Solution to webfinger endpoint not reachable

I’ve been trying the ActivityPub today but ran into an issue, Mastodon would not find my profile or my posts. So I took some time to figure out what was going on, since the Diagnostics page told me that the webfinger endpoint was not reachable.

In the end I found this thread right here and it all clicked (and worked). So I’m posting all my findings on this thread in hopes it help more people.

• The webfinger protocol seems to not be a requirement for ActivityPub but for Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.
• The webfinger address is acessible via the yourdomain.com/.well-known/webfinger[…] URL.
• The ActivityPub plugin automatically creates this virtual redirect using WordPress’ permalinks, so you don’t need to have a .well-known folder in your web hosting space.
• Some hosts do create this folder in order to issue Let’s Encrypt certificates. That should not interfere with the ActivityPub plugin.
• Some hosts, however, do block access to the .well-known folder. It was my case: my server was set up to block any and all accesses to it.
• Since the server is running Nginx, I used the solution published on the above thread, which was to add a specific configuration to Nginx in order to allow the URL to be publicly accessed. After that it immediately worked.
• If your server runs Apache you would add some other configuration to the .htaccess file.
• The problem is: some hosts may still block this URL even if you add this configuration to your .htaccess file or Nginx config file. So, depending on your host, you may or may not be able to fix the issue.

Hope that helps!