What if your #WordPress site served as a gateway to decentralized social networks? What if that could bring interactions back to your site?
We're welcoming @jeremy blogger and head of creator tools at Automattic, who will explain how a WordPress blog can become your gateway to the #Fediverse and #Atmosphere!
What if your #WordPress site served as a gateway to decentralized social networks? What if that could bring interactions back to your site?
We're welcoming @jeremy blogger and head of creator tools at Automattic, who will explain how a WordPress blog can become your gateway to the #Fediverse and #Atmosphere!
Et si votre site #WordPress vous servait de porte d'entrée pour les réseaux sociaux décentralisés ? Et si cela pouvait ramener les intéractions chez vous ?
Nous recevons @jeremy, blogueur et responsable des outils pour les créateurs chez automattic, qui vous explique comment un blog WordPress peut devenir votre porte d'entrée sur le #Fediverse et l' #atmosphere !
What if your WordPress site served as a gateway to decentralized social networks? What if it could bring interactions back to your home?
That's what this episode is about, where you'll learn how a WordPress blog can become your gateway to the Fediverse and or the ATmosphere!
We welcome Jérémy Herve, blogger and head of tools for creators for WordPress at Automattic.
Walid: hello and welcome to Projets Libres, the LinuxFR podcast that talks about free software, digital commons and open data. I’m Walid Nouh and today, I’m delighted because we’re continuing the series on the Fediverse and we’re going to talk about WordPress and the Fediverse. To talk about it with me, I have someone who is both a blogger and at the same time he’s working on the subject of this WordPress plugin and also the plugin for ATProto, so for BlueSky, we’re going to talk about it right after. So I’m with Jérémy Herve who works at Automattic. That’s it Jeremy, welcome.
Jérémy: Hello, yes I’m Jérémy Herve. I work at Automattic, where I lead a team that is in charge of creating tools for creators, for bloggers, for content creators in general. Part of our job is to maintain and improve the plugin for WordPress that connects any WordPress site, any WordPress blog to the Fediverse.
Walid: I must admit that we already spoke at the WorldCamp in Rennes in September . Unfortunately, my recording didn’t work, so we’re doing it again in good conditions this time. And that I use this plugin myself: you can follow the publications of the WordPress blog. All the information is in the show notes, in the episode description. You have the link to the plugin’s ActivityPub address.
Presentation of Jérémy
Walid: You said extremely quickly who you are. What I would like is for you to explain to us in a few words how you discovered free software and how did you come to work on WordPress?
Jérémy: I think I’ve always been a fan of free software, I want to say. I’m a blogger, an old blogger now, I want to say. I have my blog that first ran on Joomla and then I switched to WordPress, a little over twenty years ago now. And I had a personal blog for years. which runs and has, like many blogs, I think, seen its activity increase.
I was part of a small community of bloggers, we talked to each other, we commented with each other, we exchanged ideas. Then as the years went by, as social networks grew, we saw this whole conversation move from what was a free world, my WordPress site to a closed interface that was first Facebook and then Twitter, etc.
So it’s true that in my work, I’ve always looked for ways to keep the conversation outside of these prisons, I want to say. And naturally, I had done a little research, I had started, I had created an account on news items, not with Mastodon, but with GoToSocial at the beginning. And then I discovered that indeed, that I could link my passion and my work tool, which was my WordPress blog, with the Fediverse, with a simple extension.
I didn’t need to bother maintaining my own instance on the Fediverse, having to wonder if I had enough RAM on my server to run a Mastodon, to run a GoToSocial, that I could just keep using my blog and participate in conversations.
To have conversations on my blog, but also to have these same conversations on the Fediverse and to have everything open and accessible to everyone. And then I was lucky, I started using this extension myself on my own site. And a few years ago, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and we saw this exodus from Twitter to other platforms, my employer, Automattic, decided to promote and help people who wanted to make this exodus precisely by buying the ActityPub extension and its developer Matthias Pfefferle.
[We proposed] to Matthias, who had been working on this expansion for years already, to continue doing this work not as a simple hobby in his spare time, but really full-time.
So Matthias joined my team, and we started working together. I was able to give him feedback on this expansion, which I had been using for quite some time. And then we worked together to improve it, fix the bugs and make it an even better experience.
Speech by Matthias Pfefferle at FOSDEM 2026 about the WordPress plugin
The role of Matthias Pfefferle
Walid: I would put in the description and in the transcript, I would put a link to an interview with Matthias that was given in 2024 on a podcast called WP Build, in which he tells his whole story around Activity Pub, since he started with OStatus , so even before.
Interview with Matthias on WPbuilds.com
He explained in the interview that I listened to again very quickly before we recorded, that the discussions started with Tumblr, because there were questions around Tumblr and the Fediverse, etc. That in fact, the discussions started like that, that in the end, it ended on WordPress and the Fediverse. That’s where there’s really something to do. I had completely forgotten that part. So yes, Matthias, he started working on this extension before: the first commit I saw was in July 2018.
