Inspired by @Edent I am trying to making this blog part of the fediverse – meaning posts would be viewable on mastodon etc and you could follow it like you follow @tomstafford@mastodon.online.
To do this is installed the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, which should have worked out of the box, but – possibly because the blogs is installed at /notes – did not. I checked the plugin status at wp-admin/site-health.php (thanks @abeorch@fosstodon.org for suggesting), and it seemed fine, which means I had some set up problem.
For ActivityPub to work you need a file which is root_domain/.well-known/webfinger (thanks @petrichor) for making this clear to me).
This file needs to have well formed content (which you can check with webfinger.net). I added the file using ftp (and chatGPT for prompting – something it did really well, given this is a niche technical topic).
Now I ran out of things to check and try and fix – the blog *should* have an account on the fediverse, but it (currently) isn’t visible on mastodon. @abeorch reports he can see it from Frendica, but not mastodon (and his follow shows up on the blog dashboard), so either it is some kind of setting is malformed in a way that offends mastodon-specifically, or there is some delay in federation (it has been less than 12 hours so far).
By publishing this blog post I keep a note of my progress so far, and will update when/if I make some progress. Feel free to contact me with suggestions!
Update 2024-09-18: Well, I got it working. It turns out my webfinger file was malformed. I copied the format of the one for the PsyArxiv blog and now it works – this blog is visible from mastodon
In retrospect, I think the ActivityPub plugin did everything right *except* put the webfinger file in the root domain (not the /notes domain where the blog is hosted). If I had just copied across the webfinger file made by ActivityPub to the correct location I suspect it would have worked immediately.
Anyway – like, comment and subscribe, as they say