Enter the fediverse with
ActivityPub, broadcasting your blog to a wider audience! Attract followers, deliver updates, and receive comments from a diverse user base of
ActivityPub-compliant platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzYozbNneVc
With the ActivityPub plugin installed, your WordPress blog itself function as a federated profile, along with profiles for each author. For instance, if your website is
example.com
, then the blog-wide profile can be found at
@example.com@example.com
, and authors like Jane and Bob would have their individual profiles at
@jane@example.com
and
@bobz@example.com
, respectively.
An example: I give you my Mastodon profile name:
@pfefferle@mastodon.social
. You search, see my profile, and hit follow. Now, any post I make appears in your Home feed. Similarly, with the ActivityPub plugin, you can find and follow Jane's profile at
@jane@example.com
.
Once you follow Jane's
@jane@example.com
profile, any blog post she crafts on
example.com
will land in your Home feed. Simultaneously, by following the blog-wide profile
@example.com@example.com
, you'll receive updates from all authors.
Note: If no one follows your author or blog instance, your posts remain unseen. The simplest method to verify the plugin's operation is by following your profile. If you possess a Mastodon profile, initiate by following your new one.
The plugin works with the following tested federated platforms, but there may be more that it works with as well:
Some things to note:
- The blog-wide profile is only compatible with sites with rewrite rules enabled. If your site does not have rewrite rules enabled, the author-specific profiles may still work.
- Many single-author blogs have chosen to turn off or redirect their author profile pages, usually via an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math. This is usually done to avoid duplicate content with your blog’s home page. If your author page has been deactivated in this way, then ActivityPub author profiles won’t work for you. Instead, you can turn your author profile page back on, and then use the option in your SEO plugin to noindex the author page. This will still resolve duplicate content issues with search engines and will enable ActivityPub author profiles to work.
- Once ActivityPub is installed, only new posts going forward will be available in the fediverse. Likewise, even if you’ve been using ActivityPub for a while, anyone who follows your site will only see new posts you publish from that moment on. They will never see previously-published posts in their Home feed. This process is very similar to subscribing to a newsletter. If you subscribe to a newsletter, you will only receive future emails, but not the old archived ones. With ActivityPub, if someone follows your site, they will only receive new blog posts you publish from then on.
So what’s the process?
- Install the ActivityPub plugin.
- Go to the plugin’s settings page and adjust the settings to your liking. Click the Save button when ready.
- Make sure your blog’s author profile page is active if you are using author profiles.
- Go to Mastodon or any other federated platform, and search for your profile, and follow it. Your new profile will be in the form of either
@your_username@example.com
or @example.com@example.com
, so that is what you’ll search for.
- On your blog, publish a new post.
- From Mastodon, check to see if the new post appears in your Home feed.
Note: It may take up to 15 minutes or so for the new post to show up in your federated feed. This is because the messages are sent to the federated platforms using a delayed cron. This avoids breaking the publishing process for those cases where users might have lots of followers. So please don’t assume that just because you didn’t see it show up right away that something is broken. Give it some time. In most cases, it will show up within a few minutes, and you’ll know everything is working as expected.
Follow the normal instructions for
installing WordPress plugins.
Automatic Plugin Installation
To add a WordPress Plugin using the
built-in plugin installer:
- Go to Plugins > Add New.
- Type "
activitypub
" into the Search Plugins box.
- Find the WordPress Plugin you wish to install.
- Click Details for more information about the Plugin and instructions you may wish to print or save to help setup the Plugin.
- Click Install Now to install the WordPress Plugin.
- The resulting installation screen will list the installation as successful or note any problems during the install.
- If successful, click Activate Plugin to activate it, or Return to Plugin Installer for further actions.
Manual Plugin Installation
There are a few cases when manually installing a WordPress Plugin is appropriate.
- If you wish to control the placement and the process of installing a WordPress Plugin.
- If your server does not permit automatic installation of a WordPress Plugin.
- If you want to try the latest development version.
Installation of a WordPress Plugin manually requires FTP familiarity and the awareness that you may put your site at risk if you install a WordPress Plugin incompatible with the current version or from an unreliable source.
Backup your site completely before proceeding.
To install a WordPress Plugin manually:
- Download your WordPress Plugin to your desktop.
- Download from the WordPress directory
- Download from GitHub
- If downloaded as a zip archive, extract the Plugin folder to your desktop.
- With your FTP program, upload the Plugin folder to the
wp-content/plugins
folder in your WordPress directory online.
- Go to Plugins screen and find the newly uploaded Plugin in the list.
- Click Activate to activate it.
6.0.2 - 2025-06-11
Changed
- Reactions button color is now a little more theme agnostic.
Fixed
- "Account Aliases" setting in user profiles get saved correctly again and no longer return empty.
- Blocks updated in 6.0.0 are back to not showing up in feeds and federated posts.
- Webfinger data from Pleroma instances no longer creates unexpected mention markup.
6.0.1 - 2025-06-09
Fixed
- Added fallback for follower list during migration to new database schema.
- Avoids the button block breaking for users that don't have the
unfiltered_html
capability.
Blog users now get their correct post count displayed in the Editor and the front-end.
- Improved follower migration: scheduler now more reliable and won't stop too early.
- Update the Stream Connector integration to align with the new database schema.
6.0.0 - 2025-06-05
Added
- Enhanced markup of the "follow me" block, for a better Webmention and IndieWeb support.
- The actor of the replied-to post is now included in cc or to based on the post's visibility.
Changed
- "Reply on the Fediverse" now uses the Interactivity API for display on the frontend.
- Bumped minimum required WordPress version to 6.5.
- Default avatar and error handling for the reactions popover list.
- Ensured that publishing a new blog post always sends a Create to the Fediverse.
- Followers block has an updated design, new block variations, and uses the Interactivity API for display on the frontend.
- Follow Me and Followers blocks can now list any user that is Activitypub-enabled, even if they have the Subscriber role.
- Likes and Reposts for comments to a post are no longer attributed to the post itself.
- New system to manage followers and followings more consistently using a unified actor type.
- Re-enabled HTML support in excerpts and summaries to properly display hashtags and @-replies, now that Mastodon supports it.
- Refactored to use CSS for effects instead of JavaScript, simplifying the code.
- Refine the plugin’s handling and storage of remote actor data.
- The Follow Me block now uses the latest Block Editor technology for display on the frontend.
- The Reactions block now uses the latest Block Editor technology for display on the frontend.
Removed
- Cleaned up the codebase and removed deprecated functions.
Fixed
- Added forward compatibility for Editor Controls, fixing deprecated warnings in the Editor.
- Avoid type mismatch when updating
activitypub_content_warning
meta values.
- Default number of attachments now works correctly in block editor.
- Fixed a bug in Site Health that caused a PHP warning and missing details for the WebFinger check.
- Fixes a bug in WordPress 6.5 where the plugin settings in the Editor would fail to render, due to a backwards compatibility break.
- Improved automated setup process for the Surge caching plugin.
- Improved excerpt handling by removing shortcodes from summaries.
See full Changelog on GitHub.