What is ActivityPub and how does it work within WordPress? With Matthias Pfefferle

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with the hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds And by Weglot. Weglot, the easiest way to translate your WordPress website. The Weglot translation plugin gives you a reliable and easy way to make your WordPress website multilingual in minutes. No coding required and no developer time needed. Find out more at weglot.com.

Hello? Hello? Hello. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. it's WP Builds. We're back. and this time we're talking about, we're gonna talk about Mastodon. We're gonna talk about Activity Pub, the Fed averse. And who better to join me to talk about such things than this gentleman here? This is Mattias It just occurred to me, right?

But I always say your name and I've never really figured out if I get your name correct. So I'm going to say it like this, Mattias.

[00:01:28] Matthias Pfefferle: Nearly perfect. Oh, that'll do. It's Matthias.

[00:01:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Matthias.

[00:01:36] Matthias Pfefferle: Perfect. That's, perfect.

[00:01:37] Nathan Wrigley: Hey, second time. Yeah. Nice. Okay. but the reason that we've got Matthias on is because Matthias, is the author of the Activity Pub plugin for our favorite CMS WordPress.

And, Matthias is gonna show you a little bit about what he has worked on, what it does, what the Fed averse is, possibly what, maybe you're equating it with Mastodon or something like that. explain what all of that is and then maybe. Maybe you'll get a sneak preview of, of some of the stuff which is coming out of the, the master on the activity pub, I should say, plugin in the near future.

just a few bits of housekeeping before we begin, if that is okay. The first thing to do is to say that if you would like to share this with your friends, colleagues, relations, we would really love that. That would be really great. Go to your social platform of choice, something like Mastodon, for example.

and share this URL. It's wp builds.com/live. And if you go there, you've got two choices of commenting. The first one, if you're on a desktop, is there's a box to the right of the video, and that is a YouTube comment embed, which means that you need to be logged into your YouTube Google account.

The other option though, if you don't wanna be a part of Google's YouTube network, you can go to the video itself and right at the top. But top it says Live chats, a little black box. Just click on the little black box and that's the platform's chat interface. And we'll be able to see those comments coming through.

And obviously if you've got a question or something that Mattias says, did I get it right again, Matthias? Oh, okay. if anything that he, he, says, is confusing or you want clarification or you just wanna ask a question in general, pop it in a comment and then we can show it on the screen a bit like these comments.

So Elena is joining us, dunno where from, but she, she's saying hello. Just joined. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. A chap called Nathan. that's me. said hi. In return. Patricia is joining us and she says hello. That's really nice. Thank you very much indeed. And Mark. Ow. Oh, ow. Not very good with the names today, is saying hello, that's really nice as well.

And then Patricia following up, one of my sons is also a. That word, Matthias. Matthias, that one. and the activity plugin. The activity pub plugin is awesome. Oh, great. Okay. that's a perfect segue. oh yeah. Nice. Yeah. Little, gesture there. okay. First of all, would you please mind just telling us a little bit about you and how come we've got you on the podcast today?

What's your, how did you get into this whole fed diverse mastodon activity pub stuff?

[00:04:34] Matthias Pfefferle: Okay. so from the beginning, I, started with websites, working on websites, or I fell in love with the internet and websites in the end of the. 19 hundreds.

it's a great song, white old man. and then I, fell in love with blogging, writing stuff to the internet and, sharing ideas with others and, with the race of the social networks and their kind of walling up and, yeah, keeping their own little places. And, a lot of people moved to these, wallet gardens.

I, I decided I want to keep the momentum of blogging and I want to keep that relevant. And I, searched for ideas or techniques, that I could use to make WordPress, my choice of, blogging platform a. Social networks. So I tried a lot of different technologies, and roundabout 2019 I, heard about the new W three C standard activity pub and thought, okay, let's give it again a try.

and it turned out, to be the right horse I bet on. yeah, it was the last thing I tried, but it was the most successful thing, for now.

[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:06:28] Matthias Pfefferle: Yeah, so that got me into the activity pub world and got me, more into the WordPress world for, I would say for ages. I only. A user in the, in, in the whole web space and, tried, yeah.

Kind of a, spare time developer. But I would say with Activity Pub, I got more and more into the, whole community and, participated more, in, social events. talked on word camps and stuff like that.

[00:07:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So that then led to the bit that you didn't mention there was that it led you to, write, found, create, I guess a plugin, which is called Activity po.

Yeah. yeah. And do you want to take that story or shall I just explain for you or Yeah, give it a try. Okay. Let me try. so the activity pod plugin was created by Matthias and, started to become used. And I guess there was like this real interesting moment in time where Twitter in particular, was taken over by somebody else.

Let's just leave it at that. Yeah. and that person, There was a lot of news around it, and I feel that there were a lot of people jumping ship and it became a real hot talking point. It's so much so in fact that it was in the, it was in the press over here. The newspapers. It was on the television, and a lot of the coverage of that was what other things are out there.

what other platforms would satisfy the same feel of Twitter, but without using Twitter. Oh, obviously now x and a Mastodon was a, platform built on top of the activity pub protocol, which you've just mentioned. and a lot of people started to gain interest in that. And then I think it's right to say that then got automatic interested in the subject, automatic, the, the company with two T's and they then took you on or they got how, what exactly is your role over there?

How did you end up being an automation, I think is what I'm asking.

