Posted on January 8, 2023

by  Mark Gardner

Replied to Yes to ActivityPub, but no to Friends by Shelley Powers (Burningbird)

I decided to disable the Friends plug-in when I realized it was inserting every new feed item as a new post in my database. This could easily become unmanageable. Considering you can use a feed reader to read weblogs AND Mastodon accounts, it just didn’t seem worth the database burden.

I’ve also been mess­ing with the Friends and ActivityPub plu­g­ins for WordPress on my blog, and I share Shelley’s con­cerns about the for­mer bloat­ing the data­base with feed items. You can con­trol this some­what by set­ting reten­tion val­ues in days or a num­ber of posts, but you have to go into each friend’s Feeds tab and do it manually–there’s no default setting.

After read­ing that post, I’m also con­sid­er­ing dis­abling Friends in favor of a feed read­er, espe­cial­ly because (as Shelley also not­ed) there are gaps when with favorites and com­ment con­ver­sa­tions bridg­ing between WordPress and Mastodon servers. Like her, I’m not keen on installing a single-​user Mastodon instance or oth­er fedi­verse serv­er that requires man­ag­ing an unfa­mil­iar pro­gram­ming language.

My ide­al is a per­son­al web­site where I write every­thing, includ­ing long-​form arti­cles, short sta­tus­es, and replies like these. Folks can then find me via a sin­gle iden­ti­fi­able address and then subscribe/​follow the entire fire­hose of con­tent or choose sub­sets accord­ing to post types, top­ics, or tags. They’d then be able to reply or react on my site or their favored plat­form, which my site would col­lect regard­less of ori­gin, with sub­se­quent replies and reac­tions get­ting pushed out to them. Oh, and it should work with both ActivityPub clients and servers, IndieWeb sites, and syndicate/​backfeed to oth­er social net­works either with or akin to the Bridgy ser­vice I men­tioned above.

Amen !