I have a static blog. Think something like a site generated with a static site generator (like Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, etc)
I’ve been thinking about making a separate backend for the blog with ActivityPub functionality to boost its discoverability.
Is there any tool that can assist me with this? I wanted to make sure before I embark on building something from scratch.
P. S. I am aware of WriteFreely, but I would prefer if the blog site remains a static site and decoupled from the ActivityPub stuff.
There are bots that take an RSS feed and post that to a Mastodon instance automatically.
I guess an standalone AP server that reads a RSS feed and exposes that as AP might be cool. Bonus points for making it embeddable in a static site for comments.
Otherwise WordPress has a pretty well working activity pub plugin as well.
I think what you’re looking for is brid.gy, it’s an indieweb<->whatever gateway, where whatever includes ActivityPub. https://brid.gy/
So if you support webmentions on your static site (by using an endpoint outside of your static site which you query to update comments before building the site) you can interface with ActivityPub.
And supporting webmention is definitely two orders of magnitude less complex than supporting ActivityPub.
Not to take away from brid.gy and other more high tech solutions, which I should look into and maybe switch to, but I have a Jekyll site (kind of a mix between a one-person wiki and a blog), and what I do is that I just post excerpts from my posts and add a link to the post. I think this is great because Fedi posts aren’t editable but Jekyll posts are, and my writing is typo-ridden and sloppy so I really appreciate being able to fix things.
It still sucks when I make a typo in the excerpt.
IMHO the best and most supported way is just to post a message whenever you make a post. For example I toot on my mastodon whenever I release a new post. People then that share and reply to that toot.
This is done via simple automation that watches my feed and hits the mastodon API.
For actual blog subscribers I like to stick with regular RSS + WebSub, I don’t see much advantage to ActivityPub integration here.
@kevincox @cyclohexane
Yeah, this is the way, at least for now.
This Hugo plugin, is the only one I’ve seen https://git.jlel.se/jlelse/hugo-activitystreams
I commented on your post from Mastodon, but it looks like it is not appearing here: https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/107896980176809142
Paging Drs @nutomic & @dessalines
More federation issues?
I also cant follow @something@lemmy.ml from mastodon, it only says follow pending. stuck there for few months
you can’t follow people, only communities.
i was trying to follow c/privacy and c/linux
c/privacy should work, but there is a user named linux that confuses mastodon search, so you can’t sub to the community of the same name. presumably this will get fixed in the future.
It’s also worth noting that communities “boost” all of the comments in a sub, so its very “noisy” to sub to a community. that will also presumably get fixed eventually.