How to add a Mastodon icon to your WordPress site

Following yesterday’s post, I’d like to do a bit of a follow-up. Sometimes you “just” want to add a Mastodon icon to your site, linking to your Mastodon profile:

I have one just like that on my home page, alongside my other Social Media links.

In this post, I’ll cover 3 different ways to add such an icon to your site.

Share your blog posts on Mastodon with Jetpack

After dipping my toes into the Fediverse for the past few months, I wanted the Jetpack plugin to be there to help bloggers who wanted to interact more with the Fediverse on their sites.

Jetpack includes Sharing buttons that can be handy for your readers to quickly share your posts to their Social Network of choice ; adding a Mastodon button seemed like a no-brainer!

Mention other ActivityPub users right inside your WordPress blog!

If you’re actively blogging on WordPress and have been playing with Mastodon et al. in the past few months, you probably came across the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress.

The plugin implements the ActivityPub protocol for your site. It allows others to follow your blog from their Mastodon / Pleroma / GoToSocial account. If they reply to one of your blog’s posts there, their reply will be posted as a comment on your blog.

This is already pretty neat! But starting today with the release of version 0.16.1 of the plugin, you can even mention other ActivityPub users in your posts. When you hit Publish, they’ll be notified of your post inside their client of choice.

Is building a diverse Fediverse possible?

I should start with a warning: I’m new to this and learning as I go. These are my feelings as I discover this new (to me) part of the Internet.

When I joined the Fediverse a few weeks ago, I took it as an opportunity to expand my social bubble. Instead of only looking for the people I previously followed on Twitter, I started following new people to learn new things.

This is changing as more and more people join, but the Fediverse is still a bubble, or a group of interlinked bubbles. This time however, it’s not just WordPress professionals for me. :) I started following people from different circles; folks talking about the IndieWeb, the Fediverse itself, and by extension Mastodon.

In theory, the Fediverse is a great idea. As a supporter of the open web, I love the idea of a web of small independent servers talking to each other.

In practice, it seems to present some unique challenges.