As I had talked about in a previous post, this blog is a part of the Fediverse and all posts here get published to the Fediverse automatically. This means that you could search for @suramya@www.suramya.com on mastodon and find all my blog posts. I enabled this back in July and all was working well till yesterday which is when I noticed that my most recent post wasn’t pushed out to Mastodon.
I couldn’t figure out why so I created an issue over on the wordpress-activitypub github site highlighting the issue. I have to say I was extremely impressed with the quality of the support given for what is essentially a free plugin. I opened the ticket and 6 minutes later I had a response from Matthias Pfefferle who is the creator of the plugin and within 2 hours there was a code change warning people about this issue (more later in the blog).
It turns out that I had used a username that was previously an author-name for the blog in the settings and due to this:
the URL https://mastodon.social/@suramya@www.suramya.com redirects to https://www.suramya.com/blog/author/suramya-2/ but it should redirect to https://www.suramya.com/blog/@suramya. This is because Mastodon caches Profiles for quite some time, so all the signatures and IDs of the blog user, does not match the user, Mastodon has in the cache and so it will decline your post.
The recommendation is to not use author names for the blog, because it could mess up a lot of things due to caching. The fix is to either wait for the cache on the server to expire or use a different name for the blog-user. I decided to change the configuration so that the posts are now being pushed out as @blog to the fediverse and it looks like things are mostly back to normal. There is a rendering issue on Mastodon where it uses the HTML entity code in the blog’s name but that is a minor issue.
Another cool feature with the updated plugin is that all future blog posts will be publicly searchable on Mastodon (due to the way the Activitypub protocol works previous posts are not republished).
Well this is all for now. Will write more later.
– Suramya