Fediverse Integration, yea or nay?

Had an interesting discussion earlier during the first KrautPress Website Club meetup. Since Matthias is the OG of WordPress ActivityPub integration, he is obviously a huge fan of bringing your blog into the fediverse. (He’s the main developer of the ActivityPub WordPress plugin.) Whereas I was recently thinking about removing those integrations from my photo blog.

I get the appeal: People can follow your blog directly through any of the fediverse services like Mastodon or Pixelfed. They can like, comment and boost directly in their fediverse client and those likes and comments show up on your blog automatically. That is pretty cool.

But that’s where it kind of ends being interesting for me. For one: I really love using RSS for following blogs and I generally do not want those same blogs show up in my Mastodon feed as well. It’s annoying enough, that currently everything is posted twice, on Mastodon and Bluesky. Also I would never want to read any long-form content inside a Mastodon client. That is also the main reasons why apps like Tapestry¹ do not appeal to me.

Another aspect, that Ralf mentioned, which I fully concur with: I actually like looking at people’s websites directly. I love the care they put into making their websites uniquely them. (At least those that do. Some use a default theme and that is fine too.)

This next thing might feel archaic to the modern fediverse proponent, but I actually love replying to people’s posts via email. Yes, plain old email.

In my recent experience this leads to much more meaningful interactions. Maybe because the public is not part of these conversations and people are more open? I don’t know. But I enjoy it a lot.

BTW, the feed reader I am currently using, allows me to directly reply to posts via email (if the respective feed has an email tag inside the author tag). It’s a mailto: link with the title of the post as the subject. Very straight forward.

Obviously, those being conversations between two people, there is no open/public discussion, which is what you might prefer. But then again, there’s no unwanted commenting from some rando either. (Everything has pros and cons I guess.)

I don’t have a conclusion, or made up my mind, how I want to handle this with my blogs in the future. Just thought about it after the meetup and wanted to share since this is my blog and I want to post more often. 🙂

I am interested in what you think! Reply via email? 😉