388 – Bringing Back Conversations: Matthias Pfefferle on ActivityPub and WordPress

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 388. entitled bringing back conversations, Matthias Pfefferle on ActivityPub and WordPress. It was published on Thursday, the 5th of September, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping just before we begin, If you're an avid listener to this podcast, you'll have noticed over the last few episodes, I've been alluding to the fact that we're going to produce a whole bunch of new shows. I've done one of them. I did the.

I did the what's just. I did the, what just happened to podcast with Rae Moray from the repository. And I said that I was going to be producing those episodes. I've put that on pause just for a few weeks while I get all my ducks in a row and get a few of those episodes lined up, but they will be coming.

So for the next couple of weeks, it will be interviews back to back. But I hope that you enjoy those that is what's happening today. And I'm going to be talking to Matthias Pfefferle He's an Automattician dealing with ActivityPub We'll get into that in a moment, but some more housekeeping. If you're into what we do head to our schedule page WP builds.com forward slash schedule And over there, you can find all of the social networks that we're posting content on and follow us. We would really appreciate it. If you're enjoying the podcasts that you've had to your podcast, player and choice that you had to your podcast, player of choice, for example, apple podcasts, and give us a rating over there.

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Okay. So what have we got for you today on the podcast? Well it's me chatting to Matthias Pfefferle. I've done a few webinars with him before he's got a plugin, which he was developing and then he got consumed by Automattic because they thought it was such a good endeavor. It's the ActivityPub plugin. And it enables you to bind your website to a social network on the fediverse. For the fediverse, think things like Mastodon, PixelFed and a whole bunch of other things.

But the project is to get your website, your WordPress website, so that things like comments from the fediverse, from a social network, get put into your comments thread on your post. And if you reply, it will go back over into the comment thread on the social network. It's really, really interesting. And there's a whole ton of things lined up in the future, including the option of making podcasts available, which is very exciting to me. So here comes the episode and I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Matthias Pfefferle. How are you doing?

[00:05:14] Matthias Pfefferle: Fine so far.

[00:05:17] Nathan Wrigley: It's a great start. Yeah, goes downhill from here. Mathias and I

[00:05:23] Matthias Pfefferle: No, I have not.

[00:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: Mathias and I have had a, quite a nice chat, not just today, over many days. In fact, dear listener, what we're gonna talk about today, Mathias actually showed us on the screen, I recorded a webinar with Mathias on the 24th of April.

2024. I will put the link in the show notes, but if you go into WP Builds.com, hit the search icon and just search for Matthias's name. so that's M-A-T-T-H-I-A-S. that's probably all you need to do in all honesty. And then. The Jet Pack powered, search will pop up and we'll find you the post I am sure, and you can go and watch what we're gonna talk about because we're gonna be talking about the Fedi verse.

We're gonna be talking about ActivityPub. We're gonna be talking probably a little bit about Mastodon. Because Mathias is the Aian who is creating the ActivityPub plugin. Before we begin, Mathias, can you just tell us a little bit, the backstory, the bio, that kind of thing. I know it's a bit typical, but let's do it anyway.

[00:06:30] Matthias Pfefferle: The backstory, the complete story or simply, focusing on ActivityPub.

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: whichever you like, you can go right back to childhood if you like, and and we'll sit round the fireside and.

[00:06:43] Matthias Pfefferle: let's do something in between. So I am, a blogging guy. I started blogging in the early two thousands and really like the idea of, putting stuff. on the internet and, d discuss it with others using, blog posts or comments. And I was really sad when, social media took over,

at least the later days.

they played very nicely in the beginning, and took over. so I searched for ways to. Keep my block and still be able to talk with others. so I tried out a lot of different, open web standards and decentralized protocols, like the, newer ways of ping bags and track bags and, ended up, on ActivityPub, W three C standard two.

Implement a decentralized communication protocol, and it turned out that it was the right decision because a lot of people try that out, these days.