Jérémy: Yes, that’s right. I defined myself as an old blogger at the beginning of the interview. If I’m an old blogger, Matthias is even older than me. He’s an old hand on the web. And indeed, he’s always been part of this small circle of people who worked on OStatus, who worked on Activity Streams, who are the ancestors of the Fediverse we know today.
He worked on a lot of IndieWeb tools in general for everything related to Webmentions, all these tools that allow you to connect sites to each other, I’d like to say. And so, for him, it was natural to expand his work as soon as he could, to start working on a plugin that linked Fediverse and WordPress.
Even today, when we talk about Fediverse and WordPress, the reference person is still Matthias. He also has the advantage, given that he’s been there for years, of knowing people, of being part of working groups on this subject, at the W3C level, at the level of ActivityPub groups as well. And so, it allows him to keep his finger on the pulse of what’s going on in that world, to make suggestions, to help with the development of APIs, and then to bring all these improvements back to the WordPress plugin.
Walid: The extension, it’s evolved a lot. I started using it, I think, maybe at the beginning of 2024, something like that, when I really started to discover the Fediverse. The plugin has evolved a lot since then, but for people who don’t know what this plugin does, can you explain what its features are? What can you do with this plugin, besides a normal WordPress blog?
Jérémy: I want to say that it’s a bit plug and play, in the sense that it’s an extension that you can install, activate and forget. Someone who has an active blog, with comments, will be able to continue writing their blog articles, publishing them, etc. They will always have a comment form under their articles. They will be able to receive comments from people who want to come to the site, leave their email address, their name and publish a comment.
On top of that, people will have the possibility to subscribe to the blog and the author on the blog or to one of the authors on the blog or to all the authors on the blog itself. Today, when you are on a tool like Mastodon for example, you can follow someone else on Mastodon by simply following the Mastodon address which will be @jeremy or something like that.
And so now, we’re going to turn this into the possibility of subscribing to @jeremy@monsite.fr, the address of my WordPress blog. People will be able to follow and receive posts in real time on their timeline on Mastodon. They’ll be able to leave likes, they’ll be able to repost articles and they’ll be able to reply to these posts on Mastodon, without leaving Mastodon, either on their phone or on the Mastodon web interface.
For me, a little blogger, I don’t need to go to Mastodon to see their comments and to interact with them, to thank them, to answer their questions. I’m going to see their answers, their likes, their reposts, I’m going to see them directly in my WordPress interface, as if they were classic comments. And so, we can continue the conversation there, I’m going to answer them from there. And this response, it’s going to be sent back to the Mastodon account, to that person’s Fediverse account.
In the end, it doesn’t change much for the WordPress blogger, in the sense that we stay on his site, we stay on his WordPress dashboard that we know. The only big difference is that we’re going to start seeing interactions and responses from people who, finally, before, were responding to an article on Mastodon and we may not have known that they were talking about us, we may not have known that they were asking us a question, we may not have known that they liked our articles. Now, we can see it, we can answer them, we can thank them.
It brings a little bit of activity back to the blog, which I think needs it. I’ve talked about it, I’m a long-time blogger. And it’s true that I really saw the number of comments on my blog first increase and then gradually decrease until it disappeared completely. I think there was a period around 2019-2020 when I even cut the comments on my blog because, honestly, with the few comments I had, it was either spam or poor quality. It didn’t add anything to my articles.
And having activated the ActivityPub extension, it allowed me to start having comments, real conversations, interesting discussions again. It brought back value to my articles: I went from zero comments on each of my articles to there, lots of likes, lots of reposts, lots of discussions. It brought life back to my little blog. I think it’s really one of the main assets of the extension today.
Walid: Indeed, it’s still quite nice to see discussions from people who interact at least not directly with your blog, but as a behemoth or through the Fediverse tool. And you see comments from people who reply to each other, etc. And it’s really nice to see that, to actually see life on your blog, that the interactions are at home. That’s still something really good. There’s also another part of the plugin that I, personally, don’t use, which is to follow people as well, I think.
Jérémy: Indeed, it’s true that interactions go both ways, it’s true that you can publish articles, receive answers and discuss under these articles. But the Fediverse is not just that. It’s not just about producing writing. It’s also about following other people, liking and reposting their own posts and asking them questions, responding under their own posts too.
And this is indeed something that is possible via the ActivityPub plugin as well. It’s an option that we can activate in the plugin and we end up with a new menu in our WordPress board with a timeline very similar to what we can find on a Mastodon client where we will be able to follow people, respond to them, etc.
So we can find article topics, we can find interesting discussions that we can join, we can respond to those discussions, but the content we write remains under our control because it’s saved from our database, on our WordPress site. And we don’t need to use 36 different tools, 36 different social networks to interact with people. We can do it from a single interface.
Walid: You started with the ActivityPub plugin. BlueSky with its ATProto protocol came along. Finally, you also started to develop a plugin to be able to connect to the network, to the ATmosphere, the whole network around the ATProto protocol.
