I’ve been using Mastodon as my primary social media tool since 2022, first (and still) on the infosec.exchange instance, but more often than not on the chattrbx.com instance, which is a smaller instance with some friends I met along the way. I’ve found Mastodon to be my favorite place to hang out in my copious spare time, while also wandering over to Bluesky on occasion.

As I’ve been writing long-form stuff here more often lately, I’ve started grabbing links to new posts and posting them to my Mastodon account. There are only a few people that read my posts from there, or anywhere for that matter, but that’s ok. I just like having a place to post about stuff running through my brain.

Anyway, I was clicking around some WordPress settings the other day and noticed ActivityPub. I’m pretty sure it’s been around a little while, but I wasn’t really sure what it was about. I’ve now come to learn it creates a Mastodon instance for the blog/site. How cool is that?!

I went through the process of setting up the Mastodon instance in WordPress and then, after all was said and done, thought it would be a good idea to write about the process here. The problem is, I didn’t write anything down or take screenshots. I hemmed and hawed for a little while, and then realized I could go through the process with my other blog. I’ve been debating consolidating that blog with this one, but that’s a topic for another day. So I went through the process of setting things up on the other blog and can now post the steps along with some additional thoughts here for anyone that might be interested.

A quick note before I get started. The directions below are for a wordpress.com site on a premium plan with a personal domain. It’s possible the directions will work with free blogs and self-hosted (.org) sites, but I’m not sure.

Step 1

Go to WP-Admin –> Settings –> ActivityPub and select “Join the Open Social Web” link.

That’s it.

All done.

Well, sort of.

It took me a while to figure out what my account/handle was for the Mastodon instance. As I was getting flustered, I decided to just follow one of my Mastodon accounts using the “Following” tab, and it showed up as (at)zalovo(dot)blog(at)zalovo(dot)blog.

I used (at) and (dot) because WordPress creates a link to the handle and I wanted to show how the full handle + domain looked. Either way, let me just say I wasn’t a fan of the handle and spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to figure out how to change it. There’s also an option for it to use your WordPress user ID, but I moved the blog to a new domain earlier this year because I wanted to stop using my last name, and it didn’t make sense to just use my first initial and last name for the Mastodon handle after going through all that, but I finally figured out how to change the handle.

Step 2

Turns out there’s also an ActivityPub plugin!

Go to WP-Admin / Plugins, search for ActivityPub, select the plugin, and install and activate the plugin.

Uh oh, what did I do?!

This was my first thought after installing the plugin. WordPress said it was preparing a dedicated server for my site. This process lasted about a minute, but I had no idea why it was doing this and was very nervous that I’d done something I can’t take back. I’m not exactly sure why the site was moved to a dedicated server, but I’m guessing the site requires specific tools/settings in order to make it available on the Open Social Web / Mastodon. Again, that’s just a guess, but there were no hiccups of any sort.

The plugins list page will open up when the dedicated server process is complete, at which point it’s time to head back over to the ActivityPub settings page to change some of the additional options available.

Step 3

There are 3 settings that I changed after installing the ActivityPub plugin.

First, on the Settings tab, I updated the profile types at the top. There are three options on this page, Since my blog/site only has a single user, I selected the “Blog profile only” option. This also opens up the option for updating the main handle for the Mastodon account on the Blog Profile tab.

Second, on the Blog Profile tab, I updated the Mastodon Profile ID (handle). I was very feeling creative at the time and used my first name.

Third, back on the ActivityPub Settings tab and all the way to the bottom of the page, I selected the “Subscribe to IFTAS DNI List”. This is a “Do Not Interact” list that IFTAS believes federating with poses a significant risk. The list will show up in the Blocked Domains section after subscribing.

There are a few other settings you might want to consider reviewing, but most can be updated on a post-by-post basis.

There’s a “Fediverse Preview” link that will open up in a new page/tab to get a preview of the Mastodon post. It looks like WordPress uses the first few hundred characters of the blog post in the Mastodon post. However, if you create an excerpt in the post settings, it will pull that information for the Mastodon post along with however many images noted in the Fediverse settings. I picked 1 image for this post.

This is my first post since activating ActivityPub, so I still need to figure out how comments and replies work. If you have questions or comments about the steps for activating ActivityPub, or if you just want to help a blogger out to test comments and replies, I’ll happily reply here or on Mastodon.