[00:08:49] Matthias Pfefferle: In the end, I simply wrote a tweet, at the right time and wow. it was, more than a year ago when Matt, announced his plans to integrate Activity Pub into Tumblr. And I simply asked the question, why not WordPress? And that was, the beginning of our discussions and it's ended up me working kind of full-time on the activity per plugin for WordPress now.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah. What a nice story. That was

[00:09:25] Matthias Pfefferle: the last good thing Twitter did.

[00:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Woo. okay, so let's dig into what Activity Pub is, because I think a lot of people in their head have activity Pub and Mastodon. Being the same thing, right? Yeah. they, have this intuition that Mastodon is Activity Pub and Activity Pub is mastodon and it is not quite as simple a picture as that.

Is it? what, just spell out what the Activity pub protocol is, what it allows you to do, and we'll try to just take that journey for a minute.

[00:10:00] Matthias Pfefferle: it's the, yeah. it's, as you said, it's the protocol, that is used by Mastodon to, be or have. To allow a decentralized communication between different methadone servers, so to say.

it's, it's similar to, let's say, email. You have the protocols, SMTP, pop, imap, and you have applications on top of that, like Google Mail or in Germany, gmx and, web de are the big players. so Mastodon is kind the Google mail of the social world. and, activity Pub is the.

Pop three SMTP, thing of the social world.

[00:10:54] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna make an analogy that I've never made before. Okay. think of, think of social networks as a car, right? And the, engine, the bit that makes it work, makes it go forwards and backwards and enables it to move. That's activity pub and the way that your car looks, the skin around the outside and the seats and the, all of that's Mastodon.

it sits, it's not a very good analogy, is it? But nevermind. It's the one that came into my head. the point is the activity pub is the protocol sitting beneath it all without activity pub. There'd be no interactions when you clicked post in Mastodon. Nothing would happen. It wouldn't go anywhere.

People wouldn't be able to see It, it's the thing, the, glue that binds it together, the underlying technology. Okay. Given all of that, I think a lot of people also think that when they sign up for a social network, it's a walled garden, because that's the way that social networks took flight.

You went to Facebook, you signed up for Facebook, and you were fully understanding that everything that you did would be inside of Facebook. So if you logged out, you can't do anything that you could do because you logged out. Same thing over on Twitter, in fact, just substitute any social network. But the activity pub protocol, or more broadly, let's say the Fed averse, there's another term we gotta get used to, allows, these networks to interact with each other.

So if you like, it would be as if Twitter. Could talk to Facebook and you could communicate with Twitter followers inside of Facebook. And Instagram could communicate with Facebook and you could just, that's what it allows you to do, right? And because it allows you to do that, your WordPress website can be like a first citizen.

You can use your website to log in to the fedi verse, make social posts, maybe even, I don't know, by now, receive replies and communicate and put comments that go through the commenting system on WordPress and all of that. So it opens up the WordPress website, which we're used to just being this static, non-social thing.

It opens it up to being a first class citizen on the Fedi verse. I'm talking too much. but is that about

[00:13:20] Matthias Pfefferle: right? that's totally it. Yeah. And I would add one thing, because. Most people, misunderstand the first citizen because we, we learned to, to cross posts, in the past, because the most of the social networks were not really open and have no decentralized communication.

We were forced to copy our content into their little post boxes, or maybe they had an API to post that automatically. But it was always a copy. It's here is an excerpt of my, my, my text. Here's a link, where you can follow to, to get to the whole post. and that's it. And with activity pop, you can now.

Subscribe to the full content, and you see it in your social network of choice and not a copy, a strip down version, but the real content and you can interact with it like at likes boost the, content, at replies and everything on. The platform of your choice or the app of your choice in the end.

So it's, it feels like masteron, but it's WordPress

[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: in the end. Can I just pause that a little bit because I'm not entirely sure that I get this yet, but, certainly there was a moment where I really didn't get it. But what you are saying really is if you go to Twitter and you post something and no, let, forget that.

Let's go WordPress. If you go to WordPress, but you want to send some information about the post that you've just created to Twitter, you Twitter has to, you have to send a little signal to Twitter to say, okay, here's a message and I've written the message, and, but then Twitter has its own unique message.

You sent something to Twitter. Now Twitter has that thing, but with activity, pop. Your post is the thing. Yeah, exactly. So people, when they see it in their stream, their feed or whatever, they're seeing your post. So it hasn't gone away from your site. Your site is the, thing, right? Yeah.

[00:15:51] Matthias Pfefferle: Technically there is, yeah. Caching mechanisms. Yeah. But yeah, in, the end it's, my post and every reaction on that post will be shared with the original post in the end. And that's the difference between sharing something on Twitter versus, using activity pub. Because if you share something on Twitter and someone likes it or boosts it, he or she only likes and boosts the, Twitter representation on your blog, you see nothing of that.

it's simply you build up an audience that lives in their small little ecosystem and. You do not show, if you do not check that ecosystem, you wouldn't get to know if there was any interaction. So yeah,

[00:16:42] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's quite a mental leap actually to, encapsulate that in your own head. I think it's quite hard to intuit that because all the social networks so far that you've, dealt with, unless of course you've dealt with activity problem, maam, it doesn't behave like this.

And so you have an expectation that okay, what, no, say that again. And it's hard to get your head around what's going on there, but just know that the, content that you create is the content. It's not getting shared out. Yeah, there's caching and everything, it's your content.