Eventually, your WordPress becomes your central place where you’ll post messages. People will follow you on the networks they’re on. You don’t have to choose where you want to talk. You can finally talk pretty much anywhere at the same time.
Jérémy: It’s your house that you control, it’s your home, you’re the owner. It’s your content and you don’t need to go looking for readers right and left, you continue to publish at home. Indeed, first of all, we started with ActivityPub because it was first and foremost a project that was open, which allowed this kind of interaction from the start.
BlueSky is basically a micro-blogging tool at the beginning, where you were limited to the number of characters you could publish on an account. The protocol behind Blue Sky, which is called AT Protocol continues to grow: last year, they launched a new part of their protocol called standard.site which no longer allows you to publish small updates to the micro-blogging, but to produce long content that will also be stored and readable on BlueSky.
So we thought it’s the right time to join this network too. So we also developed the ATmosphere extension which works more or less in the same way, I want to say. I publish my article on my WordPress site and this article is sent to people who follow me on BlueSky. They can see all my content, they can respond, they can like, they can repost to them. And all these interactions, they are brought back to my site and the same thing, I can respond to their comments, etc. from my site.
Walid: yes, we typically see on your blog. At the bottom of your article, we see the blog on reactions on social networks. We see both what concerns ActivityPub and BlueSky.
Reactions to a post on Jérémy’s blog
Jérémy: Exactly, that’s right.
Walid: That’s really nice for the moment.
Jérémy: The idea was really that. My home on the web is my blog. And then you can interact with my blog from many different places. For the moment, it’s still the Fediverse and the ATmosphere, but we can hope that in the future, if other open networks develop, why not support them in the same way?
The problems introduced by the connection to the WordPress Fediverse
Walid: And so, were there any technical challenges around the development of these plugins? Or around the implementation on a platform like WordPress.com, for example? Did having all these new interactions require infrastructure work? Did it bring any particular challenges?
Jérémy: It requires reflection, for sure. On the one hand, because it’s true that at the beginning, WordPress is first and foremost a blog engine, even today. It’s true that today, it’s also a content manager, you can do a lot of things with it. But you have to think about the infrastructure, how you’re going to organize this data on the blog. Should a message that is published by someone I follow be stored like an article? Like a comment? Something else, etc? So you have to think a little bit about how you organize the data.
But I think that honestly, the most interesting, the most difficult challenge, on which we still suffer a little bit, or at least we don’t suffer, but it’s something you have to be aware of when today you activate the ActivityPub extension on your site, is that since people can follow you from anywhere, when you publish an article today, this article, it can be sent to hundreds of people, dozens of people, it depends on how many followers you have, who are going to be on many different instances of the Fediverse.
So someone will follow you from mastodon.social, someone will follow you from another Mastodon instance in Germany, the United States, etc., right and left. As soon as you press the publish button, all these instances will receive a notification that there is a new article, and they will in return come to visit your site to see « ok, what is this new article? Let me take a representative image, a description, a small summary, etc ».
And we end up with an effect that we already had in the 2000s with Digg for example, or with Slashdot, where our site is bombarded with requests from many different places that want to access our data. And so, if we’re not careful, if we don’t have a suitable cache plugin on the site, you can end up with your site that’s down for a few minutes because it’s hammered with requests.
Walid: Are there any particular challenges around the integration with ATProto?
Jérémy: ATProto is still something that is young, I want to say. And so, we are building it while keeping an eye on what is happening with the protocol today, because it changes every month, there are new tools that are created, etc.
As the protocol becomes more and more decentralized, because it’s true that today, when we talk about ATProto, we’re talking about BlueSky, essentially. But the goal is for the AT Protocol to be more than just BlueSky.
For us, in France and in Europe, we have Eurosky now, the latest one. We also have W.social, which was launched a few months ago as well, which we talk about a lot too. So, our goal, on our side, is really to keep an eye on all this and to make sure that our tool, already, continues to work well, that it works with the whole protocol, not just with BlueSky.
And when we talk about our extension, we’re not just talking about BlueSky, because we also want to promote things like Eurosky and open alternatives. So, that’s the biggest thing to pay attention to today, I want to say: stay on top of what’s going on on the protocol and stay open to everyone.
Final Words
Walid: OK. Super interesting. I think we’ve done the trick for that part. I’m really happy, because I contacted you a long time ago to talk about Activity Pub and WordPress and then I didn’t have time to prepare everything so now I’m really happy that we were able to record this, I wanted to leave you a last word, do you have a message to pass on to the listeners of Projets Libres before we leave?
Jérémy: I want to say that if you have a WordPress blog or if you wanted to join Mastodon and you haven’t taken the plunge yet, well now is the time to try. Why not? And if you have anything to complain about, if you have any feedback on the experience with the plugin, if you have any questions, Matthias and I, we can join us on the Fediverse, and also on the support forums of the extension.
So we’re there, we answer questions, we try to answer as quickly as possible. And the plugin, we work on it every day, every week, we make a lot of changes, and so if people have feedback and good ideas, we’re happy to integrate them into the extension, so don’t hesitate.
