fediverse

<div class="article-body"> <p>Just when you thought things were settling down… boom 💥 — the ActivityPub plugin gets another big upgrade. Say hello to version 7.0.0, a release packed with new features, polish, and under-the-hood improvements to help your WordPress site federate smoother, smarter, and more securely than ever.</p><p>Let’s dive into what’s new.</p><p>Following the Fediverse</p><p>We’ve added the initial building blocks for Following support — both sending and managing follow requests for remote actors. It’s not in the UI just yet (we’re rolling it out carefully), but that’s not far away. A big step toward richer, two-way federation.</p><p>We’ll work with developers of third-party plugins — including those behind <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/" rel="nofollow">Friends</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/event-bridge-for-activitypub/" rel="nofollow">Event Bridge</a> — to migrate their custom follow implementations to this new core feature. This collaboration helps ensure a consistent, reliable follow experience across the ecosystem.</p><p>This foundational support for following is also the first step toward a full-featured reader experience right inside WordPress — something we’re excited to keep building toward.</p><p>Refined Signature</p><p>This release brings support for RFC-9421-style HTTP signatures, both incoming and (optionally) outgoing. That’s a mouthful, but it basically means supporting the latest standard in how we verify and send activities — including a fallback to good old Draft Cavage when needed.</p><p>Check out the blog post to learn more: <a href="https://activitypub.blog/2025/07/03/http-signature-upgrades-coming-soon/" rel="nofollow">HTTP Signature Upgrades Coming Soon</a> </p><p>Full Changelog</p><p>Added</p><p>Added basic support for handling remote rejections of follow requests.<br>Added basic support for RFC-9421 style signatures for incoming activities.<br>Added initial Following support for Actors, hidden for now until plugins add support.<br>Added missing “Advanced Settings” details to Site Health debug information.<br>Added option to auto-approve reactions like likes and reposts.<br>Added support for namespaced attributes and the dcterms:subject field (FEP-b2b8), as a first step toward phasing out summary-based content warnings.<br>Added support for the WP Rest Cache plugin to help with caching REST API responses.<br>Documented support for FEP-844e.<br>Optional support for RFC-9421 style signatures for outgoing activities, including retry with Draft-Cavage-style signature.<br>Reactions block now supports customizing colors, borders, box-shadows, and typography.<br>Support for sending follow requests to remote actors is now in place, including outbox delivery and status updates—UI integration will follow later.</p><p>Changed</p><p>Comment feeds now show only comments by default, with a new type filter (e.g., like, all) to customize which reactions appear.<br>Consistent naming of Blog user in Block settings.<br>hs2019 signatures for incoming REST API requests now have their algorithm determined based on their public key.<br>Likes, comments, and reposts from the Fediverse now require either a name or preferredUsername to be set when the Discussion option require_name_email is set to true. It falls back to “Anonymous”, if not.<br>Management of public/private keys for Actors now lives in the Actors collection, in preparation for Signature improvements down the line.<br>Notification emails for new reactions received from the Fediverse now link to the moderation page instead of the edit page, preventing errors and making comment management smoother.<br>Plugins now have full control over which Settings tabs are shown in Settings &gt; Activitypub.<br>Reworked follower structure to simplify handling and enable reuse for following mechanism.<br>Screen options in the Activitypub settings page are now filterable.<br>Setting the blog identifier to empty will no longer trigger an error message about it being the same as an existing user name.<br>Step completion tracking in the Welcome tab now even works when the number of steps gets reduced.<br>The image attachment setting is no longer saved to the database if it matches the default value.<br>The welcome page now links to the correct profile when Blog Only mode was selected in the profile mode step.<br>Unified retrieval of comment avatars and re-used core filters to give access to third-part plugins.</p><p>Fixed</p><p>Allow interaction redirect URLs that contain an ampersand.<br>Comments received from the Fediverse no longer show an Edit link in the comment list, despite not being editable.<br>Fixed an issue where links to remote likes and boosts could open raw JSON instead of a proper page.<br>Fixed a potential error when getting an Activitypub ID based on a user ID.<br>HTTP signatures using the hs2019 algorithm now get accepted without error.<br>Improved compatibility with older follower data.<br>Inbox requests that are missing an algorithm parameter in their signature no longer create a PHP warning.<br>Interaction attempts that pass a webfinger ID instead of a URL will work again.<br>Names containing HTML entities now get displayed correctly in the Reactions block’s list of users.<br>Prevent storage of empty or default post meta values.<br>The amount of avatars shown in the Reactions block no longer depends on the amount of likes, but is comment type agnostic.<br>The command-line interface extension, accidentally removed in a recent cleanup, has been restored.<br>The image attachment setting now correctly respects a value of 0, instead of falling back to the default.<br>The Welcome screen now loads with proper styling when shown as a fallback.<br>Using categories as hashtags has been removed to prevent conflicts with tags of the same name.<br>When verifying signatures on incoming requests, the digest header now gets checked as expected.</p><p>Downloads</p><p>WordPress.org: <a href="https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/activitypub.7.0.0.zip" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/activitypub.7.0.0.zip"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">downloads.wordpress.org/plugin</span><span class="invisible">/activitypub.7.0.0.zip</span></a><br>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/7.0.0" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/7.0.0"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">github.com/Automattic/wordpres</span><span class="invisible">s-activitypub/releases/tag/7.0.0</span></a></p><p>Thank you!</p><p>Huge thanks to everyone who contributed code, feedback, tests, or moral support. This community makes the fediverse feel a little more federated with every release. ❤️</p><p>Update now, test things out, and let us know how 7.0.0 works for you!</p> </div>