ActivityPub is cool. It’s the protocol that enables the Fediverse, a standard way to better interconnect between different online platforms. It does for social media/blogging what protocols do for email and the web in general. Mastodon is built on ActivityPub, for example. The Fediverse is kind of like the Blogosphere 2.0.
At WordPress, I had turned on the “Enter the Fediverse” feature. It automatically cross-posts my full blog posts with WordPress tags to Mastodon. And it automatically created a “user-profile” just for my blog itself, Jason Journals. That’s convenient. It's promotional too, netting me a few new blog followers from Mastodon directly.
But I turned off the feature; my blog has exited the Fediverse. Yet I'm still enjoying Mastodon and sharing my posts there. So why turn off the feature? A few reasons.
One
My blog posts can already auto-share to Mastodon via the WordPress marketing connection. But it’s via my personal Mastodon profile - me! This is simpler to me and is personal; I myself am sharing my post (a link to it, not the entire post itself). Whereas with the WordPress "Enter the Fediverse" feature, it’s like a bot for my blog shared the whole post. But my blog is not a bot or brand or company that posts online: it’s me, or an extension of me. I prefer the distinction or separation of my blog being on my website (wherever it's hosted) and myself being on Mastodon. So to follow my blog, use the WordPress Reader, RSS, or bookmark my website. To follow me, use Mastodon.
Post where you host. Share where you care.
Two
The Fediverse feature shares the entire post, so one can read and comment solely on Mastodon without visiting my blog. That has pros/cons. From what I could tell, Mastodon comments appear on the WordPress blog post, but WordPress comments did not appear on Mastodon. That one-way bridge seems a bit disjointed and complex. It would be harder to track who said what and where. And syndicating the entire post to yet another place (beyond email and RSS) means fewer readers are viewing the canonical source on my blog's website.
Three
With the feature enabled, my blog posts get shared to Mastodon twice: once by me, once by my blog itself. That feels like spam and is redundant.
Four
As seen above, the extra feature adds more complexity overall. Yuck.
Five
I have another hand-coded static blog site hosted outside of WordPress. My HTML site does not have an "Enter the Fediverse" option. So keeping the feature off at WordPress reflects the same limited feature-set of my HTML site. That feature parity brings consistency to my workflow now and, potentially, in the future if/when I drop WordPress in favor of my HTML site.
Now I not only turned off the Fediverse feature, I've also disconnected Mastodon from the WordPress marketing connection that only shared a link and snippet for my blog post. This, too, is unavailable for my HTML site. Disconnecting it means keeping feature-parity. Instead, I share my blog posts to Mastodon the simple old-school way: copy/paste the URL in a new "toot."
Summary
So there are a few reasons why my WordPress blog left the Fediverse. I'm still actively surfing the Fedi. I'm a netizen and, uh, a fedizen. Look for me and my blog posts on Mastodon and WordPress all on the web.