This blog runs WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin, so it’s also my account on the Fediverse. Some of you follow me at @jeremy@herve.bzh, and when I post here in WordPress, it reaches your timeline on Mastodon / GoToSocial / Misskey / Pleroma…That’s the publishing side, and it works well. The reading side is newer. The ActivityPub plugin has a Fediverse Reader inside wp-admin, but we’re still building it out. In practice, I’d been doing most of my reading elsewhere. When I first joined the Fediverse I set up a GoToSocial instance, and I’ve continued to use it to consume content, on my phone, in Tusky. The UX was just simpler.That setup works for me. It only works because I’m tech-savvy enough to keep a spare account on a GoToSocial instance, and juggle between 2 instances to read or write. That’s probably not a setup that will attract more people to the Fediverse. 🙂This past month, Automattic ran an internal experiment called Radical Speed Month. For the whole month, I got to pair with one other person in my timezone, pick a project that interests me, work on it, and ship it. I got to decide what to work on, how I wanted to work, how I wanted to communicate about it. This was a great opportunity to focus on one thing and one thing only, to avoid other distractions. Maybe most importantly, it was a chance to reflect on how we’ve been working in the past few years, and compare that with a focused effort in a much smaller team. When we resume regular work on Monday, one of the first things I’ll do is chat with my team, and figure out if there are things we can drop or change from our past team workflow and routine.For me, the point of that “radical month” wasn’t just about the projects, although there are some cool ones coming out! It was the chance about triggering some introspection, re-examining our processes: what would change about how we work, and what would we want to keep.I paired with @pfefferle. We already work on the same team, so I knew it’d be a good month. 🙂 We picked a project that fit the both of us. We turned the WordPress.com Reader into a place where you can now connect Bluesky (or any other ATProto platform), Mastodon (or any other Fediverse tool using the Mastodon API), and Fediverse accounts. You can now read, react, and post from one place. Three protocols, one Reader. We called the project Reader Everywhere.One of the pieces I’m proudest of is on the Fediverse side. @pfefferle was really the driver behind this part of the puzzle! The integration is built on top of the ActivityPub Client-to-Server API. As far as I know it’s the first product at this scale to be built on top of it. We’re hoping that by shipping and iterating on the client, we’ll help the standard grow. There’s a longer write-up of this on the ActivityPub blog: Your WordPress Site — From RSS Feed to Social Account.Here’s what we shipped, in a 90-second walk-through: This was also a good opportunity to get back to a full focus on coding. I moved into a leading role a while ago, and as one can expect, it involves some meetings, reviews, planning, discussions. That’s useful and important work, but I will say that it felt good to be back to building things for a month. Matthias and I would think about solutions, push code every day, review each other’s PRs, smooth out the rough edges, ship. I really enjoyed it!If you have a WordPress.com account, I would encourage you to check the Reader! I’d love to know what you think 🙂