[00:07:54] Nathan Wrigley: And you, you created the plugin, I guess you did this just for your own interest, the ActivityPub plugin, but then after a period of time, I think there was a nice bit of, coincidence in that Twitter was acquired. Let, we won't get into all that, but Twitter was acquired and. There was a, real exodus.

Now whether or not those people have gone back or, maintained that exodus, we don't really need to worry too much about, but there was a period of time where people were definitely looking around for a different way to do their social networking and at that point you had already. Built the ActivityPub protocol.

I know it's got undergone a huge amount of change since those days, but you'd already built it and I'm guessing that the folk over at Automatic at that point was sensing that, there's a shift in the landscape here. It does look like people are looking for a new place to, to live socially online.

And I'm guessing they just approached you. Tell us a little bit of that, about that. How did you end up going from your, whatever the work was before, to working full-time at Automatic on this plugin?

[00:09:04] Matthias Pfefferle: as you said, there were a lot of discussions about, a lot of social, social networks trying to join the Fed diverse and, implement ActivityPub. And so there was also interest from automatic to implement that for Tumblr. I think it was around one and a half year ago. And, Matt published something, what should we implement for Tumblr?

Is it, ActivityPub? Is it the, Blue Sky thingy? and I simply asked, what about WordPress? And, that started the contact with, automatic and, yeah, they, we chatted a bit and then in the end it turned out, That I can do that, for a living now. So it was, I would say it was the last, good thing that Twitter did for me before, before I nearly totally left Twitter, in favor of ActivityPub and Macon.

[00:10:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we don't need to get into all the politics there, but what I think is important to say is that the, whole ActivityPub thing is much more open. You, have certainly a chance to own your own data more. You can run your own, let's say mastered on server, if that's the way that you choose to go.

and it, feels a bit more in the spirit of. The open source movement, whereas I think a lot of people's intuitions is that if you, let's say use Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter, whatever it may be, there's this certain perception that not only do you not own your data, but the business model I.

Is aligned to, to draw you in and keep you in and to, make you essentially watch more and more. Because obviously the entire thing, either you are paying for it, which I believe you can do with Twitter, but, or you are being advertised towards, you're scrolling and every so often you get an advert and it's all very much configured to, to game your attention and to consume your time.

And maybe for some people that's fine, but there's a proportion of people for whom. That incentive is not quite right, of which I am one. I count myself among those people. I was definitely getting fed up with feeling like a, cog in that giant wheel and feeling the, just the desire to keep scrolling it.

Crazy times of the day when I had better things to do and sleep being one of them. and just finding myself scrolling and still scrolling half an hour later and then thinking, what did I actually do just then? And essentially I was just constantly looking for something to excite me, but moved over to.

Mastodon and the rest, as they say is history. Now, I think one of the problems that we've got to tackle is the vocabulary because there are a few words which are used all the time, and they are The underpinnings of the whole thing, but it's not necessarily obvious off the bat to understand what they are.

So let me just throw a few out. So there's activity po I keep hearing that all the time. I keep hearing about Mastodon all the time. I keep hearing, variety of other things. But let's just start there. Let's start with activity po. Can you explain. Basically how that is the foundation of it all.

What it does, you don't have to go into the weeds, but what does it do? What does it provide? so over to you really.

[00:12:37] Matthias Pfefferle: Do you want to give it a try with your car thing?

[00:12:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, crikey. No, I'm, yeah, so in our, no, largely because I've forgotten what I said, but in our, in our, in our webinar that we did, again, links in the show notes I described, I, I came up with a metaphor off the cuff and its seemed to work, but it's, it's not stuck with me, I'm afraid.

[00:13:02] Matthias Pfefferle: Okay, then I give, I, I'll give it a try. I really like the analogy of, email there because email is. I would say the, most known decentralized protocol or, the most known decentralized tool out there in the internet. so I would, compare ActivityPub the protocol underneath all of it, with the email protocols like, SMTP pop three or imap and Master on as the.