You've got it. and Walter, thank you for joining us. Walter says, okay, this is better. Maybe, master On is a car an activity pub? Is a road. I'm just trying to think that through, but I'll go with that. That sounds good to me. Yeah,

[00:17:26] Matthias Pfefferle: because the road is more the connecting thing. Oh,

[00:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: yes. Yeah. thank you Walter, for your, wisdom.

That's much better. I shouldn't have said car anyway. Okay. So given the little preamble that we've just done, we've got an intuition now as to what Activity Pub is, and hopefully what all of that is. Where should we go next? I'm thinking we should put the screen on and have a little look at some of the bits and pieces.

Yeah. We can show stuff you've been working on. Yeah. Okay. So let me first of all, take these comments away. One second. Take that one away, and yeah, just a quick call. If you fancy sharing this with people, please do wp builds.com/live. Send them there. Okay. So here comes. Matthias's screen now. Not sure where this is gonna yeah, you've got full control.

I'm not sure where this is gonna go, but like I said, if you've got a question or anything like that, please, It makes these show so much more interesting when we get interaction like that, okay. Over to you, Matthias. And I'll interrupt if I feel like I need to.

[00:18:24] Matthias Pfefferle: Okay. Perfect. So I would say the easiest thing to show that my content really lives on my page, is that if you have a blog, let's use mine and make some advertisements.

Oh, nice. Yeah. so there's my latest post. So you can search for the post on Mastodon, for example. Simply search it.

And then nothing. Yeah. And then it shows up on Mastodon. So it's really, Mastodon is loading my content in my app of choice. In this case it's, Mastodon. And I can interact with that. Like I can interact with every other content on Mastodon. So for example, I can write a comment there. So let's make a reply.

[00:19:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So whilst you're doing that, the interface that we're looking at the moment, this black interface look top top hand corner, top right and corner. You've got the Mastodon logo. Oh yeah. we're logged into Mastodon Now, the white screen that you saw a minute ago was, Matisse's website. Okay.

But hopefully you staying this one.

[00:19:46] Matthias Pfefferle: This one Macedon.

[00:19:48] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. Okay. And now you are gonna reply to your own post. Yeah, hit

[00:19:53] Matthias Pfefferle: the, small little button at the bottom. Okay. And then you get the reply thingy open, and then you can add a reply. Nice article and send that. Okay. And now, as always, with life, with

[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: technology, life technology, nothing will work.

let's see. that

[00:20:18] Matthias Pfefferle: on my WordPress block?

[00:20:21] Nathan Wrigley: Fingers crossed, ladies and gentlemen. It's gonna take a moment, but e even if it fails, right? I don't care. the fact is we know that it works. It's just we got this, live technology never seems to work. Yeah. Hey, it's

[00:20:35] Matthias Pfefferle: a thing. and now you see, the, nice article thing and, I can allow that.

It's, we decided to keep the normal, review and moderation process of WordPress. So it will always be, sent to moderation, and you always have the choice to, add it to the spam filter or to delete it if it's not, with your. Yeah. If it does not fit to you. No, that

[00:21:09] Nathan Wrigley: makes perfect sense, because I can imagine, the web is open, Mastodon is open.

Anybody could write any old garbage, and then it appears on your website and you take an SEO hit because somebody wrote something horrible. so yeah. that's the perfect way of doing it. So you can approve it. You'll, get the typical email that e that WordPress would send out saying, you've got a new comment, go and approve it, or, exactly.

That's the perfect flow. I think that's exactly what you want. Okay. but what I now have the question of, yeah. Okay. And now you see that this is what I wanted to see. yeah.

[00:21:44] Matthias Pfefferle: At the bottom of your, oh, quite some comments. Yeah. Good grief. yeah, here it's at the bottom. And the nice thing about that is that you really get, I.

Communication again on your WordPress block because it's a social network. So you are now part of a social network, and social networks are built to make communication and interaction with content very easy. You have to log in and that's it. You can interact with everything. You do not have to switch, apps or to switch platforms.

It's not like RSS back, from the old days where you have to always visit the site to add a comment and to subscribe via email to get, to get a reminder when there is a reply to your comment. It's everything in one platform, and if someone replies, you get a notification and you can reply again and to, see that it's the same on WordPress, so you really have the whole communication thing.

Inside of WordPress. So you see all the comments from, boy, you do get a lot of comments. Look at that. Yeah. And that's, really starting with the most amazing thing of the activity plugin because really, there were quite a lot of, posts, in the last year about the, comment section of WordPress is that no one comments anymore.

And I would say the, comments and the, communication and the interaction and the discussions are what makes blogging relevant and what. Is the fun about blogging to discuss what someone had in mind and wrote about. And if you simply only, publish stuff without any reaction, it's not fun.

[00:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so here's a really interesting thing that sort of comes out of that. I feel that before social networks were a thing, the conversation happened in comments. The social networks came along and they walled up the conversation. Yeah. The conversation took place on their property, and they became incredibly successful and in many cases, incredibly, wealthy, organizations because they owned that conversation and you, couldn't escape that walled garden.

