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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

The secret sauce of the Fediverse is that you really don't need crazy software like Mastodon or Pleroma to participate in it.

Have a WordPress site? Throw this plugin on it and you've entered the Fediverse:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

Cancel that!

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> you really don't need crazy software like Mastodon or Pleroma to participate in it.

You may not need crazy software, but it's not like you just have to "implement a spec" to be part of it: read https://schub.wtf/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts... for more details, where you'll learn that ActivityPub is not really a specification but rather guidelines for doing things. You can't "implement ActivityPub" and expect your app to play well with the network; the specification is vague enough that multiple incompatible behaviours are technically valid with the specification so you actually have to "implement Mastodon" and "implement Pleroma" and "implement Pixelfed" etc...

Any Fediverse/ActivityPub plugins for traditional server-hosted forums/message boards? Support in Wordpress is nice but that's purely a single-user thing; it's not much of a "social" platform.

I host a single user instance that's purely social.

I'm not sure what your point is.

I believe Discourse was planning things but decided to scrap them. The person behind PixelFed (a federated Instagram-like platform) hinted at a [forum platform](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/105425592966902917), but I have no idea if there's any progress on that.

And of course, there's [Lemmy](https://lemmy.ml/), which is kinda like Reddit, but federated.

What if you only have a static website, HTML files only?

You can publish activitypub objects statically, but fundamentally it's a push model. You receive follow requests, then push new posts.

The objects are actually defined in the ActivityStreams spec, which is a prereq for ActivityPub. So, a purely static site can only meaningfully implement the former, not the latter. However implementing ActivityStreams object types would still be useful inasmuch as it might provide some limited interop with the Fediverse.

(Future server-side improvements might also allow for some kind of automated polling of statically-hosted ActivityStreams, outside of the standardized "push" model.)

AP also defines endpoints like outbox which you'd want for polling.

i'm not sure why parent is downvoted. it is accurate.

this is the issue where mastodon devs were considering polling: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/34

A pure HTML server won't work, of course. You need something that can execute code.

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