One of the providers of, an email service like Google Mail, for example, or, I'm not aware of any other big international one. I'm only aware of some German

[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: 5, and all of that. Yeah. But yeah, but we, yeah, we, understand there's, you don't, you're not bound to an email client to read your email. You can go into all sorts of different software, can't you? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:07] Matthias Pfefferle: then on, on top of all of that, there is also, a var, a variety of different clients. like for example, Mammoth or Mastodon, like the iPhone apps so that you can use to publish your stuff using the platforms. That's the, last part of the analogy with, your email client in the end, if that makes sense.

[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, if you go to Twitter and send messages around on Twitter, you, have no idea what's going on there. You just know that some people somewhere have written some software and you can see what the features are, that you can. Do this, that, and the other thing, but you don't really know how it's being done.

Same with Facebook, same with all these other things. The underpinnings though, with activity pop is that's the sort of base layer, that's the bit which enables the communication. And then you can put whatever you want on top of it. So if you're a developer, you can just, you can build something which will sit a top of ActivityPub and therefore be able to communicate in whichever way you like and your piece of software.

We'll be able to interoperate with another piece of software so that email analogy works well there. if I send an email from my Gmail account, I'm fully expecting somebody using Office 3 6 5 to be able to read it. There's no bit, which Office 3 6 5 says, no, hang on. This was sent from Gmail.

we're not allowing you to read that. and it's a bit like that. And so what, does Activity Pop allow for then? What kind of things does it allow you to do?

[00:15:52] Matthias Pfefferle: For, now, it's mainly built around the, classic, social networking, activities like, sharing text, sharing notes, videos, audio, but. In theory, you can build everything on top of it. in one of the last, online, conferences, someone showed a decentralized chess game built on top of ActivityPub, for example.

And yeah, that's really nice. And they build it so that even. that you could even use it on top of Mastodon so that you can use a classic, microblogging tool to also share, your, next turn of the chess game. So that was really funny. Yeah. So in the end, everything you could think of that makes sense in, in, as a.

Kind of communication thing in a social network, could build, could be built on top of ActivityPub. So it's not about what can you do with it, it's more about does the other network or the other party understand what you implemented on top of

So it's more a thing of common sense.

[00:17:23] Nathan Wrigley: So the endeavors then, typically, if you think about it in the, terms of a social network, the, social networks, usually it, you're sending texts. You might send some audio, you might send a bit of video. who, knows what computers will allow us to do in the future, but for now, those kind of things.

But if you were a developer, the activity pod protocol doesn't. It doesn't put a wall up to say, no, that's the foundations and you're not having anything else. You could build something else, like you know how to do the next chess move or whatever it may be. So it allows creativity, it allows developers to be innovative.

And in a way, I suppose that's why it's attractive because the walled gardens of Facebook and what have you don't really know what's going on in there. You don't know what's possible. okay, sActivityPubub underpins it all. You've got the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. Now, I've gotta say you have to pay attention listener, because this bit can be quite hard to understand because.

We are so used to a social network being basically a collection of people. Now, I know that you could have a robot sign up and all of that kind of stuff, but ignore that. Imagine that everybody on a, on typical social network is a human being. there's a name attached to it and they go out and they interact with other people.

But you've got a plugin which enables a WordPress install, let's just call it a website for something, for want of a better word, a website. To be on ActivityPub to communicate with people using Mastodon to communicate with people using Pixel Fed, which by the way is another version, but they're interested mostly in pictures, not, text.

how does that work You? And you're gonna have to go through that slow because it's hard to get

[00:19:25] Matthias Pfefferle: Yeah. So please interrupt me. I'm, way too deep into that rabbit hole. okay. Your introduction is very good because the, I think the main problem with this is that we. Especially in the WordPress community, we're trained to cross post stuff up to now. So this means if you posted something on your blog, a new blog post, an image, you name it.

You most commonly share this using social media. That means you put the link of your blog post, to Twitter, to Facebook, and simply shared it on that social network with your audience, on that network.

