Alex Kirk

Thanks for bringing this up, I believe this exposes one more angle of how currently the blog user is implemented in the ActivityPub plugin (fyi @pfefferle).

As you noticed, this is currently not possible. Actually, the ActivityPub plugin would need to extend the Enable Mastodon Plugin to allow this. I filed https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/issues/800 to suggest that.

I think it’d be helpful to understand in what ways you’d like to manage the blog user and what behavior you’d expect? This is how I see it but I’d be curious for your view:

In the timeline, I suppose you’d see all posts of your blog (this is already the case when you log in with any blog user).

You could view your blog followers, but you could not follow anybody.

There are profile editing capabilities coming (see https://github.com/akirk/enable-mastodon-apps/pull/157), so this could also allow editing the blog user. I think it’s worth a discussion that through this you could accidentally rename your blog when you only wanted to rename your blog profile.

I currently don’t see how you could reply via ActivityPub (which I think is one of the motivations to actually create a real blog user?), I am not sure how to prevent this except through generating an error message.

I am marking this as “not a support question” / “resolved” since this is ActivityPub plugin territory.

Indeed, sorry about that! I’ll remove that again, it looks like this was a brief effort at CloudFest that didn’t go anywhere. I intend to release it in a new version tomorrow.

In the course of implementing https://github.com/akirk/friends/pull/312, I also fixed a bug that might also manifest in what you are experiencing. I have released 2.9.2 some days ago with that bugfix, could you take a look if you still experience it? Thanks!

Thank you for the great review! You might be also interested in the Enable Mastodon Apps plugin which allow you to use (mobile) Mastodon apps to interact with your setup.

Hi, not sure what’s going on here. Are you observing this with a specific feed?

Hi, after mulling a bit about the situation, I think the best approach would be to actually separate the ActivityPub boosting from the reblogging. Before this was in one which required a unified operation. WIth https://github.com/akirk/friends/pull/309 I’ve split this, so that the “Reblog” will take you to the editor where you can deliberately modify and publish:

You’re right, this is what it’s supposed to do. Typically, what you’re seeing is caused by plugins interferring with each other.

One way to find out is to install the Health Check & Troubleshoot plugin so that you can temporarily deactivate other plugins easily. See this section in the www.ads-software.com support handbook: Troubleshooting with a specific plugin.

You’ll then get a “Troubleshoot” link in your plugins section where you can see what it’s like if you only had this single plugin “Friends” installed:

You can then check your /friends/ page to verify that you can see other subscriptions, and then one-by-one activate other plugins to see at which point the bad interaction starts. Would be great if you could report your findings back here, maybe I can find a solution to resolve the bad interaction from the “Friends side.”

I am seeing the same behavior on the Tusky app. Actually also logging in is impossible inside the app, but it’s a bug in Tusky (you need to click the three dots on the top right and click “login with browser”. If you use the Tusky nightly app, it works (both logging in and posting). Too bad they haven’t released the bugfix since December 2023 ??

• This reply was modified 8 months ago by Alex Kirk.

Good point! The information is in the post’s metadata, so it could be displayed by the Friends plugin! I’ll add it in the next release.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 1 week ago by Alex Kirk.

Well, fediverse posts also don’t have titles. Thus the posts the Friends plugin creates are of the type status which don’t have a title.

Oh no, thanks for flagging and sorry about that! I’ve fixed this in 2.9.1, released just now.

Sorry about this, I’ve fixed this in version 2.8.7, released just now. It was a very simply typo.

Thank you for updating your report that were able to identify and fix the problem yourself. Highly appreciated!

Hi! Thanks for sharing this usecase! Do you have a Github account and would be willing to share this at https://github.com/akirk/friends/issues ? If not I am happy to relay this there to track it.

I don’t have immediate plans to implement this but I see some obstacles where I’d be curious how to solve them. For example: who should choose which feeds to be followed per user? i.e. what if one user adds an RSS feed to a person they follow and another one doesn’t want that?

Alright, it turns out it was a combination of two things: On the one side a bug on Friends that I fixed with the newly released 2.8.4. Additionally Manton of micro.blog fixed a detail in their implementation of webfinger. Thanks, Manton!

Could you please try again and tell me if it works now with the new version? Thanks!