I added ActivityPub functionality to The New Leaf Journal. This means that it is now possible to follow The New Leaf Journal from a Mastodon account thanks to the ActivityPub WordPress plugin. It should also be possible to follow The New Leaf Journal from other ActivityPub clients such as Soapbox, Pleroma, Misskey, Pixelfed, or Hubzilla, but I have only confirmed it through Mastodon. You can find our account by searching for: @newleafjournal OR https://thenewleafjournal.com/@newleafjournal using your preferred account and front-end.
Note that individual authors do not have New Leaf Journal profiles. I decided to only enable a single profile for the site itself. It is worth noting that this was not possible to configure in earlier versions of the plugin.
If you follow our ActivityPub account, all of our newest posts will appear in your timeline as they are published. I am not sending our full articles, so you should see the title, post excerpt, permalink, and tags (represented as hashtags). Please note that you will only see posts that are published after you start following The New Leaf Journal. Thus, when you first follow us, you will not see any posts on our ActivityPub profile until we publish at least one post after you become a follower.
Note that I may modify how our posts display over time as I test different configurations. However, my plan is to always have a link to the post with at most a short description.
You can interact with our posts and boost them to your followers just like any other Mastodon post. I am not sure how comments will be represented, but if they come back to us, I will be amenable to publishing them as regular post comments at my discretion.
I am always looking for new ways to help people follow our articles. It is for this reason that I maintain a page with information about how to use our RSS, ATOM, and JSON feeds and added a TWTXT feed to our site.
I will also take this as an opportunity to make note of our sister project, The Emu Café Social. The Emu Café Social is built around short-form publishing. It complements The New Leaf Journal, which is designed for long-form articles. In the case of The Emu Café Social, every author profile is an ActivityPub profile. Thus, you can follow my Emu Café Social account at @naferrell.
I also invite readers to follow my other ActivityPub presences:
- @nafnlj (Mastodon)
- @nafnlj (Minds – May not work from all instances)
- https://mostr.pub/users/71650bd2a9dca5f39fc51b9623c37d735900c4fbfe9f8cb78256d8a99f58522c (NOSTR via MOSTR bridge, may not work with all instances. You can also follow my regular NOSTR profile with a NOSTR client.)
I also use these accounts to some extent or another, although the main places to read my writing are The New Leaf Journal and The Emu Café Social. I hope to welcome some new followers to The New Leaf Journal’s new ActivityPub presence. I will update the post if I discover any other interesting ways that people can use our new ActivityPub functionality to follow and interact with The New Leaf Journal.