followers

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.

Let’s dive into what’s new.

Following the Fediverse

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.

We’ll work with developers of third-party plugins — including those behind Friends and Event Bridge — to migrate their custom follow implementations to this new core feature. This collaboration helps ensure a consistent, reliable follow experience across the ecosystem.

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.

Refined Signature

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.

Check out the blog post to learn more: HTTP Signature Upgrades Coming Soon

Full Changelog

Added

Added basic support for handling remote rejections of follow requests.
Added basic support for RFC-9421 style signatures for incoming activities.
Added initial Following support for Actors, hidden for now until plugins add support.
Added missing “Advanced Settings” details to Site Health debug information.
Added option to auto-approve reactions like likes and reposts.
Added support for namespaced attributes and the dcterms:subject field (FEP-b2b8), as a first step toward phasing out summary-based content warnings.
Added support for the WP Rest Cache plugin to help with caching REST API responses.
Documented support for FEP-844e.
Optional support for RFC-9421 style signatures for outgoing activities, including retry with Draft-Cavage-style signature.
Reactions block now supports customizing colors, borders, box-shadows, and typography.
Support for sending follow requests to remote actors is now in place, including outbox delivery and status updates—UI integration will follow later.

Changed

Comment feeds now show only comments by default, with a new type filter (e.g., like, all) to customize which reactions appear.
Consistent naming of Blog user in Block settings.
hs2019 signatures for incoming REST API requests now have their algorithm determined based on their public key.
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.
Management of public/private keys for Actors now lives in the Actors collection, in preparation for Signature improvements down the line.
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.
Plugins now have full control over which Settings tabs are shown in Settings > Activitypub.
Reworked follower structure to simplify handling and enable reuse for following mechanism.
Screen options in the Activitypub settings page are now filterable.
Setting the blog identifier to empty will no longer trigger an error message about it being the same as an existing user name.
Step completion tracking in the Welcome tab now even works when the number of steps gets reduced.
The image attachment setting is no longer saved to the database if it matches the default value.
The welcome page now links to the correct profile when Blog Only mode was selected in the profile mode step.
Unified retrieval of comment avatars and re-used core filters to give access to third-part plugins.

Fixed

Allow interaction redirect URLs that contain an ampersand.
Comments received from the Fediverse no longer show an Edit link in the comment list, despite not being editable.
Fixed an issue where links to remote likes and boosts could open raw JSON instead of a proper page.
Fixed a potential error when getting an Activitypub ID based on a user ID.
HTTP signatures using the hs2019 algorithm now get accepted without error.
Improved compatibility with older follower data.
Inbox requests that are missing an algorithm parameter in their signature no longer create a PHP warning.
Interaction attempts that pass a webfinger ID instead of a URL will work again.
Names containing HTML entities now get displayed correctly in the Reactions block’s list of users.
Prevent storage of empty or default post meta values.
The amount of avatars shown in the Reactions block no longer depends on the amount of likes, but is comment type agnostic.
The command-line interface extension, accidentally removed in a recent cleanup, has been restored.
The image attachment setting now correctly respects a value of 0, instead of falling back to the default.
The Welcome screen now loads with proper styling when shown as a fallback.
Using categories as hashtags has been removed to prevent conflicts with tags of the same name.
When verifying signatures on incoming requests, the digest header now gets checked as expected.

Downloads

WordPress.org: https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/activitypub.7.0.0.zip
GitHub: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/7.0.0

Thank you!

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. ❤️

Update now, test things out, and let us know how 7.0.0 works for you!

ALT

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.

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.

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.

Coming Soon: Following Others!

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).

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!

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 the format proposed by @dansup for Pixelfed. For now, only Actor objects are supporteded, but we’re hoping to expand that over time.

Full Changelog

Added

Added a first version of the Follow form, allowing users to follow other Actors by username or profile link.
Added initial support for Fediverse Starter Kits, allowing users to follow recommended accounts from a predefined list.
Ensure that all schedulers are registered during every plugin update.
Followers and Following list tables now support Columns and Pagination screen options.
The featured tags endpoint is now available again for all profiles, showing the most frequently used tags by each user.
The following endpoint now returns the actual list of users being followed.

Changed

Follower tables now look closer to what other tables in WordPress look like.
Improved Account-Aliases handling by internally normalizing input formats.
Minor performance improvement when querying posts of various types, by avoiding double queries.
Set older unfederated posts to local visibility by default.
Step counts for the Welcome checklist now only take into account steps that are added in the Welcome class.
Table actions are now faster by using the Custom Post Type ID instead of the remote user URI, thanks to the unified Actor Model.
The following tables now more closely match the appearance of other WordPress tables and can be filtered by status.

Fixed

Ensure correct visibility handling for Undo and Follow requests
Ensure that the Actor-ID is always a URL.
Fixed a bug in how follow requests were accepted to ensure they work correctly.
Fixed an issue where the number of followers shown didn’t always match the actual follower list.
Fixed a PHP error that prevented the Follower overview from loading.
Fixed missing avatar class so that CSS styles are correctly applied to ActivityPub avatars on the Dashboard.
Fixed potential errors when unrelated requests get caught in double-knocking callback.
Improved WebFinger fallback to better guess usernames from profile links.
Prevent WordPress from loading all admin notices twice on ActivityPub settings pages.
Removed follower dates to avoid confusion, as they may not have accurately reflected the actual follow time.
Stop purging Follow activities from the Outbox to allow proper Unfollow (Undo) handling.

Downloads

WordPress.org: activitypub.7.1.0.zip
GitHub: tag/7.1.0

Thank you!

Big thanks to everyone who contributed code, feedback, testing, or encouragement—this community helps make the fediverse more connected with every release. ❤️

Update to 7.1.0, try it out, and tell us what you think!

ALT