Walid: Well, Jérémy, thank you very much. It was a pleasure to have you talk about this subject that is particularly close to my heart, which is the Fediverse. For the listeners, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to answer the news item, to ask your questions, to give your remarks. It will be with great pleasure. Jérémy, thank you very much.
Jérémy: thank you.
Walid: See you soon. And then, I’ll be happy to follow the evolution of the plugin that I use myself too.
What if your WordPress site served as a gateway to decentralized social networks? What if it could bring interactions back to your home?
That's what this episode is about, where you'll learn how a WordPress blog can become your gateway to the Fediverse and or the ATmosphere!
We welcome Jérémy Herve, blogger and head of tools for creators for WordPress at Automattic.
Walid: hello and welcome to Projets Libres, the LinuxFR podcast that talks about free software, digital commons and open data. I’m Walid Nouh and today, I’m delighted because we’re continuing the series on the Fediverse and we’re going to talk about WordPress and the Fediverse. To talk about it with me, I have someone who is both a blogger and at the same time he’s working on the subject of this WordPress plugin and also the plugin for ATProto, so for BlueSky, we’re going to talk about it right after. So I’m with Jérémy Herve who works at Automattic. That’s it Jeremy, welcome.
Jérémy: Hello, yes I’m Jérémy Herve. I work at Automattic, where I lead a team that is in charge of creating tools for creators, for bloggers, for content creators in general. Part of our job is to maintain and improve the plugin for WordPress that connects any WordPress site, any WordPress blog to the Fediverse.
Walid: I must admit that we already spoke at the WorldCamp in Rennes in September . Unfortunately, my recording didn’t work, so we’re doing it again in good conditions this time. And that I use this plugin myself: you can follow the publications of the WordPress blog. All the information is in the show notes, in the episode description. You have the link to the plugin’s ActivityPub address.
Presentation of Jérémy
Walid: You said extremely quickly who you are. What I would like is for you to explain to us in a few words how you discovered free software and how did you come to work on WordPress?
Jérémy: I think I’ve always been a fan of free software, I want to say. I’m a blogger, an old blogger now, I want to say. I have my blog that first ran on Joomla and then I switched to WordPress, a little over twenty years ago now. And I had a personal blog for years. which runs and has, like many blogs, I think, seen its activity increase.
I was part of a small community of bloggers, we talked to each other, we commented with each other, we exchanged ideas. Then as the years went by, as social networks grew, we saw this whole conversation move from what was a free world, my WordPress site to a closed interface that was first Facebook and then Twitter, etc.
So it’s true that in my work, I’ve always looked for ways to keep the conversation outside of these prisons, I want to say. And naturally, I had done a little research, I had started, I had created an account on news items, not with Mastodon, but with GoToSocial at the beginning. And then I discovered that indeed, that I could link my passion and my work tool, which was my WordPress blog, with the Fediverse, with a simple extension.
I didn’t need to bother maintaining my own instance on the Fediverse, having to wonder if I had enough RAM on my server to run a Mastodon, to run a GoToSocial, that I could just keep using my blog and participate in conversations.
To have conversations on my blog, but also to have these same conversations on the Fediverse and to have everything open and accessible to everyone. And then I was lucky, I started using this extension myself on my own site. And a few years ago, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and we saw this exodus from Twitter to other platforms, my employer, Automattic, decided to promote and help people who wanted to make this exodus precisely by buying the ActityPub extension and its developer Matthias Pfefferle.
[We proposed] to Matthias, who had been working on this expansion for years already, to continue doing this work not as a simple hobby in his spare time, but really full-time.
So Matthias joined my team, and we started working together. I was able to give him feedback on this expansion, which I had been using for quite some time. And then we worked together to improve it, fix the bugs and make it an even better experience.
Speech by Matthias Pfefferle at FOSDEM 2026 about the WordPress plugin
The role of Matthias Pfefferle
Walid: I would put in the description and in the transcript, I would put a link to an interview with Matthias that was given in 2024 on a podcast called WP Build, in which he tells his whole story around Activity Pub, since he started with OStatus , so even before.
Interview with Matthias on WPbuilds.com
He explained in the interview that I listened to again very quickly before we recorded, that the discussions started with Tumblr, because there were questions around Tumblr and the Fediverse, etc. That in fact, the discussions started like that, that in the end, it ended on WordPress and the Fediverse. That’s where there’s really something to do. I had completely forgotten that part. So yes, Matthias, he started working on this extension before: the first commit I saw was in July 2018.
Jérémy: Yes, that’s right. I defined myself as an old blogger at the beginning of the interview. If I’m an old blogger, Matthias is even older than me. He’s an old hand on the web. And indeed, he’s always been part of this small circle of people who worked on OStatus, who worked on Activity Streams, who are the ancestors of the Fediverse we know today.