[00:20:16] Nathan Wrigley: I am gonna interrupt there because I feel that this is a good moment to inject something. so in that scenario, you've created a blog post. Your blog post is on your website and it's, there, but in order to get it to the other things, you then tell the other things. My blog post is over here, but, you have to create a brand new post over there.

So you go to Twitter and you create a new post saying, I've created this back here. You go to Facebook, I've created this. So there's a Facebook new post, there's a Twitter new post, there's an Instagram new post. So now we've got four things. We've got the blog post and then we've got Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and add as many as you like.

Every time we share something with a different network, we've created a new thing, and Right.

[00:21:06] Matthias Pfefferle: and the sad thing about that is that if you. got some responses to your blog post on that social network that it only lived on that social network. So that means if you shared something on LinkedIn, the discussion on LinkedIn was not shared with the discussion on Twitter. So you had several, disconnected discussions on social media and if someone, added a comment on your blog, you.

It. It, yeah.

[00:21:43] Nathan Wrigley: In fact, again, excuse me to

[00:21:46] Matthias Pfefferle: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: it, it is. It's in the best interest of Facebook as a company, with shareholder dividends to pay and all of that kind of thing. It's in their interest to keep that conversation. In Facebook, it's in LinkedIn's interest to keep the conversation in LinkedIn.

It's in Twitter's. best interest to keep the conversation over there. So you've got your blog posts, and in the olden days, all the comments would come because that was what we all did. We went around blog posts and we posted comments. That's all kind of died out because now we're having conversations over on Twitter, conversations over on LinkedIn, all of that.

And if you are a social media user, you'll know the pain of this. You, if you write something and cross post it, you've now got four or five places you've got to go and shatter your attention. Because you've gotta go and have the conversation in all these different places. Okay. You've made that point.

Perfect. Keep going.

[00:22:41] Matthias Pfefferle: And then, let's explain that for ActivityPub. So ActivityPub is the, complete opposite of that. You do not have to, cross post stuff anymore. That means, putting, copies of your content into the wallet gardens of social media, but others will be able to follow. Your account on the blog or your blog directly.

And if they follow your blog, they will automatically receive all of your updates in their timeline so they can read all of your blog posts on their social medias of choice. So they do not have to, visit your site any longer. They can stay on their social. Network of choice, let's say Mastodon or pixel fat, or maybe another WordPress block and directly subscribe to your content.

And the on, on top of that, they can directly interact with your content, with your blog post, with your, published image and all of that. Comments or likes or boosts will also be shared back with your blog. So it's it enables your blog to allow a fully decentralized communication like you are like, from social, from the classic social media.

So that means, a Masteron user does not really see a difference between your blog and then and another Masteron account in the end.

[00:24:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I'm, gonna do another, interjection, if that's all right. Because honestly, it took me so long to figure this out, basically because I have been, I've been taught. Social media is this thing, and it's just, that's how you know, although they're all different, they are basically the same.

you go to Twitter, you create an account and you do things. You go to Facebook, you create an account and you do things. You go to all these other service and you do things and it's all walled away. But what you are saying is if you install the ActivityPub protocol and you write a blog post and you click publish that.

Is then the equivalent of having gone and written something in Twitter and clicked, post in Twitter, tweet, or whatever it is these days, it's visible immediately with no cross posting. You just publish in WordPress. It's now visible to people who follow you. On the ActivityPub network, for want of a better word, so pixel fed, mastodon, whatever it may be, they can immediately see it and they can interact with that. having to come to your website. If they make a comment, it will come into your website as a comment and they didn't have to come over and go to, example.com and find the post and all of that kind of thing. Or click a link and open up something new. They can do it in the feed of their Mastodon social network and.

It's, profoundly different, but quite hard to encapsulate in your head because you're just not used to that. So you publish something on WordPress. It is now. post in a social network. It's not like it got put over there. It is over there. The moment you, click publish, and I, it took me so long to understand that, but also there was this evolution of your plugin.

I. For a period of time if somebody commented on that wouldn't be consumed back to your website. And so that had to be built. So there was that kind of friction there. And now my understanding is that you've built all of that. If you comment, sorry, if somebody comments that will come into your website as a comment and so on.

