fediverse

This release puts speed and control right at your fingertips. Whether you’re jumping between settings, syncing followers, or handling quotes in real time, version 7.6.0 makes managing your Fediverse presence faster and more intuitive than ever.

Navigate in a Flash

Say hello to the quickest way to move around your ActivityPub settings.

In preparation for WordPress 6.9, which brings the Command Palette (Cmd/Ctrl + K) to the entire wp-admin, the plugin now adds its own commands, giving you instant, keyboard-driven access to your workflows anywhere in WordPress.

Type “ActivityPub” and you’ll see context-aware commands that adapt to your site setup and user role. Whether you’re managing a blog actor or a user actor, you can open followers and following lists, check blocked actors, jump straight to your settings, or even search and edit extra fields — all without ever leaving the Command Palette.

Every command includes the ActivityPub icon for easy recognition. Just press Cmd + K or Ctrl + K, start typing, and go — it’s the smoothest way yet to pilot your Fediverse setup.

Stay in Sync Across the Fediverse

Your follower lists now stay accurate wherever you connect.
With support for Follower Synchronization (FEP-8fcf), the plugin automatically keeps your followers collection in step with other servers — even when things drift out of sync.

If differences appear, background tasks quietly reconcile them, keeping your lists clean and consistent. The result is a smoother, more reliable experience across the entire Fediverse — no manual fixes required.

Speed When It Counts

Quoted posts and follow confirmations now move at the speed of conversation.

A new immediate Accept dispatch system sends responses as soon as they’re created, instead of waiting for the next scheduled queue.

That means faster follow confirmations and quicker quote acknowledgments, making interactions feel more natural across the Fediverse. Behind the scenes, those Accept messages go straight to the right inboxes — including mentioned and replied-to users — while a scheduled backup ensures full compatibility with slower servers.

It’s a smart balance between speed and reliability, helping your posts and follows appear almost instantly.

Privacy, Your Way

Want to keep your social graph private? You can now hide your followers and following lists from public view while keeping all relationships intact. Your followers still follow — they’re just hidden when you prefer a little more privacy.

Full Changelog

Added

Add bidirectional transforms between reply and embed blocks for improved user experience.
Add Command Palette integration for quick navigation to ActivityPub admin pages
Added a new ap_object post type and taxonomies for storing and managing incoming ActivityPub objects, with updated handlers
Added a privacy option to hide followers and following lists from profiles while keeping follow relationships intact.
Added a scheduled task and setting to automatically purge old inbox items, helping maintain site performance and storage control.
Added fallback to trigger create handling when updates fail for missing posts or comments, ensuring objects are properly created.
Added immediate dispatch for Accept activities to speed up quoted posts while keeping scheduled processing for compatibility with other instances.
Added new configuration options to better manage traffic spikes when federating posts, allowing finer control over retry limits, delays, and batch pauses.
Added support for FEP-8fcf follower synchronization, improving data consistency across servers with new sync headers, digest checks, and reconciliation tasks.
Add LiteSpeed Cache integration to prevent ActivityPub JSON responses from being cached incorrectly. Includes automatic .htaccess rules and Site Health check to ensure proper configuration.
Add quote visibility setting for Classic Editor users.
Add unified attachment processor for handling ActivityPub media imports from both remote URLs and local files, with automatic media block generation and Classic Editor support.
Integrate Federated Reply block with WP.com Reader’s post share functionality, allowing users to reply to ActivityPub posts directly from the Reader.

