fediverse

<p>Getting started with ActivityPub on WordPress just got a lot easier. A new guided onboarding experience is now part of the plugin, designed to help you configure key settings and understand how your site connects to the Fediverse—from the moment you activate it.</p><p>Whether you’re new to ActivityPub or just setting things up again, the onboarding flow helps you make informed choices around visibility, content formatting, and profile setup. It’s built to give you confidence that your content is reaching the right audiences in the right way.</p><p>Tailored for You</p><p>The plugin now adapts its behavior based on the caching plugins you have installed. You’ll also find clearer guidance if you’re using Surge, and an option to fine-tune how your content is tailored for browsers versus Fediverse services.</p><p>We’ve moved profile-related settings out of the welcome page and into new dashboard widgets, so they’re easier to find and update. And to make the learning curve smoother, the Help tab now includes a section explaining how ActivityPub works on the users page.</p><p>Media, Previews, and Performance</p><p>Beyond onboarding, this release adds support for audio and video attachments in ActivityPub embeds and previews. Posts shared to the Fediverse can now include up to four images, and you can choose how many to include on a per-post basis. Editor previews have also been improved—they now show media even if the post hasn’t been published yet.</p><p>For performance, author profiles now return a smaller set of extra fields (up to 20) to avoid bloated responses, and invalid items in the Outbox are skipped gracefully instead of causing errors.</p><p>Designed to Grow With You</p><p>This update also brings better mobile support for settings pages, improved documentation, and more robust error handling for things like missing or misformatted Outbox requests. And for developers, several filters and hooks have been updated or deprecated to make future work smoother and more predictable.</p><p>If you’ve been curious about joining the Fediverse or connecting your blog in a more structured way, now’s a great time to try it. Just activate the plugin and let the onboarding guide you through the rest.</p><p>Tried the new onboarding? Let us know how it worked for you and what you’d like to see improved.</p><p>Full Changelog</p><p>Added</p><p>ActivityPub embeds now support audios, videos, and up to 4 images.<br>Added a check to make sure we only attempt to embed activity objects, when processing fallback embeds.<br>Add setting to enable or disable how content is tailored for browsers and Fediverse services.<br>Adjusted the plugin’s default behavior based on the caching plugins installed.<br>A guided onboarding flow after plugin activation to help users make key setup decisions and understand Fediverse concepts.<br>Author profiles will cap the amount of extra fields they return to 20, to avoid response size errors in clients.<br>Fediverse Preview in the Editor now also supports video and audio attachments.<br>Guidance for configuring Surge to support ActivityPub caching.<br>Help tab section explaining ActivityPub capabilities on the users page.<br>Profile sections have been moved from the Welcome page to new Dashboard widgets for easier access.<br>The ActivityPub blog news feed to WordPress dashboard.<br>The Outbox now skips invalid items instead of trying to process them for output and encountering an error.</p><p>Changed</p><p>Batch processing jobs can now be scheduled with individual hooks.<br>Better error handling when other servers request Outbox items in the wrong format, and 404 pages now show correctly.<br>Fediverse Previews in the Block Editor now show media items, even if the post has not been published yet.<br>Hide interaction buttons in emails when the Classic Editor is used.<br>Improve compatibility with third-party caching plugins by sending a Vary header.<br>Much more comprehensive plugin documentation in the Help tab of ActivityPub Settings.<br>NodeInfo endpoint response now correctly formats localPosts values.<br>Reactions block heading now uses Core’s heading block with all its customization options.<br>Settings pages are now more mobile-friendly with more space and easier scrolling.<br>The number of images shared to the Fediverse can now be chosen on a per-post basis.<br>Updated default max attachment count to four, creating better-looking gallery grids for posts with 4 or more images.<br>Use a dedicated hook for the “Dismiss Welcome Page Welcome” link.<br>Use FEP-c180 schema for error responses.<br>Use Audio and Video type for Attachments, instead of the very generic Document type.</p><p>Deprecated</p><p>Deprecated rest_activitypub_outbox_query filter in favor of activitypub_rest_outbox_query. Deprecated activitypub_outbox_post action in favor of activitypub_rest_outbox_post.</p><p>Fixed</p><p>Broken avatars in the Reactions and Follower block are now replaced with the default avatar.<br>Email notifications for interactions with Brid.gy actors no longer trigger PHP Warnings.<br>Improved support for users from more Fediverse platforms in email notifications.<br>Improved the handling of Shares and Boosts.<br>Issue preventing “Receive reblogs (boosts)” setting from being properly saved.<br>Mention emails will no longer be sent for reply Activities.<br>Prevent accidental follower removal by resetting errors properly.