Now what we're seeing is a real dramatic shift. That conversation now happening inside of a social network, but surfaced in real time. On your blog,

[00:24:31] Matthias Pfefferle: so yeah, because it doesn't really happen in the social network. No. Be it happens on your site. Yeah. But using the same mechanisms like in a social network,

[00:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: so yeah.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a really good call out there. So it looks like it's on the social network. It's not, you are just seeing what's on the blog when you reply, it's a comment and it goes, I think that's a, again, a difficult step to understand. But the point being, if conversations happens over on Mastodon and you've got the Activity pod protocol, look at what happens on your website.

Suddenly your comments are alive again. okay. Just a couple of things coming in. I'm just gonna pause us there. firstly, Eleanor is joining us and she says, sorry, I am blind. Please do not apologize, Eleanor, she says, I am just listening. What's going on? She says, you logged into Mastodon, replying to your WP blog post, or you logged into your client with your own WP admin account.

Could you just clear that up for Eleanor?

[00:25:37] Matthias Pfefferle: I locked in using my Mastodon credentials. I had two different accounts to show that these are really two different things. The Matthias P on Mastodon and the Matthias p on, on the block, and they can communicate with each o other. So I used my Mastodon credentials to log into Mastodon and then, searched for one of my blog posts and replied.

On Mastodon using Mastodoncon account, and the comment ended up in the comment section of WordPress and now I'm allowed to reply on WordPress and it will be federated back to Mastodon. So you really have a fully decentralized, communication possible. And as a WordPress owner, you do not have to have a Methadone account anymore.

You simply can only use WordPress for publishing stuff and following the conversation and be part of the conversation.

[00:26:49] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just delve into that just a tiny bit more? So you. you've obviously, you've got a WordPress website, you've got an account on that WordPress website 'cause you can log into it and install plugins and all of that kind of stuff.

when you install the activity PO plugin, and we can get to this in a minute, are you using that user that you log in as, are they your mastodon? Is that how your Mastodon, will appear? Or can I bring an existing Mastodon account that's on some network, like Mastodon social or Masto host or whatever.

Can I bring that into the plugin and use it from there? And if that question wasn't clear, I'm sorry.

[00:27:31] Matthias Pfefferle: these are two completely different things. So it's, no longer, it's not that I use an existing account to log into something else. I do not log in to WordPress using my methadone account and vice versa.

These are two completely different accounts. If you search for something that simply uses an existing Mastodon account to publish stuff, then we are back in the old, cross-posting world. This is really, forget Mastodon, at least from the publisher perspective. You can forget Mastodon completely. It's, you simply have to care about your WordPress and your content.

But others can follow you. Yeah. And I can show that, later.

[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: I think a lot of people, when they, when one of the things which creates the, problem of people leaving platforms like X or Twitter or whatever is that they've got this, they've got this following built up. and it, when you go and do this, it's almost like you're starting afresh with that thing.

the website is its own new thing, and you can begin that journey there. You can obviously keep your old accounts going and work it that way, but this is something new. Yeah. Eleanor says also, what about moderation? If my comments are under approval to avoid hate speech? Yes. Yeah. So

[00:28:58] Matthias Pfefferle: that's what I'm, that's what I mentioned earlier.

Yeah. we do not bypass the moderation system of WordPress. it's it's the same handling as someone commented directly on your site. It is, hold for moderation. It is going through, spam plugins if you have installed one of them. So it's the same in the end. It's publishing a comment, but not on your site.

but on, from methadone.

[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So Eleanor, basically you are full control. You, can, yeah, you can decline, so everything is pending. Nothing will be published until you make a conscious decision to make it published. And then, Patricia, thank you again. says long blog posts could be too much.

Okay. So we're imagining you've written a 10,000 word blog post. How would that look in, on the Mastodon front end? 'cause that would be a lot, wouldn't it? will they be displayed on other people's fed verse Wol as is correct? Was I thinking to have a separate site just for posting short? sorry.

I was thinking to have a separate site for just posting short activities and links. Any advice?

[00:30:14] Matthias Pfefferle: So then let's go into the, let's go more into the WordPress word and the settings. okay. So we're

[00:30:24] Nathan Wrigley: now gonna go into Matthias's plugin, the Mastodon plugin, and you can get this totally for free. On wordpress.org.

Just go search

[00:30:33] Matthias Pfefferle: for it. Yeah. to install it. Simply go to the plugins section. Search for activity pub.

Oh, you have to press

[00:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: new? yeah. I still do that. Maybe I should Every time. I do not do that. Every time. That's, yeah. There it's, and then,

[00:30:52] Matthias Pfefferle: you can install it and activate it, and then you have maybe I, I will switch to English first. So where is it? It's, it's okay.

[00:31:03] Nathan Wrigley: you can if you wish, but, okay.

That's very kind of you.

[00:31:11] Matthias Pfefferle: and then you see that, you see a setting section activity pop. And this, the, Welcome screen shows you, for example, your new profiles because this is something new, and this is a learning curve because, from Twitter you are trained to only have a small username. For example, my username on Twitter is my last name, but because you're, because Macedon and Activity Pub and the Ty verse is decentral, you have to also tell the other one.

Where your profile lives. So okay,

[00:32:03] Nathan Wrigley: we're, gonna have to pause there just for a minute. so we're all used to going to twitter.com or x, whatever it is. That's where it all lives, right? That's where the action's happening. But the, what mastered on an activity pub allow people to do, just like you can download WordPress and stick it on, and there you've got a website, it's yours, example.com.

