How do I get started with this after install?

[JimKillock]

I've installed the plug in, and BuddyPress in case it is needed. I can't see, however, any output from the plug in as such.

Do I need to take some extra steps to ensure that information about how to follow etc is displayed? Or has something gone wrong with my install (on WP's hosted site)?

[Cambridgeport90]

You shouldn't have to do anything (though BuddyPress is also a fantastic piece of software, but not needed for this plugin to work.) The dinformation which you seek is found under your profile; under followers (Fediverse). You can see those who follow you; notice that you will immediately be discovered; look at it on another fediverse instance to which you have access.

[pfefferle]

It seems to work fine for me. I can follow your profile and see one of your posts :)

[JimKillock]

Thanks! That's great. But where does someone external find that this facility exists? Do I add it manually, or should it appear on a public page automatically somwhere?

[pfefferle]

You have to tell your readers. There is no auto generated info/page (yet).

[JimKillock]

Thanks very much for all your help :) Now to try to get some new people to use your plugin …

[stevenjaycohen]

Also, try adding your site to some of the emerging Fediverse directories to increase discoverability!
https://fediverse.info/explore/people#howItWorks

[AndySoc1al]

I'm running WordPress on my own domain, with the URLs being at the root level, no subdirectories. I've installed WebFinger and ActivityPub, I see my profile identifier says I should search for @[email protected] on Mastodon. I search that and get 0 results.

I'm stumped.

[pfefferle]

@mateuswetah can you provide us your blogs domain? maybe I can have a look?

[mateuswetah]

Hey @pfefferle sure, I would enjoy some support if you can help 😄

Here is my website: https://mateuswetah.com.br.

If you check my webfinger: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=https%3A%2F%2Fmateuswetah.com.br%2F%40mateuswetah, (which I created manually as suggested here), you'll see that is right now set to user admin. I tried this before with [email protected] because I wanted to have any post from any user but had the feeling that this could be the problem so also tried that, since the admin user has content in its blog page.

I tried some of the tweaks suggested previously on .httacess. No success. I know that Hostinger uses Let's Encrypt, but they didn't provide much more information about it. I can create and edit files in my WordPress folder only.

BTW if you search for mateuswetah on Mastodon you might find this user, which I created years ago when I was digging into Fediverse. I would love to have this working via ActivityPub ❤️

[mateuswetah]

@pfefferle have you had any chance to look at it?

[pfefferle]

I am on vacation, I will check when I am back. ☺️

[pfefferle]

@mateuswetah here is a nice tool, to test your blogs profiles: https://browser.pub/[email protected]

there seem to be an issue with the headers for WebFinger: Unexpected content type in webfinger response: application/octet-stream"

It seems that your hoster also uses LightSpeed caching, maybe this also helps: https://www.timnolte.com/2023/04/09/fixing-openlitespeed-caching-for-activitypub-on-wordpress/

[bethanye]

Same problem, also on Dreamhost + Apache + LetsEncrypt. Following the recommendation to allow access to .well-known referenced here, I had Dreamhost Support add a bypass for .well-known.

I'm still getting a 400, and missing "resource" parameter when I curl the page or visit in a browser.

% curl "https://bethanye.geekery.org/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:[email protected]"
missing "resource" parameter%

[davemacdo]

I am also having the missing "resource" parameter problem. Did you ever resolve this?

[kvibber]

I put this in my top-level .htaccess and it seems to be working. Also Dreamhost+Apache+Let's Encrypt, but on a VPS, so I'm not sure if that makes a difference.

RewriteRule ^.well-known/(host-meta|webfinger|nodeinfo|x-nodeinfo) /blog/.well-known/$1 [L]

I'm able to find and follow the author account through Mastodon again

[AndySoc1al]

Well, look at that - there's an .htaccess file in the webfinger directory, put there apparently by Let's Encrypt. Here's the contents:

Order allow,deny
Allow from all

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[.]well-known/acme-challenge/[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+$
RewriteRule .* - [L]

RewriteRule .* - [F]
RewriteRule ^.well-known/(host-meta|webfinger|nodeinfo|x-nodeinfo)$ /wp-json/activitypub/1.0/$1 [L]

After adding your code at the end, I deleted the cache in wp-admin, and still get the same error in Site Health. I'm reluctant to nuke the ACME Challenge code, since I kind of want to keep the SSL cert functional.

I also put the webfinger line just after the Allow line. This seems like it should work, but does not seem to. I'm going to temporarily disable the cache and see if that works.
Update Tried disabling the caching plugin, and made no difference. According to the htaccess checker, putting the activitypub rewrite rule at the beginning leads to the wp-json URL, but actually going to the webfinger URL still just throws an error. sigh

[timnolte]

I would put the line I provided before the acme-challenge line.