He worked on a lot of IndieWeb tools in general for everything related to Webmentions, all these tools that allow you to connect sites to each other, I’d like to say. And so, for him, it was natural to expand his work as soon as he could, to start working on a plugin that linked Fediverse and WordPress.
Even today, when we talk about Fediverse and WordPress, the reference person is still Matthias. He also has the advantage, given that he’s been there for years, of knowing people, of being part of working groups on this subject, at the W3C level, at the level of ActivityPub groups as well. And so, it allows him to keep his finger on the pulse of what’s going on in that world, to make suggestions, to help with the development of APIs, and then to bring all these improvements back to the WordPress plugin.
Walid: The extension, it’s evolved a lot. I started using it, I think, maybe at the beginning of 2024, something like that, when I really started to discover the Fediverse. The plugin has evolved a lot since then, but for people who don’t know what this plugin does, can you explain what its features are? What can you do with this plugin, besides a normal WordPress blog?
Jérémy: I want to say that it’s a bit plug and play, in the sense that it’s an extension that you can install, activate and forget. Someone who has an active blog, with comments, will be able to continue writing their blog articles, publishing them, etc. They will always have a comment form under their articles. They will be able to receive comments from people who want to come to the site, leave their email address, their name and publish a comment.
On top of that, people will have the possibility to subscribe to the blog and the author on the blog or to one of the authors on the blog or to all the authors on the blog itself. Today, when you are on a tool like Mastodon for example, you can follow someone else on Mastodon by simply following the Mastodon address which will be @jeremy or something like that.
And so now, we’re going to turn this into the possibility of subscribing to @jeremy@monsite.fr, the address of my WordPress blog. People will be able to follow and receive posts in real time on their timeline on Mastodon. They’ll be able to leave likes, they’ll be able to repost articles and they’ll be able to reply to these posts on Mastodon, without leaving Mastodon, either on their phone or on the Mastodon web interface.
For me, a little blogger, I don’t need to go to Mastodon to see their comments and to interact with them, to thank them, to answer their questions. I’m going to see their answers, their likes, their reposts, I’m going to see them directly in my WordPress interface, as if they were classic comments. And so, we can continue the conversation there, I’m going to answer them from there. And this response, it’s going to be sent back to the Mastodon account, to that person’s Fediverse account.
In the end, it doesn’t change much for the WordPress blogger, in the sense that we stay on his site, we stay on his WordPress dashboard that we know. The only big difference is that we’re going to start seeing interactions and responses from people who, finally, before, were responding to an article on Mastodon and we may not have known that they were talking about us, we may not have known that they were asking us a question, we may not have known that they liked our articles. Now, we can see it, we can answer them, we can thank them.
It brings a little bit of activity back to the blog, which I think needs it. I’ve talked about it, I’m a long-time blogger. And it’s true that I really saw the number of comments on my blog first increase and then gradually decrease until it disappeared completely. I think there was a period around 2019-2020 when I even cut the comments on my blog because, honestly, with the few comments I had, it was either spam or poor quality. It didn’t add anything to my articles.
And having activated the ActivityPub extension, it allowed me to start having comments, real conversations, interesting discussions again. It brought back value to my articles: I went from zero comments on each of my articles to there, lots of likes, lots of reposts, lots of discussions. It brought life back to my little blog. I think it’s really one of the main assets of the extension today.
Walid: Indeed, it’s still quite nice to see discussions from people who interact at least not directly with your blog, but as a behemoth or through the Fediverse tool. And you see comments from people who reply to each other, etc. And it’s really nice to see that, to actually see life on your blog, that the interactions are at home. That’s still something really good. There’s also another part of the plugin that I, personally, don’t use, which is to follow people as well, I think.
Jérémy: Indeed, it’s true that interactions go both ways, it’s true that you can publish articles, receive answers and discuss under these articles. But the Fediverse is not just that. It’s not just about producing writing. It’s also about following other people, liking and reposting their own posts and asking them questions, responding under their own posts too.
And this is indeed something that is possible via the ActivityPub plugin as well. It’s an option that we can activate in the plugin and we end up with a new menu in our WordPress board with a timeline very similar to what we can find on a Mastodon client where we will be able to follow people, respond to them, etc.
So we can find article topics, we can find interesting discussions that we can join, we can respond to those discussions, but the content we write remains under our control because it’s saved from our database, on our WordPress site. And we don’t need to use 36 different tools, 36 different social networks to interact with people. We can do it from a single interface.
Walid: You started with the ActivityPub plugin. BlueSky with its ATProto protocol came along. Finally, you also started to develop a plugin to be able to connect to the network, to the ATmosphere, the whole network around the ATProto protocol.
Eventually, your WordPress becomes your central place where you’ll post messages. People will follow you on the networks they’re on. You don’t have to choose where you want to talk. You can finally talk pretty much anywhere at the same time.
Jérémy: It’s your house that you control, it’s your home, you’re the owner. It’s your content and you don’t need to go looking for readers right and left, you continue to publish at home. Indeed, first of all, we started with ActivityPub because it was first and foremost a project that was open, which allowed this kind of interaction from the start.