You can do the same, and, thousands of people have, they've installed and they've run mastered on their own server. And because there's thousands of servers. We have to have something in the username to say, okay, it's over on that server. And again, forgive me if I've butchered that, but is that about right?

[00:32:47] Matthias Pfefferle: Yeah, that's about right. Yeah. And it's sim it's it's, it looks like an email address because it makes sense to have username at the platform. That's why it's, it looks very similar, but it doesn't have to be, an email address. but you could also use kind of your profile URL on the network.

So both is possible. And, for my WordPress block, I would try it with the email like identifier and you simply can search for that on methadone or any other platform that, allows you to follow others. And now. You can see my full profile. This is my blog's profile on Mastodon. Yeah. So it's, there's no difference from the look and feel simply by looking at the profile.

You can't see any difference between a block profile and the masteron profile.

[00:33:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But the, URL, if you like, the username, the profile URL or the profile name, has two parts. It has the username that, like the bit that we're used to is the, at whatever it is that you want. So might, mine might be at WP Bills.

And then you've got this appended bit at server. Yeah, so at username, at server. So that's, again, that's hard to get in your head as to why is the username got two at signs in it. That's weird. That's. That's the mechanism, but it doesn't take long before that just starts to look really normal again.

I'm sorry, I'm interrupting you. Carry on.

[00:34:34] Matthias Pfefferle: No, perfect. And, this allows you to have multiple users on one platform. That means if you have a multi-user, WordPress, where a lot of authors, publish their content, Macedon users can follow each of these authors. and, that's why you have to have the, username part and the server part to build multi-user, to allow multi users.

and to come back to the, to the question, with long content and short content with WordPress, we decided to, in the end, allow both. So it's possible to. Have the full content on Macedon, but it's also possible to strip that down. For example, the Metaverse, post is only the excerpt and a link back to the original article.

so it's up to you in the end how you decide. Yeah. How, what do you prefer to share on, Meson?

[00:35:56] Nathan Wrigley: Actually that there's an interesting thing in there as well, isn't there? I guess to some extent it's also about thinking about other people, because in our social networks we are used to this little bit of text and then the other little bit of text.

and then very occasionally on when I'm browsing through Mastodon, I will see a post, which is extremely long and it is strange. It's weird. Yeah. I've got to scroll through it to get through that one. so there's, just maybe give that a bit of thought. the people also consuming, it might find it weird that you are posting your latest novel.

[00:36:35] Matthias Pfefferle: yeah. but that is mostly because of Macedon was designed to build a Microblogging platform. Yeah. Yeah. When I said that you are in control of what you share, there's a, there's a setting on WordPress, where you can decide what default content type we should use to publish something.

If you choose note, it will always post the full content.

[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:37:11] Matthias Pfefferle: That's a bit strange because note is posting, the full content article will be stripped down, but it is like, it is. That's the way it is right now.

[00:37:21] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But

[00:37:23] Matthias Pfefferle: if you decide to use WordPress post format, it will try to, to decide what's best to share.

So for example, if you use a note. Let's say you post something without a title or something that is very short, it will be sent as a note. And if it's a full article with headline and a certain number of characters, then it will be shared as an article. And Mastodon, as I said, is stripping down articles to only use the excerpt and a link back to the, original content.

This way, you give the decision to the platform who's showing the content. That means with the article, you send the full content and a summary, and Macedon decide, decides to use the summary for an article. But there are other platforms that are, about full blogging or full content, and they might show the, full content.

Or maybe there are other platforms like, for example, pixel Fat that are designed with a focus on images. So they will add the image at the top and yeah, present the image more, in the end. Okay. So it's, you provide some data for the, consuming platform. And this platform decides what's best to show in the, okay.

[00:39:07] Nathan Wrigley: So that's interesting. but you have choices. Yeah. Which in other platforms you just don't, you don't get that choice. It's just, the platform decides how it's gonna look. yeah.

[00:39:16] Matthias Pfefferle: it's also bit, a bit tricky. Yeah, I was gonna

[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: say, there's an experiment you've gotta run on, your content really isn't that,

[00:39:23] Matthias Pfefferle: and you can't be sure that your content will display the same way on every platform.

Yep. That's the, Disadvantage of that, but okay.

[00:39:34] Nathan Wrigley: so we've got a question here from Eleanor again. who is a novel writer, it turns out, she says, I'm a novel writer. I think the best way, it's not a question, I apologize. I think the best way to share this kind of content is having the excerpt posted.

Agree? Yeah. Okay. I

[00:39:50] Matthias Pfefferle: would

[00:39:50] Nathan Wrigley: agree.

[00:39:51] Matthias Pfefferle: If, this is, a very long text and maybe you also use paging for that, it's, I would say it's the best to only, share the excerpt. But, you still are possible to get all the interaction stuff even without the length of the content is not, changing how others can interact with the content.

[00:40:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, perfect. All right. Should we go back to your settings? We, took a bit of a long side there, didn't we? Let's see. Yeah, to that. That's perfect.

[00:40:32] Matthias Pfefferle: On the top, you can decide if you want to have authors enabled. That means every author on your blog that has the ability to publish, content will be enabled for activity pub.

Or if you want to have one account, to follow. That means that you simply follow the block and everyone could, follow this one account and it will share every article regardless of the, author.