Yeah.

[00:26:52] Matthias Pfefferle: Yeah, exactly. it's still a bit tricky because WordPress is not built, with a social network in mind. So there are tricky parts and you have to, find creative ways to, solve, some problems. one thing is, for example, that it's still possible to comment directly on the block. So we can't federate that.

We can't share that with the fedi verse because it, was done on your block. There, there is no, fedi verse account to federate that in any

way. so we still have some in between solutions, so there are still possibilities to have different. Communication threats under one of your blog posts. But we try to improve that over time and, yeah, but it's, still work in progress.

There are still some loose ends, that we can work on, but I would say if you compare that, if you compare the usage of, A normal block with, an ActivityPub enabled block. I would say it, it will bring back conversations to your blog. You can compare that with, a feed reader where you will be able to directly comment, the, blog post inside of your feed reader.

That's the, news thing that comes with ActivityPub. And because it's so easy and because, users do not have to. Visit your blog and to maybe sign up or put in their usernames and emails and come back from time to see if the blog author has answered their comment. They will more commonly react to one of your blog posts.

So I really see comments on. Things that I publish again, and not only one or two comments, I have common threads, round about 40 comments. again, and that's really, that's, amazing because I started blogging because I want to share some ideas, but I want to get some feedback. I do not want to shout, into nowhere.

and it. It really feels like the old days of blogging again.

[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it's a, it's like a intravenous, isn't it? It's, you've got this amazing, you straight into the social network. I've got a couple of questions around that. and, I think you answered them already, but I'll just. Be clear. So let's say for example, I, install your plugin, get that all set up.

We can go into that in a minute. But, so now I am on the Fedi verse, and I write a blog post, click publish. It then appears if anybody's following me in their feed, because that's how you know you follow people and their content comes into your feed and they post a comment and that will then appear.

In my WordPress comment thread for that post. So presumably I get some sort of notification from, the WordPress website to say you've had a new comment. in the same way that you would do from a social network, I can then go and then if I reply to that, I. That will appear as a reply over on, let's say again, we'll just keep using Masteron.

What though, and I think you said this, if somebody just comes directly to your website and has no ActivityPub account, no Mastodon account, then if they comment that's just between you and them, that's almost it's a public but slightly more private, if Because not everybody's gonna be able to consume that.

Okay. I've got that. So here's another question. If I. If I set up your plugin and I create this, account within my WordPress website, can I bring a preexisting, let's say master on account into the website, or do I start from scratch with that?

[00:31:29] Matthias Pfefferle: So for now, you have to start from scratch because we have not yet implemented, the move, support that, Mastodon provides so that you will be able to move one of your accounts to. A different account and, ActivityPub does not know the, it's not log in as someone, it's not sign in with Twitter or sign in with Facebook.

so it's really you have an account, you do not reuse. A Mastodon account. so yeah, in the end, to keep it short, you, have a, different account. So if you already started on Mastodon, you will have another account for your block. But the nice thing about the fatty verse or ActivityPub is that.

If you publish something, and it is part of the, fatty verse, you could use your Mastodon account that already has an audience to, share your blog post with them. And sharing does not mean that you have to copy links, between your blog and your, mastodon. You simply can hit the, share button under your blog post.

So it's, You could still make use of your classic profile. And we are, trying to, as one of the next steps, trying to allow you to migrate your methadone account to your

[00:33:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. That's, yeah.

[00:33:22] Matthias Pfefferle: there are some more tricky things around that because for now we focused on the publishing part.

For WordPress because, as I said, WordPress is not built with a social network in mind, so it's, easy to implement the publish and the discussion part. It might be more tricky to have the following part so that you can use your WordPress installation to follow other accounts and to have a, a social stream inside your WordPress.

so yeah.

