I’ve just made my blog available on the Fediverse, at least partially.
Yesterday while browsing Hacker News, I saw Carl Schwan’s post Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon(m) about him replacing Disqus with replies posted at Mastodon. Just on Monday I was thinking, why can’t blogs participate in Fediverse? I tried to use WriteFreely as a replacement for Pelican, only to find it very limited, so I thought I might write a gateway to expose the Atom feed using ActivityPub. Turns out, someone already did that: Bridgy, a service connecting websites to Twitter, Mastodon and other social media, also has a Fediverse counterpart, Fed.brid.gy — just what I was looking for!
I won’t go deeply into the details, but just outline issues I had to deal with:
- Bridgy relies on microformats. While I had some microformats and Schema.org microdata already at both blog and the homepage, they were not sufficiently good for Bridgy to use.
- Webmention: I had to set up https://webmention.io to act as Webmention host for me.
- I ran into an issue with Mastodon being more picky about signatures — which the author Ryan Barrett promptly fixed.
The end result is not fully working yet, since posts don’t appear yet, but I can be found and followed as @shadura.me@shadura.me.
As a bonus I enabled IndieAuth at my website, so I can log into compatible services with just the URL of my website.