BlueSky is basically a micro-blogging tool at the beginning, where you were limited to the number of characters you could publish on an account. The protocol behind Blue Sky, which is called AT Protocol continues to grow: last year, they launched a new part of their protocol called standard.site which no longer allows you to publish small updates to the micro-blogging, but to produce long content that will also be stored and readable on BlueSky.
So we thought it’s the right time to join this network too. So we also developed the ATmosphere extension which works more or less in the same way, I want to say. I publish my article on my WordPress site and this article is sent to people who follow me on BlueSky. They can see all my content, they can respond, they can like, they can repost to them. And all these interactions, they are brought back to my site and the same thing, I can respond to their comments, etc. from my site.
Walid: yes, we typically see on your blog. At the bottom of your article, we see the blog on reactions on social networks. We see both what concerns ActivityPub and BlueSky.
Reactions to a post on Jérémy’s blog
Jérémy: Exactly, that’s right.
Walid: That’s really nice for the moment.
Jérémy: The idea was really that. My home on the web is my blog. And then you can interact with my blog from many different places. For the moment, it’s still the Fediverse and the ATmosphere, but we can hope that in the future, if other open networks develop, why not support them in the same way?
The problems introduced by the connection to the WordPress Fediverse
Walid: And so, were there any technical challenges around the development of these plugins? Or around the implementation on a platform like WordPress.com, for example? Did having all these new interactions require infrastructure work? Did it bring any particular challenges?
Jérémy: It requires reflection, for sure. On the one hand, because it’s true that at the beginning, WordPress is first and foremost a blog engine, even today. It’s true that today, it’s also a content manager, you can do a lot of things with it. But you have to think about the infrastructure, how you’re going to organize this data on the blog. Should a message that is published by someone I follow be stored like an article? Like a comment? Something else, etc? So you have to think a little bit about how you organize the data.
But I think that honestly, the most interesting, the most difficult challenge, on which we still suffer a little bit, or at least we don’t suffer, but it’s something you have to be aware of when today you activate the ActivityPub extension on your site, is that since people can follow you from anywhere, when you publish an article today, this article, it can be sent to hundreds of people, dozens of people, it depends on how many followers you have, who are going to be on many different instances of the Fediverse.
So someone will follow you from mastodon.social, someone will follow you from another Mastodon instance in Germany, the United States, etc., right and left. As soon as you press the publish button, all these instances will receive a notification that there is a new article, and they will in return come to visit your site to see « ok, what is this new article? Let me take a representative image, a description, a small summary, etc ».
And we end up with an effect that we already had in the 2000s with Digg for example, or with Slashdot, where our site is bombarded with requests from many different places that want to access our data. And so, if we’re not careful, if we don’t have a suitable cache plugin on the site, you can end up with your site that’s down for a few minutes because it’s hammered with requests.
Walid: Are there any particular challenges around the integration with ATProto?
Jérémy: ATProto is still something that is young, I want to say. And so, we are building it while keeping an eye on what is happening with the protocol today, because it changes every month, there are new tools that are created, etc.
As the protocol becomes more and more decentralized, because it’s true that today, when we talk about ATProto, we’re talking about BlueSky, essentially. But the goal is for the AT Protocol to be more than just BlueSky.
For us, in France and in Europe, we have Eurosky now, the latest one. We also have W.social, which was launched a few months ago as well, which we talk about a lot too. So, our goal, on our side, is really to keep an eye on all this and to make sure that our tool, already, continues to work well, that it works with the whole protocol, not just with BlueSky.
And when we talk about our extension, we’re not just talking about BlueSky, because we also want to promote things like Eurosky and open alternatives. So, that’s the biggest thing to pay attention to today, I want to say: stay on top of what’s going on on the protocol and stay open to everyone.
Final Words
Walid: OK. Super interesting. I think we’ve done the trick for that part. I’m really happy, because I contacted you a long time ago to talk about Activity Pub and WordPress and then I didn’t have time to prepare everything so now I’m really happy that we were able to record this, I wanted to leave you a last word, do you have a message to pass on to the listeners of Projets Libres before we leave?
Jérémy: I want to say that if you have a WordPress blog or if you wanted to join Mastodon and you haven’t taken the plunge yet, well now is the time to try. Why not? And if you have anything to complain about, if you have any feedback on the experience with the plugin, if you have any questions, Matthias and I, we can join us on the Fediverse, and also on the support forums of the extension.
So we’re there, we answer questions, we try to answer as quickly as possible. And the plugin, we work on it every day, every week, we make a lot of changes, and so if people have feedback and good ideas, we’re happy to integrate them into the extension, so don’t hesitate.
Walid: Well, Jérémy, thank you very much. It was a pleasure to have you talk about this subject that is particularly close to my heart, which is the Fediverse. For the listeners, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to answer the news item, to ask your questions, to give your remarks. It will be with great pleasure. Jérémy, thank you very much.
Jérémy: thank you.