[00:41:05] Nathan Wrigley: So in your case, that was an easy decision because you've got a, an authorship of one.

Yeah. But you can make a choice around that, and you've gone for the, blog. So it's just

[00:41:14] Matthias Pfefferle: No, I decide, I decided to use both ah, and the, nice thing. Oh, you do? I see that now. Yeah, sorry. yeah. The nice thing about using both is, in that combination, every article will be published under the name of the author.

And the blog account is boosting that,

[00:41:36] Nathan Wrigley: got it. You got it

[00:41:38] Matthias Pfefferle: on Mastodon. If you go to my profile, you see all of my blog posts. Yep. And if you load my blog's profile, the blog is always boosting my articles. So on a multi-user blog, it's possible to simply follow the blog users because it boosts every aca, every user's post.

So if you want to have all of the articles, you could still follow the blog user. But it's always under the name of the author, if that makes sense. So

[00:42:20] Nathan Wrigley: boosting in Mastodon terms is a little bit like retweeting or something. Yeah. you, you promote it. You say, I approve. Yeah. I want other people to see it, so hang on.

Because my experience of boosting in Mastodon is I have to click a button. I, that I have to Yeah. In be in the ui. But did that do it automatically? Yeah. Did your blog account did it by itself. That's part of how the plugin Yeah. Exactly. Sends that. Okay. So

[00:42:45] Matthias Pfefferle: if a new, if a new blog post is federated under the name of the author, it will directly be boosted by the block user's.

So you do not have to do anything's. That's a nice little feature. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. I think it's a nice, it's a nice way to have both. So you do not have duplicate content. It's, simply you can publish something under your own name, but you have a way to. Or you provide a way to follow the whole blog anyway.

[00:43:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so I'm thinking like, I dunno, a tech public publication like TechCrunch or something, they've obviously got loads of authors and they wanna share their content under their name, but also the tech crunch brand wants to promote everybody's content. Yeah. And so the TechCrunch, profile, if you like, would then boost every author's content.

Exactly. Yeah. That's indeed.

[00:43:44] Matthias Pfefferle: And, that was the first experiment, but you can think that, further, like for example, having accounts for tags or categories or other taxonomies so that you will be able to follow, let's say only the activity pub content on my block. So it will still be published under my name, but the activity pub author will boost everything on my blog.

That's with the tag activity pub, for example. Gosh. So you can have a lot of virtual users that simply boost stuff, on your blog. Fascinating.

[00:44:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. keep going. I'll just give you a bit of a heads up. We've got, it's now quarter to the hour. so probably got about, and we an hour, so Oh yeah.

So another 15 minutes. Let's see what we can do. Let's see what we can do.

[00:44:39] Matthias Pfefferle: So the next one is, you can choose between Note, note is, notice the default thing in the s if you want to have your content look nearly, the same on every platform. Full text, no stripping down, then it's note. But the downside of it is that your full content will be displayed on Mastodon and every other platform.

Normally, if you choose WordPress post format, it's WordPress tries to find the best way to share your content, providing a lot of extra information for the other platform, trying to, define what content you published. For example, is it a video? is it an audio, is it an article, is it a note?

And also tries to find the right, attachment for that. So tries to, if you, have an audio attachment, it might be a, podcast episode and it will focus on audio and publish the audio file instead of images, for example. Got it. And that's this one. this one is only for the note. If you want to have.

Custom cont if you want to decide exactly what to share, if you do not trust us, then you could decide and have some, short co short codes to exactly define what the plugin should share.

[00:46:15] Nathan Wrigley: So you can customize that and encapsulate that in a little bit of HTML. So in your Yeah, it's, yeah, it's

[00:46:21] Matthias Pfefferle: like that you, this just the, title and the full content, for example.

Okay. But you can decide I will always only, at the excerpt. Got it. Got it. Media attachment is ca is how many attachments we should use from your post. the special thing about Mastodon is that it trips out every media file from the content and adds it as attachments. So if you want to have a, if you want to have media on, Mastodon, you have to have a number, above zero here.

Okay. Then we strip the media from the content and adds it as a, as an attachment. Okay. Got it. Great. Yeah, you can decide what you want to share. The, custom post type, so to say, if you want to only share posts, if you want to share pages, if you want to share media, that's tricky because this one would share every media upload regardless of.

It's to post or not? simply, the, upload will share it on meson. Yeah. So be careful with that. you can add hashtags. That means the plugin tries to find the, find a hashtag in your content and, converts that into a link and makes a WordPress tag out of it. So

[00:48:01] Nathan Wrigley: can I ask just Yeah. On the previous one, you've got post pages, media and so on.

if I had a website with custom post types, would they, it would show up here and you would

[00:48:11] Matthias Pfefferle: able disable it. Yeah.

[00:48:13] Nathan Wrigley: Ideal. you can go crazy with that as well. Lovely. Okay.

[00:48:19] Matthias Pfefferle: For block lists, we simply use the, built-in mechanism. you can add, disallow comment keys, in the classic, Moderation, area of WordPress and it will be reused by the plugin. So there's got it, nothing, different. So that's about the, normal settings. And then you have the, followers page where you see all your followers. These are the followers of your block because it's the setting site.

And if you want to see the followers of your user, you go to the user area and there is another follower. And these are the followers of my user account. Okay. So

[00:49:08] Nathan Wrigley: this was, again, if you've got it set up so that. You've got the blog account and you've also got yeah, individual author accounts.