[00:34:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I, get it. So when we write on social media, especially Twitter because of its limitations in terms of character count, everything's very short. 280 characters is, I believe, the limit. and typically I. Although this varies, the owner of the, or the, administrator of the Mastodon server can, opt the character count.

they could make it 10,000 if they wanted, or two, if you really wanted. but typically it's a most mastodon servers. Hover around the default, which is 500 characters, but a blog in my head at least. Anyway, it had a different purpose. It was more about kinda long form content.

you maybe throw in some images in there. You might even be embedding a YouTube video. There's, greater length to that content, typically more thought goes into it and so on. how. what are the options available to tweak the long content that you create such that when it goes out onto your social network, it's not oh goodness, I've just received Nathan's brand new master on post.

I can see it and I'm scrolling and I've been scrolling for 25 minutes and there it still is and I can't get past it. Do you know what I mean? How is, are there ways to modify it? So We get the excerpt instead, or we only get the first 300 characters of our blog post. can we tweak it? Is there like a templating system?

Something like that?

[00:35:41] Matthias Pfefferle: So I think there's, no simple answer to that. There, there is a simple answer to that to, to your question. Yes, there is a templating system. But the templating, so you could decide to only use an excerpt and you can decide if you want to, or if you prefer a, short link o over the, full perma link to save some space.

but in the end it limits you because you decide that for every social network and there are social networks. That focus on micro content like methadone, it's the, decentralized version of Twitter. So they prefer shorter content, one image. and, but there are also other social networks like Pixel Fed that focuses on.

Big images or there are, networks that focus on video or on longer form content. So if you decide to, use a fixed template, you will limit your. the, ability to best share for the network that tries to consume your content. So we are currently trying to find a way to use the semantically correct type.

for your content to share on social media so that the network that con consumes your content can decide how, they show up your content. That means, ActivityPub has the, idea of a type where you can say, okay, this type of content is an article that means it's. Long form. And this type is maybe only one paragraph.

It's a note. if you add some images to, one of your posts, it is most likely, from the type image. And then Macedon can decide how it will show your content. That means, for article, they try to, Make their own excerpt or use kind of the summary field of your, of the shared content. on another network like, friendly Car, it shows the complete content because it's built, with, longer form content in mind on Pixel Fed, it will show, only show the posts with the images.

In the, and there's a lot of potential to improve that. There's, a very, new movement around, bulletin boards, forums that are also, around the, long form content. And they're really, pushing into the, they're really pushing the idea of. Having long form content as a first class citizens of the, ActivityPub, of movement.

So I would say there, there's a lot, a lot of potential, for improvements. But I, to, to sum that up in the end, I would, suggest you to use the auto.

How,

[00:39:38] Nathan Wrigley: I think maybe truncate is the word you're after. Yeah.

[00:39:40] Matthias Pfefferle: no. We have, d different, possibilities you could use in the plugin. There's one, send everything as a note. That means it will show up as you post it. So even Mastodon shows your complete content. That means if you have written something with thousand, thousands of characters, it will show everything.

What might distract users. I would not recommend using that anymore. But, there's a second, setting which says something like, use post formats, use the word plus post formats to detect the right. Type to share. So the, plugin itself tries to find the right object type before it shares it with the Fed verse, if that makes sense.

[00:40:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It feels like there's, maybe that's, work for, you in the future to, to try and

[00:40:48] Matthias Pfefferle: Yeah, totally.

[00:40:50] Nathan Wrigley: that obvious because,

[00:40:52] Matthias Pfefferle: And not only for me. I, would, that's a tricky thing because it's not only about WordPress because it's about, we have to find a common sense in the ERs and all of the platforms that kind of use ActivityPub to find the best way to show content or to process the different kinds of content, in a common sense.

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we're just so used to certain platforms behaving in certain ways. I, guess as, the fed averse evolves. Maybe it'll start to stray away from that. And the norms that are in the fedi verse will become their own. And, you won't be thinking about, that looks weirdly long. maybe they'll, I don't know, maybe there'll be some sort of read more or something like that.