Walid: See you soon. And then, I’ll be happy to follow the evolution of the plugin that I use myself too.
Next time someone claims it's difficult to sign up for a Fediverse account, know that I've been unable to figure out how to set a profile picture on my Eurosky account and it's been six months. Don't even ask about the steps I took to get that account.
I want to follow this up with an AMAA (ask me anything #atproto!) I've done a few of these on #bluesky and thought it might be fun to do one here! I don't believe in dumb questions, so please ask me any you may have! Happy to answer anything, or at least hopefully point you in the right direction! Feel free to reply your questions to this post.
Also feel free to even ask me stuff like "Is atproto really #decentralized", "Aren't relays/PDS expensive?", "What do migrations look like there?", etc. Nothing is off the table, and I'd be glad to answer anything! Good chance I will have questions in the future about #activitypub and #mastodon that I will be asking!
My name is Bailey, I'm an open source software developer who is very active in the AT Protocol community. Excited to be here to check out more about ActivityPub, but more importantly to make some new friends and talk about tech/software development!
A bit more about my work with atproto - I manage a PDS at https://selfhosted.social - I wrote a migration tool for accounts going between PDSs called https://pdsmoover.com - I wrote a service that sits in front of a PDS to add 2FA (something y'all already smoking us on!) - I am active in a few groups. https://npmx.dev as a core team member and a contractor with eurosky.social
Excited to be here and happy to answer any questions anyone has about AT Protocol and just talk software!
I want to follow this up with an AMAA (ask me anything #atproto!) I've done a few of these on #bluesky and thought it might be fun to do one here! I don't believe in dumb questions, so please ask me any you may have! Happy to answer anything, or at least hopefully point you in the right direction! Feel free to reply your questions to this post.
Also feel free to even ask me stuff like "Is atproto really #decentralized", "Aren't relays/PDS expensive?", "What do migrations look like there?", etc. Nothing is off the table, and I'd be glad to answer anything! Good chance I will have questions in the future about #activitypub and #mastodon that I will be asking!
My name is Bailey, I'm an open source software developer who is very active in the AT Protocol community. Excited to be here to check out more about ActivityPub, but more importantly to make some new friends and talk about tech/software development!
A bit more about my work with atproto - I manage a PDS at https://selfhosted.social - I wrote a migration tool for accounts going between PDSs called https://pdsmoover.com - I wrote a service that sits in front of a PDS to add 2FA (something y'all already smoking us on!) - I am active in a few groups. https://npmx.dev as a core team member and a contractor with eurosky.social
Excited to be here and happy to answer any questions anyone has about AT Protocol and just talk software!
Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are…
So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that – cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is).
Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social.
That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.)
The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…)
So @_elena calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹):
Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger:
> “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z)
Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in.
These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want.
🤡🤡🤡
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity.
> “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³
But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it.
Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control?
And if so, why can’t they even get that right?
Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead.
Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them.
Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are…
So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that – cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is).
Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social.
That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.)
The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…)
So @_elena calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹):
Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger:
> “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z)
Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in.
These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want.
🤡🤡🤡
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity.
> “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³
But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it.
Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control?
And if so, why can’t they even get that right?
Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead.
Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them.
Leave alone, for God sake which #atproto server they use. They could eventually change it.
Somehow I don't feel like those high ethereal have for real an app on their phone, and they post personally. They will have a social media manager or someone in care of their social media presence. Which drive to another question.
Why don't they have an account on their @ec.social-network.europa.eu ? It's money already 'spent'. Crossposter services do exist.
Scoop: #WSocial has been experiencing major technical problems for over a week: it is effectively a ghost town, filled with thousands of new accounts that cannot use the platform.
Because my new article contains a possible solution to their problem, by the time you read this the issue may have been fixed. Or not. It has been going on for 7+ days, with complete radio silence by its developers and founders.
“My fear is that W Social is just another for-profit Big Tech startup that happens to be based in the EU. We don’t need that. We don’t need more European surveillance capitalists and people farmers. We need ethical alternatives working for the common good.”
– Yours truly, in @_elena’s excellent exposé on W Social.
Do read the article to the end, especially noting the bit about the composition of their board of advisors, which includes an ex-Google AI lead and an ex-Paypal Chief [Violate Your] Privacy Officer who now works at Tools for Humanity (Sam Altman’s “Sci-fi dystopia? Hold my beer…” identity farming startup that wants to scan your eyeballs).
“My fear is that W Social is just another for-profit Big Tech startup that happens to be based in the EU. We don’t need that. We don’t need more European surveillance capitalists and people farmers. We need ethical alternatives working for the common good.”
– Yours truly, in @_elena’s excellent exposé on W Social.
Do read the article to the end, especially noting the bit about the composition of their board of advisors, which includes an ex-Google AI lead and an ex-Paypal Chief [Violate Your] Privacy Officer who now works at Tools for Humanity (Sam Altman’s “Sci-fi dystopia? Hold my beer…” identity farming startup that wants to scan your eyeballs).
