ActivityPub for WordPress and fediverse:creator

Introduction

I share all of my New Leaf Journal articles to my Mastodon account (@nafnlj@linuxrocks.online) using a WordPress plugin called Share on Mastodon. See what my most recent post (before this one) looks like on my Mastodon profile:

The fediverse:creator Tag

Note the “More from Nicholas A. Ferrell” at the bottom of my social re-post. Mastodon has a feature called author attribution. Properly configuring author attribution can add a link to an article/post author’s profile to link cards for his or her articles from around the web. Or as Join Mastodon puts it:

If you are an author or creator, your Mastodon account can be credited and linked when your articles, blog posts, and other works are shared on Mastodon and across the fediverse. This is possible by including a fediverse:creator tag in the HTML code of the websites where your work is published.

In short, two things must happen for author attribution to work. The website where the author posts articles and blogs must include a “fediverse:creator” tag with the author’s Mastodon profile. Second, the author must add that website’s domain to a field on his Mastodon profile for sites that are allowed to credit him or her (this prevents false attributions).

Now return to the screenshot of the Mastodon post I just shared and look closely at the author attribution tag and compare it to my profile picture and name for my Mastodon account at the top. My Mastodon account image is our Newsletter mascot and I use N.A. Ferrell as my name for that account. Yet the author attribution tag is my profile image for this site and The Emu Café Social and the name is “Nicholas A. Ferrell” instead of “N.A. Ferrell.” What gives?

Setting fediverse:creator as WordPress Profile Using ActivityPub for WordPress

While I could have set an author attribution tag for my Mastodon account, I decided to set it to my profile on The Emu Café Social. For those not in the know, The Emu Café Social is my short-form publishing site. I consider it to be a sister site to The New Leaf Journal (do check it out if you enjoy what I do here). One reason I added “Social” to the site name is because The Emu Café Social has some social publishing features. The one we will look at here comes from a WordPress plugin called ActivityPub for WordPress.

I previously wrote about ActivityPub for WordPress in ActivityPub for WordPress and The NLJ back in 2023. The plugin turns a WordPress website into an ActivityPub server, meaning that the site, or individual author profiles, can be followed from Mastodon and similar ActivityPub-powered social media servers as if they were normal accounts. I no longer use it on The New Leaf Journal, but it is a key part of The Emu Café Social.¹ If you happen to use Mastodon or something similar, you can follow my ECS profile at @naferrell@social.emucafe.org or by searching for my profile URL (https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/),

Because ECS is an ActivityPub server and my author account is functionally a profile, I was curious whether I could set it up as the author attribution account for my New Leaf Journal articles.² As you can see from the screenshot, I was successful. I present the steps I undertook below.

First, I had to add an fediverse:creator tag to The New Leaf Journal site header. While I could do this manually, I decided to turn to a simple plugin called Simple fediverse:creator. In addition to not wanting to fiddle with our header manually, I also wanted to make sure that the fediverse:creator tag I was setting up would only be applied to my articles (in case Victor or someone else publishes again). Simple fediverse:creator promised author-specific tags, so I decided to give it a go.

After installing Simple fediverse:creator, I needed to enable authors, meaning that each author could set their own tag:

If an Administrator turns on the “Enable Authors’ fediverse:creator” option on the General Settings page (Admin Dashboard > Settings>General Settings), a field labeled “fediverse:creator” will be added to users’ profile pages (under “contact info”).

For whatever reason, the field is placed on the General Settings page for WordPress (that would not be my first choice for location). Single author sites have the option of setting the author account here. However, for multi-author sites (NLJ has been a de facto single author site since late 2024, but it is still de jure multi-author) sites, the admin must type “YES” (no quotation marks) in the Enable Author’s fediverse:creator box. Enabling authors adds a new field to the author settings page in WordPress.

For me, the box appeared under website and above GitHub user name (I use the IndieWeb plugin, which adds some additional default social options). Following its format, I set my profile to naferrell@social.emucafe.org. Were I using my current Mastodon account, I would have entered nafnlj@linuxrocks.online.

I had tried this once before and was disappointed to find that the author attribution tag was not being applied to my New Leaf Journal posts. I gave up in that instance, but on this occasion I took a moment to think and realized that I had missed a step. That step occurs not on The New Leaf Journal, but instead on The Emu Café Social. I navigated to the main ActivityPub settings page on The Emu Café Social and scrolled down until I found the “Attribution Domains” field:

As you can see, the two domains that are allowed to credit me are social.emucafe.org and thenewleafjournal.com. The former was set by the ActivityPub plugin by default. In order to attribute my New Leaf Journal links to my Emu Café Social profile, I had to add thenewleafjournal.com as an authorized attribution domain.

As you can see in the first screenshot in my article, this technique worked. Thus, if you have a WordPress website with the ActivityPub plugin, you can attribute your posts from another WordPress website to the WordPress-ActivityPub site account. This may be useful for single-author sites with the ActivityPub plugin or sites with an ECS-like set-up where every author is a separate profile. While this article demonstrated configuring this with two WordPress sites, author attribution can be configured with other blogging/writings set-ups.

Footnotes

1. The ActivityPub “inbox” stopped working on New Leaf Journal. After being unable to successfully troubleshoot the problem myself, I decided to drop ActivityPub from NLJ. While ActivityPub is essential for what I am doing on ECS, it was just a nice-to-have feature on NLJ and I found that very few people were actually following the NLJ account. For NLJ, simply sharing my articles to my Mastodon account is probably more “effective” without adding all the traffic that comes with ActivityPub.

2. I had two practical reasons for doing this. Firstly, because my ECS fediverse:creator tag is used with ECS, using the same one with NLJ ensures that both my ECS and NLJ links on the fediverse have the same author attribution tag. Secondly, because I suspect more people see NLJ links than ECS links, having my ECS account as the creator tag on NLJ posts could help make people aware of ECS.