Subscribe to this blog via … ActivityPub

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I can make it easier for people to follow this blog.

I usually post a link to any new blog post on my social media accounts, but it’s very easy for people to miss a single social media message amongst the torrent of a typical timeline.

Subscribe via RSS (and other) feeds

Obviously I have my RSS and Atom (and even JSON) feeds set up, and while I don’t know exactly how many subscribers I have (or indeed who they are) the feed readers bots that declare the number of subscribers in their user agent string seems to suggest I have somewhere between 100–200 subscribers to my feeds for this blog (although there are many feed bots that don’t provide this information).

Recently I “borrowed” (read: “stole shamelessly”) some ideas from James’ latest invention Subscribe Openly which will show buttons for all the common feed readers, enabling users to just click a button and—in some cases with just that single click—add my RSS feed to their feed reader.

Subscribe via email

Some time ago I also set up the ability to subscribe to my blog via email - or ‘Just like Substack, but without the Nazis’ as I branded it.

This currently uses an out-of-the-box MailChimp integration that polls my RSS feed every day—if it finds a new blog post—at 11pm UK time it generates an email version of the entire post and emails it out to everyone who has subscribed.

This is currently used by far fewer people than the number who follow this blog with a feed reader (somewhere around 20 people at the moment), but I do appreciate that some people prefer email, so I wanted to make it easy for them.

Since I’m already using MailChimp for my email newsletter it didn’t cost anything extra to set this up. At some point I might drop the MailChimp version and implement it natively in my website, but it’s not at the top of my list of priorities.

And now subscribe via … ActivityPub, e.g. through Mastodon

My latest enhancement—and it’s very much in a beta version, but it’s open to anyone to use—is the ability to follow this blog from within an ActivityPub site or app, such as Mastodon.

To follow via Mastodon etc you just need to search for @artists-notebook@www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk on your app and follow the account with that name.

It’s very much a basic implementation: I’m not receiving any comments on it, or receiving any incoming notifications of likes or boosts (I think ActivityPub users can still comment, like, and boost, but only they and their followers can see that).

Nor can I follow other ActivityPub accounts, post comments, or like/boost other people’s posts from the implementation. Even as basic as this sounds, it took me a long time to put together and I’m sure there are still many bugs to fix.

I don’t expect that a massive number of people will follow my blog via Mastodon etc, but I thought it was a worthwhile exercise to provide another option for people who prefer it. If the number of ActivityPub subscribers to my blog does grow more than I suspect it will then I might look into implementing ActivityPub comments and like/boost counts etc.

There now follows a bunch of slightly more technical ActivityPub musings for those so inclined:

I’m not using any bridging service that forwards the posts from my site to an existing third-party ActivityPub server, but instead I’ve implemented basic ActivityPub functionality on my site, along with a few extras such as signed incoming/outgoing requests that make it play nicely with Mastodon.

As such it’s not really the IndieWeb definition of POSSE—“Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”—but rather POSIE—“Publish (on your) Own Site, Implement Endpoints”.

It’s more akin to syndication in the style of RSS, where the actual content stays on your own site, but people can read it via a different application (rather than posting it out to a silo): with RSS the content stays on your site in the RSS XML file, and people can use feed readers to subscribe to it and read it; with this ActivityPub implementation the content stays on my site in the form of ActivityPub JSON files and and people can use ActivityPub applications to subscribe to it and read it.

Except it took a lot longer for me to set up my ActivityPub implementation than it did to set up my RSS and Atom feeds!

I’m sending the blog posts as ActivityPub “article” object types—as opposed to the “note” object type that Mastodon uses for its more typical social-media-length posts—because the “article” object type is for longer multi-paragraphed objects.

Each flavour of ActivityPub application can decide to display these articles differently. Mastodon, for example, displays the title, a short description (which is included as part of the article), the hashtags, and then a link to the full article (which renders on Mastodon as a typical link preview with a pretty picture from my blog). This seems like a good design decision by Mastodon - far better than suddenly inserting a huge long multi-paragraphed blog post into a timeline of short-form notes.

Bookwyrm (an ActivityPub app that focuses on books, like a non-Amazon alternative to Goodreads) doesn’t seem to be displaying my blog posts at all (but does seem to allow users to follow my blog). This could be a bug on my side, or it could be that Bookwyrm simply doesn’t accept ActivityPub “article” object types.

I don’t have any other ActivityPub accounts, but I’d be interested in any feedback and screenshots on how my blog posts display (or don’t) from people who do!