter’s API to crosspost, Mastodon is looking for two bits of information when an application is registered: a client name and a website URL.
Mastodon Autopost and Mastodon Auto Share, both have a file called client.php
which define these two variables.
public function register_app($redirect_uri) { $response = $this->_post('/api/v1/apps', array( 'client_name' => 'Mastodon Share for WordPress', 'redirect_uris' => $redirect_uri, 'scopes' => 'write:statuses write:media read:accounts', 'website' => $this->instance_url ));
You can edit this file with a text editor to change the 'client_name'
from 'Mastodon Share for WordPress'
to 'Anything You Want'
. If you’re in a joking mood, maybe change it to 'Twitter'
?
To change the URL so that the link on the client_name
directs to your website, you’ll want to change the line 'website' => $this->instance_url
.
In particular change $this->instance_url
to 'https://example.com'
where example.com would be your website. I’ll note that $this->instance_url
on this line in the original plugin is a bug. If left alone, it points the URL to your home Mastodon instance instead of to the more logical https://wordpress.org/plugins/autopost-to-mastodon/
where the plugin lives.
If you prefer using Jan Boddez‘ excellent plugin, you’ll want to do something similar, except in that case you’ll want to change a file named class-options-handler.php
in the includes
folder.
Here you’ll want something like:
'client_name' => __( 'Example.com' ),
But note that Boddez doesn’t have a similar bug, so the website line
'website' => home_url(),
is already correctly defined so that your website will automatically be linked without any changes to it.
If you’re already using one of these plugins and manually modify them, note that you’ll probably need to re-authorize the plugin so that the changes propagate.
Hearkening back to the internet’s good ole days with decentralized networks
Looking back at the decade of 2010 and developments in the internet, in Social Media, and inside alternative Social Media projects.
It feels a lot like the reason we are unable to offer real alternative social networks is not that we cannot do so. It is because most people with the abilities to do so spend their time working on things that only work for the tiny audience that is the tech sector, while happily ignoring the needs of all those billions of non-technical humans out there. This is something that frustrates me more than I want to admit. ❧
Annotated on May 06, 2020 at 08:17AM
He’s definitely got some interesting and insightful ideas here on why alternative social media efforts may not have the desired effect. I’ve also heard some of his technical issues with Activity Pub by other developers (and implementers). Many find it not only difficult to implement, but find it difficult to actually federate properly.
Crossposter to post statuses between Mastodon and Twitter - renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster
There’s also an approved version in the repository named Add Fediverse Icons to Jetpack