Last week we launched support for the ActivityPub API in Micro.blog. This is a major feature to add compatibility with Mastodon, including:
- Mastodon users can follow posts from your blog using a username like @you@yourdomain.com.
- Mastodon users can reply to your posts, and those replies will show up in your Micro.blog timeline.
- You can follow Mastodon users from within Micro.blog.
- You can reply to Mastodon posts in Micro.blog, and those replies will also flow back to Mastodon.
Unlike cross-posting (which Micro.blog also supports), enabling ActivityPub in Micro.blog does not use a separate Mastodon account. Everything can be accessed from within Micro.blog using your custom domain name as your web identity. I’ve mostly been testing with Mastodon, but as we continue to test and improve this feature it should also work with non-Mastodon ActivityPub servers.
There are a few steps to get started:
- Pick a custom domain name. For me, this was easy: I wanted to use manton.org.
- After setting up Micro.blog to host your blog, point the domain name to Micro.blog. We have a help page about this.
- Micro.blog will send an email when SSL is enabled for your blog. If there are any delays, don’t hesitate to email us at help@micro.blog and I will make sure your blog is updated and ready for ActivityPub.
- Click on Account → ActivityPub → “Set Mastodon-compatible Username”. Here you can choose what username other Mastodon users can find you with.
Thanks to everyone who has already tried enabling this on their Micro.blog account! We have learned a lot and fixed several bugs with conversations across both platforms. Looking forward to where this goes.
