---
title: 'ActivityPub'
date: '2022-11-06T11:37:10-05:00'
permalink: /activitypub/
tags:
    - reflecting
---

Some time back, I got [sooooooper-interested](/connections/) in the work of [IndieWeb](https://indieweb.org) and what it might do for connecting blog spaces and social media spaces. Things have quieted down since then, though I’ve been syndicating most posts to the bird site and gathering [Webmentions](https://webmention.net) from there.

A few months back, seeing the handwriting on the wall for the bird site, I got a bit more active on Mastodon, but didn’t cut all ties until this week. So now I’m working to move my syndication links and start pulling Webmentions from my new-ish social media home.

Mastodon uses the [ActivityPub](https://activitypub.rocks) protocol to allow for the building of federated networks. Right now, that’s mostly being talked about in the context of federation within Mastodon: you can be on mstdn.social and I can be on scholar.social and yet we can still follow one another. However, the implications of ActivityPub are much farther-reaching than that: in theory, at least, any platform adhering to the ActivityPub standard could communicate with any other.

In order to maximize that possibility, the [new network](https://hcommons.social) my colleagues and I have been standing up is running the [Hometown](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki) fork of Mastodon; Hometown not only allows its instances to focus more deeply on writing (by allowing longer than 500-character posts) but also provides for connections to more kinds of ActivityPub-based content.

So I’ve fiddled with my settings here at [kfitz.info](https://kfitz.info) and am testing to see what syndication ends up looking like in this new environment.

*Edited to add*: That wound up looking like a link to this post, rather than a truly syndicated post. So more fiddling ahead.