Anyway, I get the point. okay. Just moving on slightly. Let's say for example, that we create a blog post and we're really happy with it, and then we come back to that post a year later and we. We wanna modify it in some way, maybe update something at the end, some new information has come along.

what happens in that scenario? So if we're updating a piece of content, then we click update, not publish, but we're updating it, does that then get fed back to the top of our feed? Or does that just modify the one from one year ago that probably nobody's gonna see.

[00:42:19] Matthias Pfefferle: There's, again, no easy answer to that, but because it depends on the platform. I think Mastodon is putting it on top of your, of the, list again, but it might be different on, on, on other social media, but. In the end to to, sum that up. It work, it simply works. So you have the full create update, delete experience like you would have, simply on your block, but federated.

That means if you delete your blog post, we will also send the delete to the 30 verse to say the, to the other platforms that they please delete. their. Local CED versions of your blog post with all the comments attached to the post. And if you send an update, we, we also sent the update out to the.

[00:43:18] Nathan Wrigley: So a question about the sort of technicalities in the background, particularly bandwidth database, that kind of thing. all of this presumably is getting stored in the database, and I'm, not sure how the comment system would work. So obviously if something's being commented on out there in the Fed verse.

And then it's appearing on my WordPress site. Is that being stored in the database? And are there any concerns about, like cheap hosting? Is there any concern about how much space you need to allocate to these things? obviously it depends, right? if you're really busy and you are the most popular person on earth and you're getting 40,000 comments an hour, that's gonna be different from a typical user that's maybe got a few people that comment, but.

Just tell us where all of this information is being stored and we can draw our own conclusions from that.

[00:44:10] Matthias Pfefferle: So in the end, we tried to reuse everything that. Comes with WordPress core. So reactions are, stored as comments on your block. That makes it easy to show them up under the, blog post and to have the threaded communication. when it comes to traffic, that is a really tricky discussion because in the end, it's not only about direct comments, but it's also about.

Sharing something you have published. Because every time someone shares one of your blog posts, everyone, every instance tries to fetch your blog

[00:44:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh,

[00:44:56] Matthias Pfefferle: to see what you've written. So that means. That can grow exponentially. And, there are some, blog posts, with kind of title like, Mastodon is DDoSing, my, my WordPress instance, or my, Mastodon instance.

So it's a really noisy protocol and it can get really tricky when you are on shed hosting. So if you. Really have, a big audience in mind and you really want to grow your audience and want to own your audience because you do not want to rely on social media anymore. you have to think about either, hosting itself or you have to think about at least caching in the end.

[00:45:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, okay. That's interesting. So we've, I think we've done a good groundwork there on what, it is and what it does right now. Hopefully we did, if we didn't, apologies, dear listener. but let's talk about some of the roadmap items that you've got. And you did mention a few of these, but I.

Probably we've not covered a few of them. Are there any things that are gonna be coming in the next, oh, I dunno. Let's go six months a year. It's quite a long way off. I know, but are there any things that you haven't mentioned that you wish to add in the coming days, week, months, year?

[00:46:29] Matthias Pfefferle: So we are still working on improving the possibilities to edit the profile. for now we are trying to reuse what comes with, themes or we try to. Auto generate some content. but we want to be more user focused and want to allow the user to change more of these settings. That's one big thing.

then it's, we are just recently, tweaking a lot in, the area of, What I mentioned with the bulletin boards to be comfortable with these boards and to be able to, subscribe to the blog as a bulletin board threat and see all of the, posts as, posts in a threat. I'm really keen about implementing, or supporting, podcasting.

In

[00:47:41] Nathan Wrigley: Ooh.

[00:47:44] Matthias Pfefferle: it's, a bit tricky because, podcasting shifted a bit to, external services. So it's, yeah, it's, as I said, it's tricky to find. a way to get the, a link to the audio file, in the big WordPress plugins. But I'm, I think that is really interesting because, there is no real.

Solution to podcasting in the Fedi verse. Yet there are some audio, focused platforms, but that's more about music in general. So I would love to see that in the

[00:48:28] Nathan Wrigley: I would love to see that in the end.