[AndySoc1al]

I would put the line I provided before the acme-challenge line.

Did that. No difference. Put it in the root .htaccess as the first line - no difference. I can get to the wp-json virtual URL (virtual because going into SSH on the host shows there is no actual directory named wp-json), but the redirect fails to do anything useful. I'll put in a detailed customer service query to Dreamhost, but I'm guessing they will suggest upgrading to a dedicated IP.

Thanks for all your help, @timnolte

[AndySoc1al]

OK, I tried a hack that worked for someone (not on Dreamhost) to force things: copy the contents of that json file that is generated in the wp-json virtual URL and paste it into a text file named webfinger the ./well-known directory. Still the same empty "Error" reply. Decided to be particularly nuts, and created a directory named webfinger, put an HTML file in it and tried to get to that URL - same empty "Error" message.

So, yeah, there's something particularly thorough that Dreamhost must be doing with the .well-known folder.

[huckabarry]

I tried just about everything as well on BlueHost and finally just gave up on Wordpress and got a Micro.blog this week.

[FoxLee]

I have some really weird info to add to this issue. I have the plugin working (on my Dreamhost VPS with LetsEncrypt) on my www domain (https://www.invincible.ink -> @[email protected]), but it's failing with a second WP install on a subdomain (https://press.invincible.ink -> @[email protected]).

The setup on the www domain has an interesting quirk: The wordpress install is actually a couple of subfolders deep compared to the domain root, but I used a workaround to force the www as the wordpress URL for the sake of having it look nice. This involved copy/pasting the normal (core) WordPress htaccess snippet into the htaccess file in the domain root, then adding an index.php that loads the Wordpress header—and thus the entire software:

define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/shared/blog/wp-blog-header.php' );

As weird as this is, it's always worked like a charm and has run the blog site correctly without getting in the way of a dozen other subdomains and subfolders. More importantly, that's just about the only meaningful difference between the two sites I'm trying to get working. And it does mean that the actual folder where the blog is located doesn't contain .well-known/.htaccess. Could that be why it's behaving there, in spite of known Dreamhost issues, and not on the second site?

[FoxLee]

Further to this, I now have it working on several other sites on subdomains on this account—https://escarnum.invincible.ink and https://squarefireballs.invincible.ink—and on another TLD on this account with a conventional setup, https://www.ex-manus.com. They all seem to have weird webfinger lookup results, but I can find and follow their accounts from Mastodon with no issues. I am utterly at a loss as to why only the press.invincible.ink subdomain refuses to work :\

[caranha]

Hello! I'm also having issues getting this plugin to work.

I'm on Wordpress 6.1.1, installed on a linode VPS. I do have let's encrypt.

After installing, got the "not valid json" message on site health, and went digging here for answers. Tested my website on webfinger.net/lookup, and got that my webfinger is 404'ing.

Saw that several answers involved messing with .htaccess, and checked in my server: my wordpress install directory does not seem to have any explicit .htaccess file (it is a pretty vanilla install, I did almost no hacking other than soft-linking some other directories for static files), and no .well-known directory either. So I'm finding all the "add this to your .htaccess file" suggestions in this thread not very useful :-(

Any suggestions of things that I should try are welcome!

Extra info:

• Website: https://claus.castelodelego.org
• User: https://claus.castelodelego.org/?author=1
• Site health error message:

Your WebFinger endpoint https://claus.castelodelego.org/.well-known/webfinger
?resource=acct:[email protected] does not return valid JSON for application/jrd+json.

• Plugins: Webfinger, ActivityPub, Askimet, NextGen Gallery, Classic Editor

[caranha]

Note: This workaround worked for me (manually creating .well-known/webfinger)

#188

That said, I'm still interested in finding a "proper" solution to this problem, since it seems to be pretty common. I'd be happy to do stuff to help diagnose it!

[pfefferle]

@caranha you have to enable "pretty permalinks" in the WordPress settings: /wp-admin/options-permalink.php

[caranha]

@pfefferle Thank you! That helped me fix the problem.

I tried to enable "pretty permalinks", and my posts all became 404's.

Turns out that my wordpress site was not configured on the apache side to use modRewrite. After I added

<Directory>
   # ... other configuration ...
   AllowOverwrite all
</Directory>

To the site configuration, both permalinks and the ActivityPub plugin started working normally.

[caranha]

Note: My "site-health" still shows the same error message, even though everything seems to work and show valid data now...

[pfefferle]

I am glad that it works now! It might be possible that site-help has some kind of caching. I would assume that the error will disappear soon.