As a bit of an experiment in decentralised social media, I’ve made some updates to my site so that I can use it for Mastodon-style text posts and Pixelfed-style photo posts. The idea was to find a way to ‘own’ my own data, especially photos.

In a practical sense, that means using the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, creating templates for photo posts and the author archive, and redesigning the homepage to accommodate the new content.

I decided to use post categories to differentiate between regular blog posts (like this one), photo posts for resharing on Pixelfed, and short posts for resharing on Mastodon. I know there are better ways to do that, but I prefer to have the categorisation so that I can split the different post types out on the home page. It also makes it easier to have a category archive for photos, with its own distinct layout.

Great start, but limitations

Ideally, I would have gone all the way and migrated my Mastodon account over to WordPress, but I hit a blocker on that. According to the documentation in the ActivityPub plugin, I first need to add my Mastodon account as an ‘Account Alias’ in my WordPress user profile settings. For reasons that I am sure are specific to my database and WordPress installation, this alias doesn’t stick, and the rest of the migration procedure is impossible.

Fingers crossed this will be resolved at some point, but for now, I’m happy with my site being the source of posts, which I can then share further via Mastodon and Pixelfed. Not to mention that the site itself can be followed.

It is quite amazing to think that this post, written in WordPress, will also exist as a social media post in its own right, thanks to ActivityPub!