fediverse

<div class="article-body"> <p>I’m going to be participating in the <a href="https://fediforum.org/2026-03-growing-open-social-web/" rel="nofollow">Growing the Open Social Web</a> workshop at Fediforum on March 3, 2026. I’m excited to talk to other people who care about the Fediverse about ways to connect more people through ActivityPub.</p><p>Fediforum invited attendees to publish position papers before the workshop. SWF has a number of hypotheses about growth of the social web; I’ll try to summarise some of them here.</p><p>Growth can’t come at the expense of privacy. People currently on the Fediverse must have the tools they need to preserve their privacy as the network grows. This means privacy from other users, as well as privacy from new platform operators. Expanding the options for private interactions on the Fediverse, like <a href="https://socialwebfoundation.org/program-protocol-e2ee/" rel="nofollow">end-to-end encrypted messages</a> and <a href="https://github.com/swicg/groups" rel="nofollow">private groups</a>, is necessary for preserving privacy as the user base and platform list expands.<br>Connecting platforms to the Fediverse is our most efficient way to grow. There are already billions of people on social platforms across the Internet. Getting these platforms to let users publish to the Fediverse, as well as having two-way interactions with remote users, lets people share in the benefits of the Fediverse with a platform and interface that they’re already used to. Even when brand new social platforms adopt ActivityPub, they bring their new features and users.<br>Connecting communities helps us grow fast and stay cohesive. Bringing formal and informal communities onto the Fediverse is a great way to enable a lot of new users quickly. By formal communities, we mean organized groups like clubs, universities and schools, professional societies, enterprises, or local and regional governments. These groups can set up their own places on the Fediverse, like Mastodon servers, and provide user accounts for all their members. (One great way to connect formal communities is to Fediverse-enable the community platforms they already use.) These new Fediverse users have the kind of connections in place that retain active users, as well as the support they need to use the Fediverse. More informal communities, like people sharing the same profession, fans of a particular hobby, or users of a language or technology, can be great additions to the Fediverse, but these groups are less cohesive and less likely to bring their own infrastructure.<br>People come to social networks for existing social ties. Bringing on new users one-by-one is the most difficult way to grow this network. The best way to engage new users on the network, and to keep them active and interested, is to make sure they can connect to people they already know and care about. That may be friends, family, colleagues and neighbours, or brands, creators, and publications they recognise. Our onboarding processes for Fediverse users need to encourage the social contacts so that people feel a reason to stick around for day 2, 7, and 30.</p><p>We’re looking forward to engaging with the Fediforum community on these and other topics. We’ll see you on March 3!</p> </div>

<div class="article-body"> <p>This release is mostly made up of behind-the-scenes improvements, but one update you’ll notice right away is the refreshed Followers table. It now looks and feels much more like the standard WordPress admin tables: you can customize it with screen options to hide columns or change how many followers are shown per page, and you can now delete individual followers using inline action links. We also polished the layout by increasing information density and improving the readability of date columns.</p><p>We’ve made migrations easier to kick off by automatically resolving account aliases and saving their ID form. That means you can now paste in WebFinger IDs, profile URLs, etc. and the plugin handles the rest, as long as it resolves to an ActivityPub profile.</p><p>This release also fixes a long-time annoyance: unfederated posts (like those published before the plugin was activated or imported later) will no longer be sent out to followers just because they were updated. For now, we use a simple cutoff for posts older than a month, which should cover the majority of those cases.</p><p>Coming Soon: Following Others!</p><p>Most of the work that went into this release is still invisible, hiding behind a feature flag in Advanced Settings (you can find it by opening Screen Options in the ActivityPub settings screen).</p><p>There’s really no functionality around it yet, beyond following accounts from other instances, as we have yet to start processing incoming posts and adding the ability to interact with them. But if you just can’t wait to show your appreciation for other accounts by following them, go wild!</p><p>Behind the same feature flag, we’ve also added initial beta support for Fediverse Starter Kits. This lets new users follow a set of recommended accounts from a predefined list, following <a href="https://github.com/pixelfed/starter-kits/issues/1" rel="nofollow">the format proposed</a> by <span class="h-card"><a href="https://pixelfed.social/dansup" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>dansup</span></a></span> for Pixelfed. For now, only Actor objects are supporteded, but we’re hoping to expand that over time.</p><p>Full Changelog</p><p>Added</p><p>Added a first version of the Follow form, allowing users to follow other Actors by username or profile link.<br>Added initial support for Fediverse Starter Kits, allowing users to follow recommended accounts from a predefined list.<br>Ensure that all schedulers are registered during every plugin update.<br>Followers and Following list tables now support Columns and Pagination screen options.<br>The featured tags endpoint is now available again for all profiles, showing the most frequently used tags by each user.<br>The following endpoint now returns the actual list of users being followed.</p><p>Changed</p><p>Follower tables now look closer to what other tables in WordPress look like.<br>Improved Account-Aliases handling by internally normalizing input formats.<br>Minor performance improvement when querying posts of various types, by avoiding double queries.<br>Set older unfederated posts to local visibility by default.<br>Step counts for the Welcome checklist now only take into account steps that are added in the Welcome class.<br>Table actions are now faster by using the Custom Post Type ID instead of the remote user URI, thanks to the unified Actor Model.<br>The following tables now more closely match the appearance of other WordPress tables and can be filtered by status.</p><p>Fixed</p><p>Ensure correct visibility handling for Undo and Follow requests<br>Ensure that the Actor-ID is always a URL.<br>Fixed a bug in how follow requests were accepted to ensure they work correctly.<br>Fixed an issue where the number of followers shown didn’t always match the actual follower list.<br>Fixed a PHP error that prevented the Follower overview from loading.<br>Fixed missing avatar class so that CSS styles are correctly applied to ActivityPub avatars on the Dashboard.<br>Fixed potential errors when unrelated requests get caught in double-knocking callback.<br>Improved WebFinger fallback to better guess usernames from profile links.<br>Prevent WordPress from loading all admin notices twice on ActivityPub settings pages.<br>Removed follower dates to avoid confusion, as they may not have accurately reflected the actual follow time.<br>Stop purging Follow activities from the Outbox to allow proper Unfollow (Undo) handling.</p><p>Downloads</p><p>WordPress.org: <a href="https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/activitypub.7.1.0.zip" rel="nofollow">activitypub.7.1.0.zip</a><br>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/7.1.0" rel="nofollow">tag/7.1.0</a></p><p>Thank you!</p><p>Big thanks to everyone who contributed code, feedback, testing, or encouragement—this community helps make the fediverse more connected with every release. ❤️</p><p>Update to 7.1.0, try it out, and tell us what you think!</p> </div>