I am now running both ActivityPub and ATmosphere plugins on this website now, each enabling the blog to be visible across both protocol types. For activity pub it should show to Mastodon / GotoSocial instances and ATmosphere will show to Bluesky (and possibly Threads but not sure). interestingly the plugins work in a slightly different way.
ActivityPub
ActivityPub is probably the more tightly integrated plugin, it doesn’t need another account to post through like ATmosphere. It does however currently need other plugins, friends and enable mastodon apps to give a total experience, for example being able to do non-blog posts and see others feeds in an app. I have found Phanpy to be the best solution for interacting with the ActivityPub plugin.
The closer integration does allow for some interesting blocks supplied for the plugin, for example a follow pane:
and also lists of followers and those I follow:
Fediverse Followers
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Low Quality Facts @lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social -
Tony @coldkennels@mastodon.social -
mcg @mcg@social.lol -
Lou Plummer 💖 @amerpie@social.lol -
JCProbably :prami_pride: @jedda@social.lol -
Charlie Holland @chiply@fosstodon.org -
Wilfred Hughes @wilfredh@mastodon.social -
Alec Sargent @alecsargent@social.linux.pizza -
Iván @yvan@social.lol -
Andy Carolan @andycarolan@social.lol
One of the tricker problems was there wasn’t a ‘profile’ page to point people at, in the same way as your mastodon profile. This has been added, you can see mine at here, although it still remains harder to follow from here than it would be through a traditional mastodon instance.
ATmosphere
The Atmosphere approach is slightly different as it posts through, and scrapes comments back from an ATmosphere PDS, for example Bluesky using the AT protocol. Mine is @mark.hysted.com. The outcome is basically the same, posts are sent out via my Bluesky profile and comments come back to be added in the blog post. This is a more recent plugin, only just released so there isn’t the blocks that ActivityPub has – but I expect those are in train.
What I’m not quite sure about
I’m not sure how this all works together, are comments made on Bluesky federated to Mastodon and can those be replied to? Am I causing chaos across the two approaches and also creating a burden on my WordPress site that will mean a performance upgrade? Feel free to add replies and test how things work between the two different plugins and ecosystems. Also shout if you see any weirdness!
Useful links
- ActivityPub Plugin
- Friends Plugin
- Enable Mastodon Apps Plugin
- ActivityPub Blog for WordPress – useful updates and tips
- ATmosphere plugin launch and detail
PS – Most of my recent blog posts seem to be about blogging, I promise this will be the last for a while.
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