[00:48:32] Matthias Pfefferle: and that's not directly, ActivityPub related, but, Alex Kirk, a friend of mine. started a, different plugin called Enable Methadone apps, and that would allow you to use a methadone app of your choice, to pub, to, to use with your WordPress block so that you could use a methadone app to publish, new, micro posts to to your blog and.

Maybe see your followers, and interact with them in the end, but that's still very early and

[00:49:19] Nathan Wrigley: I'm loving some of those items though. That's really great. just before we close it off, there was obviously great interest in Mastodon and all of these different fedi verse platforms in, in a period of about, oh, I don't know, let's say about a year ago, something like that. When, the, politics of the world were, such, how's it going?

do you have any intuition as to whether, people are still, have they gone back to the platforms that they left? Are people still flocking to Mastodon in the way that they were or is it leveled off? What do you, what's your intuition there?

[00:49:54] Matthias Pfefferle: that's really hard to say because I would say I'm deeply into an echo chamber and I'm fully on Macon and.

[00:50:03] Nathan Wrigley: Everybody's on Mastodon in that case. Yeah, yeah.

[00:50:06] Matthias Pfefferle: And I even deleted my, Twitter app. I would say yes, it's still growing and with, threats, with, meters Threats Network. Just recently, joining the, 30 verse, it, yeah, I would say, there were some numbers that.

Threats alone would double the size or more than double

[00:50:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it was like a hundred million in one hit, wasn't it? Something like that.

[00:50:39] Matthias Pfefferle: So they're still on opt-in so that the, it's, still a way to go, but it's, a huge potential there. on the other hand, the, usage of the plugin itself is quite ing so I'm curious. Why that is? because, yeah, but that's, I, might be biased.

I really see the, potential of the plugin there, with bringing back the interaction part that nearly died with a common system of WordPress. I can't tell why that is. so yeah.

[00:51:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. No, that's fine. so just again, dear listener, quick reminder, if you go to WP Build search for, Mathias, then you'll be able to see I. What we're talking about, able to see the bits and the pieces, on the screen

[00:51:48] Matthias Pfefferle: Yeah, I think that's a bit easier.

[00:51:50] Nathan Wrigley: it's easy to understand the, what it is that you are getting yourself into and what have you, but I think we've done a good job of explaining what it is, so I'm really pleased about that.

Mathias, where would we find you online and don't say Twitter? where would we find you? be that an email address, a Mastodon account. Whatever you like. Where's the best place to reach out to you?

[00:52:12] Matthias Pfefferle: so there are two good places. If you speak German, it's. No block. It's N-O-T-I-Z dot BLOG. and if you want to have a chat with me about the TI verse, the indie web or other decentralized protocols stuff, you can find me on methadone. It's P-F-E-F-F-E-R-L-E at. Have I spelled it correctly?

[00:52:50] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know whether I'm gonna hope that you have, P-F-E-F-E-R-L-E

[00:52:56] Matthias Pfefferle: Perfect.

[00:52:57] Nathan Wrigley: Mastodon. Social. We'll put those links into the show notes. So head to WP Builds.com. Search for this episode. Actually, now that I think about it, if you go to WP Builds.com and search for Mathias, you're gonna find this episode plus the other one.

So there's two to choose from, but that's good. There's a hundred percent more content than I thought a minute ago. Mathias, thank you so much for chatting to me today. really appreciate it. It.

[00:53:23] Matthias Pfefferle: Thank you for having me.

[00:53:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all we've got time for this week. I really hope that you enjoyed that episode. I love chatting to Matthias. He's a very, very nice gentleman indeed. Go to metastases socials that are mentioned in the podcast and give him some love. This project really is important. Decentralizing all of the different things that we do on socials, I think is really important.

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All right. That really is it. Hopefully we'll see you for this week in WordPress show on Monday. If not, like I said, at the top of the show, we'll be back next week and it will probably be an interview. We will see you then.

So all it remains for me to do is to fade in some cheesy music, say stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.