How to configure the mastodon account used by this plugin

Hi there!

The plugin doesn’t create any Mastodon account, but Fediverse users using the Mastodon platform will indeed see a representation of your site’s accounts when searching for an account’s handle in their Fediverse client of choice.

Let’s look at an example:

• My personal site is jeremy.hu. I’m an author on the site, and you can find all my posts and information about me on my author archive page at https://jeremy.hu/author/jeremy/
• The information displayed on that archive page comes from data (a display name, a biography) I added to my profile under Users > Profile in my WordPress dashboard.
• I use the ActivityPub plugin on this site and have enabled Author accounts in the plugin’s settings.
• As a result, the author I mentioned earlier can be found on the Fediverse. If you were to look for my author archive page in your Mastodon instance, you would find that author:

• Of course, on the Fediverse people are more used to look you up via a handle, not a URL, so you can also search for @[email protected]:

• The information displayed there (and on the profile page that appears if I click on the name) all comes from the user’s profile page, under Users > Profile.
• In my ActivityPub plugin settings, I also enabled a blog-wide account, that will push all posts from my blog, regardless of the author:

• That means that one can now also search for @[email protected] in their Fediverse client.
• The information displayed there cannot come from a user profile, since it’s a blog-wide account. As a result, the blog-wide account biography, name, and profile pictures are picked from the site’s general settings just like you mentioned.
  • The account’s name and description come from the site title and tagline, as set under Settings > General
  • The account’s profile picture and header image come from the site’s identity settings, as set under Appearance > Customize.

Changes to the WordPress site’s details above will not reflect on Mastodon straight away.

That’s a good point. Each Fediverse instance does indeed cache the data they fetch about each Fediverse account, to improve performance. But in practice, that means that sometimes information can be outdated until the cache eventually gets cleared.

Hopefully this all clarifies things a bit! ??

Question: How did you arrange that https://jeremy.hu/@jeremy redirects to https://jeremy.hu/author/jeremy/ ? Manually, in htaccess, or does it come from ActivityPub?

This works for every user account out of the box.

https://notiz.blog/@pfefferle => https://notiz.blog/author/matthias-pfefferle/

Not with my two instances, i’m redirected when I request the blog profile-id – but it might have to do with this?

It could if your blogs are in a subfolder and you want to redirect the root @-url.

This should work: https://example.com/blog/@user => https://example.com/blog/author/user

For this: https://example.com/@user => https://example.com/blog/author/user you need to have a custom rewrite rule.

Now i look further into it, might it have to do with the blog wide accounts? Those redirect to the frontpage, but when I use a @non_existing_handle i get a json telling me it doesn’t exist.{"code":"activitypub_user_not_found","message":"Gebruiker niet gevonden","data":{"status":404}}

When I query https://domain.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:[email protected], it returns:

subject "acct:[email protected]"
aliases
0 "https://domain.com/@blog_wide"
links
0
rel "self"
type "application/activity+json"
href "https://domain.com/@blog_wide"
1
rel "https://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page"
type "text/html"
href "https://domain.com/@blog_wide"

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by eiland.

Yes, the @-urls are only virutal URLs and redirect to the matching WordPress internal (profile-)URLs. That means @user redirects to the author page and @blog to the home page.

Ah! My homepage is set up differently. I was looking for a way to have @blog redirect to the user which posts the site wide updates…
Maybe I should just go for pluginauthor and not use the blog functionality…

The blog can’t always be matched with an author, only if you have a single author blog, that’s why it redirects to the home page.

sorry for hijacking the thread, but what happens when I check both “authors” and “blog”? Are posts send for two separate handles?

Ah, update, I see that the blog is boosting the author’s post, nice!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by eiland.

yes, to avoid duplicate content and to not having too much redundancy, we decided that this might be the most elegant solution ??