<br>Properly remove retries schedules, with the invalidation of an Outbox-Item.<br>The blog profile can no longer be queried when the blog actor option is disabled.</p><p>Downloads</p><p>WordPress.org: <a href="https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/activitypub.5.9.0.zip" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/activitypub.5.9.0.zip"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">downloads.wordpress.org/plugin</span><span class="invisible">/activitypub.5.9.0.zip</span></a><br>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/5.9.0" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/5.9.0"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">github.com/Automattic/wordpres</span><span class="invisible">s-activitypub/releases/tag/5.9.0</span></a></p> <small class="notice" x-post-type-data="type=&#x27;Article&#x27; attributed_to=None"> Takahe has limited support for this type: <a href="https://activitypub.blog/2025/05/14/5-9-0-easier-onboarding-for-your-fediverse-experience/">See Original Article</a> </small>

<p>Fediverse projects are maturing and adoption of them is trending up. I’m excited for the further development of the underlying technologies as well as the apps being built to leverage those technologies into even more integrated, user-friendly experiences.</p><p>With any developing tech, small annoyances are found and ultimately patched or worked around. It’s to be expected that no user experience is ever perfect, even for matured ecosystems. Typically, some smaller annoyances are tolerated when balanced with the overall utility and usefulness of the tech.</p><p>One of the issues I’ve noticed (and I’m sure I’m not the first or only), is that when posts are relevant enough that the OP decides to cross-post into multiple communities, the comments and engagement stays with each community post leading to separate conversations.</p><p>The existance of separate conversations itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe you post a recipe for Pot Roast in a general cooking community and also a community that helps refine recipes to improve them. It may be that the two separate conversations make more sense as the nature of discourse is focused on two different aspects of the content posted. If they were combined, it would be more difficult to sift through chatter to get at the discussion you were looking for.</p><p>This concept is true for different communities as well as different instances. Maybe the Pot Roast recipe conversation generated on lemmy.carnivores is substantly different from the conversation at lemmy.vegan-curious and the existance of both is bolstered by the cultures and seneabilities of the different instance/communities. That could create usefull and/or thoughtful discourse that maybe wouldn’t have happened if everyone was mixed together and talking past each other.</p><p>However, there are plenty of informative posts attached to very similar communities on a given instance as well as posted to mirror-communities across separate instances. Each individual post is a separate entity and i find myself jumping in to different conversations of the same content to see what’s being said in each. In addition to general replies often asking the same questions across all of the posts, unique engagement is diffuse and not connecting.</p><p>I imagine that an OP would have trouble keeping up with all of these different interactions and likely defaulting to paying their attention to only one or two while the remaining posts are left to fend for themselves. Even if the OP stayed on top of them all, I assume they’d often have to answer the same questions multiple times.</p><p>_The question I pose is: _</p><p>What is the solution to myriad and diffuse conversations around cross-posts? Is there a way to handle this situation thru lemmy-ettiquette or does it require a technological solution?</p><p>Maybe we handle it thru culture and expectation. If the decided upon method was to post once and then link that post to other communities for exposure, maybe that funnels everyone into one post to interact (when that’s what OP wants).</p><p>Is there a software solution on the app developer level that combines like posts together? Is it a protocol level solution thats required? Maybe something that allows a single post to essentially ‘tag’ different communities for exposure, while only posting once? Can we associate posts to an individual user rather than associating the post to a community, so all replies come to the user post rather than in a community?</p><p>I don’t know what the solution looks like and I’m not savvy enough to understand the protocol/software side to know if any of my examples are realistic. I also don’t know if this is an issue for anyone else, or at least one that lemmy-ites actuallly care about enough to try and solve.</p><p>Does anyone know if work is being done to address this? Am I focusing on something that is simply not a priority? I welcome your thoughts.</p><p>…I tried to choose what I thought was the best place for this post, but I’m open to moving it if I was in error. (Ironically, something that might be easier if posts were handled differently). :)</p> <small class="notice" x-post-type-data="None"> Takahe has limited support for this type: <a href="https://lemmy.world/post/38541993">See Original Page</a> </small>