Changed

Added support for FEP-3b86 Activity Intents, extending WebFinger and REST interactions with new Create and Follow intent links.
Added support for the latest NodeInfo (FEP-0151), with improved federation details, staff info, and software metadata for better ActivityPub compliance.
Extended inbox support for undoing Like, Create, and Announce activities, with refactored undo logic and improved activity persistence.
Improved Classic Editor integration by adding better media handling and full test coverage for attachments, permissions, and metadata.
Improved delivery of public and follower activities by expanding local recipient handling to include all ActivityPub-capable users and follower collections.
Improved inbox performance by batching and deduplicating activities, reducing redundant processing and improving handling during high activity periods.
Improved REST API responses with smarter context handling.
Improved REST collection pagination by using explicit total item counts for more accurate results.
Moved default visibility handling from the server to the editor UI, ensuring consistent and flexible ActivityPub visibility settings across both block and classic editors.
Prevented self-announcing by ignoring announces from the blog actor, while still processing announces from user and external actors.
Refactored activity handling to support multiple recipients per activity, allowing posts and interactions to be linked to several local users at once.
Refactored avatar handling into a new system that stores and manages avatars per remote actor, improving reliability and preparing for future caching support.
Refactored the inbox system to use a shared inbox, storing activities once with multiple recipients for improved efficiency and reduced duplication.
Reorganize integration loader and move Stream integration into dedicated folder structure.
Reply posts: do not display post title before @mentions in posts that are replies to somebody else
Simplified configuration by always enabling the shared inbox and removing its separate setting, UI field, and related logic.
Simplified inbox storage settings, allowing certain activities (like deletes) to be skipped to reduce unnecessary database use.
Simplify follow() API return types to int|WP_Error for better predictability.
Updated inbox handling to support multiple users receiving the same activity and improve overall data consistency.
Updated mailer hooks to send notifications only when activities are successfully handled, preventing emails for failed events.
Update plugin short description to be more user-friendly.

Fixed

Reply block now properly validates ActivityPub URLs before setting inReplyTo field
Added a safeguard to ensure the plugin works correctly even when no post types are selected.
Added a safety check to prevent errors when resolving comment author hostnames without a valid IP address.
Fixed activity processing to handle QuoteRequest and other edge cases more reliably.
Fixed an issue with post content templates to ensure the correct fallback is always applied.
Fixed fatal error when transformer Factory receives WP_Error objects.
Fixed HTML entity encoding in extra field names when displayed on ActivityPub platforms
Fixed typo in example, improve quoting description.
Fix Following table error message to display user input instead of empty string when webfinger lookup fails.
Fix infinite recursion when storing remote actors with mentions in their bios
Fix local inbox delivery to use internal REST API instead of HTTP, enabling local follows and proper boost counting.
Fix logic errors in Move handler: remove redundant assignment and fix variable name collision.
Fix public key retrieval for GoToSocial profiles with path-based key URLs.
Improved actor resolution by prioritizing blog actor detection before remote actor checks and refining home page URL handling.
Improved handling of empty fields for better compatibility with Pixelfed and more consistent fallback behavior across actor names, URLs, and related data.
Improved hashtag encoding for consistent formatting.
Improved Jetpack integration by initializing it during the WordPress startup process.
Refactored Mastodon import handling to use consistent array-based data, improving reliability and compatibility across all import scenarios.

Downloads

WordPress.org: activitypub.7.6.0.zip
GitHub: tag/7.6.0
WordPress.org: activitypub.7.6.1.zip
GitHub: tag/7.6.1

Thanks, Crew!

Big thanks to everyone who contributed code, feedback, and testing to make this release possible. You keep ActivityPub evolving with every version.

Version 7.6.0 is now live — update today and enjoy lightning-fast navigation, smarter synchronization, and smoother federation! ❤️

ALT

ALT

Bridging the fediverse

A couple of years ago I started making an ActivityPub server to make it easy for me to access the fediverse over nntp.

One of the challenges - at least in the way I built my server - is that every server it talks to speaks a slightly different dialect of ActivityPub. Mastodon generates JSON with one structure, Pleroma might include a field that others don't, GotoSocial might leave one out, etc. etc.

Around a month ago Klaus lured me into trying the Bluesky↔Fediverse bridge Bridgy Fed. TechCrunch had a nice introduction on how to bridge your account, which I followed.

And then I had to adjust my ActivityPub server to the quirks of the bridge. Usually it's stuff like "this field I have only ever encountered having a string as the value, but now it's a dictionary, or a list", and it takes me a while to handle all of them.

Had I implemented the spec rather than just building something and trying it against other servers, I would probably have fewer of these surprises. But, hey, I was (and still am) building Illuminant for fun, so I was happy to implement just enough to interact.

One thing that in hindsight is sort of expected and also sort of a downer is that boosts and parent blueskidoos only show up if the sender's account is bridged. So rather than being a useful expanse of the fediverse, this bridging turns out - to me, anyway - to be more of a curiosity than anything else.

ALT