1) The co-founders picked #ATproto but only started using the network WEEKS after their Davos launch
2) The CEO said "we also want to keep European data in Europe to maybe train European AI models with our data because we also have amazing AI companies in Europe" 🤯
1) The co-founders picked #ATproto but only started using the network WEEKS after their Davos launch
2) The CEO said "we also want to keep European data in Europe to maybe train European AI models with our data because we also have amazing AI companies in Europe" 🤯
Great read by @laurenshof on the many parallel efforts to bolt private interaction onto public-by-default protocols:
"Each ends up with bounded spaces, explicit membership, persistent state, and access decisions at the boundary. This is roughly ... what Matrix has been building ... we’re doing carcinization for protocols."
Great read by @laurenshof on the many parallel efforts to bolt private interaction onto public-by-default protocols:
"Each ends up with bounded spaces, explicit membership, persistent state, and access decisions at the boundary. This is roughly ... what Matrix has been building ... we’re doing carcinization for protocols."
When TikTok’s future felt uncertain, Tori White saw an opportunity. On the latest Dot Social, @mike sits down with Skylight Social's CEO to talk about building a creator-first video platform on the AT Protocol. Watch the episode here, or find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Blacksky has already built their own ATProto stack that's fully independent from Bluesky.
Now Eurosky is making progress as they roll out their own PDS.
I see more independent infrastructure springing up on https://atp.fyi/network, including AppViews.
For anyone hoping that we'll get another wave of people coming to the fediverse once Bluesky folds/enshittifies, that might not necessarily be the case as people will have more options to stay in the Atmosphere.
A few facts and thoughts about #BlueSky being decentralized or not:
#ATProto (the protocol behind bluesky) is decentralized and open-source, but is controlled by a for-profit (albeit fiscally a public benefit) organization, "Bluesky Social PBC".
"Bluesky" refers to a sum of ATProto concepts, notably the AppView (bsky.app), the main Personal Data Servers (PDS, bsky.social), and the Relays (or firehose, bsky.network). There are others, but they're the 3 important ones.
Anyone can run their own AppView, PDS or Relay AND consume the content from/get their content consumed by the Bluesky infrastructure. HOWEVER, not everything is trivial or cheap to run.
3.0 A PDS, which contains your data (account details but also posts, likes, follows, etc), is trivial and cheap to self-host. Cheaper than hosting a mastodon instance, even, because it does way less stuff and receives way less requests. See https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
3.1 An AppView (the presentation layer, where users interact with ATProto content) can be created by anyone, but the bsky.app backend is NOT open-source, so there are not a ton of options right now. EDIT: seems like I was wrong and that the bsky.app AppView is open-source: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages/bsky
3.2 Running a relay is trivial but expensive to self-host. This is because its purpose is to act as an aggregator for all the PDS so that AppViews can consume the data in a way that scales better. The Bluesky relay implementation (bigsky) is open-source: https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/blob/main/cmd/bigsky/README.md About 2.5 months ago, 4.5TB of storage was needed and an OVH server costing 150$/month worked to host a full-atmosphere relay (more on that later).
4.0 To make a comparison with #ActivityPub (the protocol behind #mastodon ), the AppView and PDS is the same thing in ActivityPub, and the concept of relay doesn't exist. There are advantages and drawbacks to both architectures, I might do a future post highlighting those.
5.0 With those definitions out of the way, some observations:
5.1 A lot of users self-host their PDS, but the vast majority of users chose the simpler option.
5.2 There are some alternative AppViews built on ATProto, but the vast majority of users visit bsky.app.
5.3 There are very little non-bluesky self-hosting of relays, mostly because of their prohibitive cost. Running the bigsky relay is expensive partly because of design decisions for ATProto and partly because it takes ALL content from ALL accounts for ALL the network on the atmosphere (in this case atmosphere == fediverse but for ATProto). This is like if your Mastodon instance queried ALL servers for ALL accounts querying ALL posts. In the future, there might exist relays that don't scrape ALL data but only a subset of it, which would bring down costs, but it's not yet the case.
6.0 So "is Bluesky decentralized?"
6.1 In theory, yes, everything that bluesky does on ATProto can be.
6.2 In practice, however, the most decentralized part of Bluesky is the PDS, where the user data is stored, and even that is not that decentralized.
6.3 Will it stay this way? I'm hopeful it won't, but I don't know. ATProto is fairly new compared to ActivityPub, and the ecosystem around it was mostly built by the BlueSky company, but I expect this to change in the future. However, the cost of entry for things built on ATProto will always be more than the cost of entry for things built on ActivityPub.
6.4 Things built on ActivityPub will always be more decentralized than things built on ATProto, because of design decisions from both of these protocols.
This video from @jgarr about the differences between #ActivityPub and #ATProto has me wondering if ActivityPub could actually support separating identity from content, since things like post ids are fully qualified URLs.
Could I host my identity on one domain and my content on another? I haven’t found anything in the protocol spec that forbids that, but I may have overlooked it.