[00:49:15] Matthias Pfefferle: If you only have enabled author, you will only find it in the user section.

If you have enabled only the blog user, you can find it in the, in the setting section if, and you, if you have enabled both, they, will be handled differently because someone can follow your blog but not your user. That's why you have, two different, areas for that.

[00:49:41] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. A couple of things quickly.

I don't know how much more you have, but, let's just raise these points. so this is Eleanor again, just making a suggestion this time. Suggestion for novel writers like me, write short spoiler on the excerpts. Then give the link. So have two bits of content if you like, the main content, the excerpt, and then you can surface the excerpt and you'd be happy to, that's gonna be the shorter version.

And then Patricia, is asking a question on a multi-site. Ooh, can the blog accounts be the same in sub sites and boost the different author posts from all of the networks sites?

[00:50:19] Matthias Pfefferle: Woo. In theory, yes, but it's not built yet like that. Okay. So you can use the plugin in a multi-site if it's, configured with subdomains, not subpaths.

Yeah. Yeah. 'cause that's a technical thing. And it's not about the plugin, it's about the specification of activity pub. but there is not yet a central user that boosts everything but technically possible. So this could be an extension to that. Yeah. Okay.

[00:51:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Okay. So

[00:51:02] Matthias Pfefferle: in, in the end.

Every user can boost that. It's in, in this case, it's, to not have duplicate content. But, that's also a nice thing if you already have a methadone account and build up your audience and have quite some followers, and then you decide to use the methadone plugin in, in WordPress, you can still boost your blog posts using your Masteron account, and then it, will be, sent to all of your followers.

So it's you publish that using your WordPress, and then you can share that on masteron using your, mess, your classic and old Meson

[00:51:45] Nathan Wrigley: account. You'd have to do that manually, I guess you'd have to go and, yeah. Surface the content. No. Yes. Find the boost button and Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay.

[00:51:52] Matthias Pfefferle: It's here and then that's the old school way.

[00:51:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. All right. anything else there?

I think we've done the settings, haven't we? That bit's

[00:52:05] Matthias Pfefferle: not, quite yet. Not quite, I will switch pages. That might be confusing, but I would, I do not want to mess up my main blog, Okay. Yeah. Yeah. we also have some things to make it easier, or that it feels more like a social network.

So we have some blocks.

[00:52:29] Nathan Wrigley: So just to be, 'cause I know that we've got, people in who are listening to this. so what's just happened is, Mattias is he's now write, writing a blog. He's gone into the block editor, and he's just creating a post, or a page. I can't remember what, and I,

[00:52:45] Matthias Pfefferle: it's, it doesn't matter.

You can do it. you can use it in both. You could also use it in your template if you have a full site, editing, theme. and

[00:52:56] Nathan Wrigley: what we're seeing is that there's a bunch of pre-built blocks. So you can just chuck in a bunch of, I think there were three or four that I just caught sight off there. No,

[00:53:06] Matthias Pfefferle: it's two of them.

Two, two. It's follow me on the Fed verse. It's a follow widget thing, and as a setting you can choose. Who to follow the whole site or my profile. And it will change. It's the same, it's the same icon, but you see it, in the username. If I change it, it's my first name, for example, I show you show it in a second.

And the other one is ware followers, where you also have the option to, decide which followers of the whole site or of the profile. and then if you publish that and check that on the front end, you will see all your followers, like you expected, from Mastodon. You have a nice little pager and this is great, classic links, and you have a follow widget.

If, it's a bit tricky, with the, new handles. And it's also a bit tricky to explain to others how they can follow your blog. And we decided to build something to help you explain it to your users. So

[00:54:28] Nathan Wrigley: this is basically a one click solution. You find that block, chuck it in, maybe in a template at the end of blog posts or something like that.

Yeah. And there you are. You've just, you don't have to explain anything. Yeah. Somebody just clicks the button,

[00:54:41] Matthias Pfefferle: clicks the follow button, and then we try to explain ether you copy this one and put it in, in the search field of your methadone instance, or provide us your methadone instance and we will do that for you.

[00:54:55] Nathan Wrigley: And then what a redirect taking you over there. And then you can, how does that work? Sorry. Yeah. Okay. I'll watch that. That's easier. Yeah.

[00:55:03] Matthias Pfefferle: Oh, have I missed something? Me, Mastodon.

[00:55:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's the gremlin. Oh, it's the tech gremlin. You're doing something live. It's you were doing so well. You got to 56 minutes without a single technical hitch.

And, up to now, up to exactly. It had to happen. No, of course not.

[00:55:29] Matthias Pfefferle: Okay.

[00:55:30] Nathan Wrigley: You had three minutes normally.

[00:55:32] Matthias Pfefferle: Oh, no, it's not.com. It's dot social. Oh,

[00:55:35] Nathan Wrigley: it's not, oh, IAL glitch. It's you typing in Ah, success.

[00:55:40] Matthias Pfefferle: yeah. And then it redirects you to your Mastodon, instance of choice and opens the, blogs profile that you simply can hit the follow button.

So it's do it for me thing.

[00:55:56] Nathan Wrigley: This is great, honestly. confession, right? I installed this on a test site and there were a few bits and pieces that back then, a, lot of months ago now that I did that, the, there were a few bits and pieces that I thought, oh, that's a shame that it doesn't do that.

And you've really answered most of those, especially that follower thing where you can see who your followers are and all of that. Because remember, dear listener, that it's your website that's got all of this on it. And so you can't go to another interface and show it. So having the things like the followers listed out in a one click block, solution, literally click at one button inside the block editor.

Suddenly it's, feeling more like the set of capabilities that I'm used to, elsewhere. Oh. This is nice. what a load of fun. Patricia's just saying she's gotta go see you later, Patricia. She's gotta go to a WordPress me top meeting. thank you Dan. Sharon, she says, great. with literally one minute 30 left.

Do you think you've got through the stuff that you wanted to get through?

[00:57:10] Matthias Pfefferle: Yes, I would say so ish. It's, yeah, there's, something that I mentioned. the, plugin tries to find the best attachment to share. So in the end, it also supports not only images, but also video and audio. Oh, okay.

So if you have a podcast, it will show a little, player.

[00:57:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. No, do this quick. 'cause this is great. 'cause it does look good. And I do have a podcast, so this is important.

[00:57:48] Matthias Pfefferle: I'm not sure if,

[00:57:49] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, you showed me this the other day and it was really nice. Can you find a podcaster and a podcast? Yeah. No, it's,

[00:58:01] Matthias Pfefferle: yeah,

[00:58:03] Nathan Wrigley: it's, beautiful though. what happens is it, displays the podcast player in a really nice little, ui. It just, it's ready to go. It's brilliant.

yeah. I think you've run out a lot. Yeah. I can find it. nevermind.

[00:58:22] Matthias Pfefferle: I have plan, I, planned to publish one, but it's not in under minute, and I would, to at least tease something. Oh God,

[00:58:33] Nathan Wrigley: yes. Go on. No, yeah, go on. I don't care. Now just go for it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna extend this for a few minutes.

Go on.

[00:58:43] Matthias Pfefferle: A good friend of mine and a colleague, Alex Kirk also worked on a Mastodon API plugin. So that means that you not only can, share or, federate content with Mastodon, but use a Mastodon app to manage your WordPress site. So this is my block in a Mastodon app. Okay. So we, are

[00:59:15] Nathan Wrigley: now on Mastodon, we're in the Mastodon app on its app, right?

On my, your website, Right.

[00:59:21] Matthias Pfefferle: it's the app. And you see all of, my blog posts. You can publish new posts there. Hello?

And, you have. a bit of the social web feeling. You see your followers also in the app. Your blogs followers, and with some extensions we are also working on, you might see also you followers in that app soon, or to say it differently, to use WordPress to follow others maybe in the near future.

are you teasing

[01:00:07] Nathan Wrigley: that or is that actually what's gonna happen?

[01:00:10] Matthias Pfefferle: That's great. Yes. There is a plugin. It's called friends. That's Alex Kirk's plugin, That, yeah. And that also that, that, Al already allows that, but it's you, have to use some different plugins for now. But, the idea is to maybe have one big social media, plugin in, in the future that provides all of that so that you do not have to have a massive on account.

Maybe in the near or far future. but to use your WordPress to do everything. Follow others, other

[01:00:45] Nathan Wrigley: people see

[01:00:47] Matthias Pfefferle: comments be followable. Yeah.

[01:00:49] Nathan Wrigley: a yay. So you are basically at that point, a little, your own little version of Mastodon, the activity pub protocol. I should say that it's not just, and to prove

[01:01:00] Matthias Pfefferle: that publishing works here, you see there it job published.

Yay.

[01:01:04] Nathan Wrigley: So you did it from the app. Yeah. Now it's appeared on that site. Very clever is all I can say. Yeah. And that's very clever.

[01:01:14] Matthias Pfefferle: the nice little thing about that is that at, least that's my experience, that a lot of these, WordPress apps out there are very bloated and complicated at the moment.

So this, if you simply care about. Text and want to put out text extremely fast. This is a really nice way to do that. Ah, I love it. It's micro-blogging.

[01:01:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is. It is. That's exactly what it is. Micro-blogging. Okay. I am gonna have to call it at this point. That is really great. So a little inkling of what's gonna come in the future.

the ability to basically follow people, be followed, receive comments, make comments, all of that coming to a WordPress site near you, and then you really are like a first citizen on the Fed verse. Yes. Inside of your WordPress website. It's take some little bit of a mental shift to understand what's going on.

thank you first of all, to Mattias, Mattias, tomato, tomato. I don't know. I apol, I apologize. but thank you for coming and joining us today. Really appreciate it. Off the back of this, we're gonna be recording a podcast episode and referencing. What we've just done. that'll come out, on the WP Builds podcast reasonably soon.

But not just thanks to you, thank you to all the people who showed up today and made comments. There was a few nice little questions in there. Really nice to have, you giving us that information. If you fancy following what we do, wp builds.com/subscribe. WP builds.com/subscribe. Go there, sign up to our email newsletter and we will pest you twice a week with bits of content that we create.

Old school. Old school. yeah, it's, yeah, that's not a lot in my life. That's particularly new, but there you go. so that's it. We're gonna knock it on the head. Big thanks to Mattias. We will be back, with another webinar at some point soon, but we'll be back with podcast episodes and this week in WordPress on Monday.

Thank you so much for watching. Take it easy, everybody. Bye-Bye bye-Bye bye-Bye.