Do the Woo is Trailbazing the Fediverse

BobWP:
Hey everybody, BobWP here, and welcome to On Community. And when we’re talking community, we’re talking about growing the Do the Woo Community on the Fediverse. I’m here today talking about something we’ve recently done with our site. I’ve been excited working on it. I haven’t been working on it; I’ve been answering simple questions, but I do have two of the people that really are the brains behind this whole thing, both from Automattic. I’m going to have them introduce themselves. I’m going to start first with Derek. Why don’t you tell everybody who you are?

Derek:
Thanks, Bob. Derek Hanson. I’m a technical account manager with the Automattic Special Projects Team, and I’ve been collaborating with Bob and the Do the Woo site ever since we relaunched the site on WordPress.com. I’ve been really excited to be a part of this project.

BobWP:
And that’s going to be another whole show. You’ll hear about all that. That he’s still talking to me—I mean, that’s great in itself.

Derek:
Every site’s organic; it goes on forever.

BobWP:
And Matthias. Matthias, this is great. You were pulled in for this other special project under the Special Projects Team. I know several people have heard you already on this podcast, in fact, just yesterday, the episode that came out. So why don’t you just give a short introduction? We’ll dive into what has happened at Do the Woo.

Matthias:
Okay, so my name is Matthias, and I’m working on WordPress and all the open web stuff and weird stuff since forever, I can’t remember. It’s way over 10 years, I would say. I joined Automattic, I think, one and a half years ago to work full-time on the ActivityPub plugin that we enabled on your blog just recently.

BobWP:
Cool. So back in March at CloudFest in Germany, I remember I was having breakfast, and somebody walked up and sat down with me, and it was Matthias. We got talking a little bit, and I was telling him about how we had just launched our new site that Derek was talking about. I remember him saying at some point, he just said something like, “We need to get you on the Fediverse.” Back then, I kind of understood a little bit. I knew about Mastodon, and that was about it. I think we maybe talked a little bit about it, but I didn’t quite know the impact and what it would turn into. And so we wrapped back around, and here we are. So what did you mean when you said we need to get you on the Fediverse? I mean, what was in your mind?

Matthias:
The first thing was to get such a famous guy using the plugin, to be honest—shameless self-promotion. No, I was really curious, and I was very happy that you were so interested in that topic and that I was able to talk about that with you. I was also curious because it was not about a classic WordPress site but a podcast, which has different media possibilities. So I was wondering how a podcast would look like in the Fediverse in general and how we might get that done for Do the Woo in the end. So yeah, it was really interesting, and seeing you being interested in that and being open to talk about that was kind of nice. And yeah, it was a nice little chat.

BobWP:
It was exactly that. I mean, everything intrigues me around website blogging, media content, all that stuff. And just the fact that it was like, wow, yeah, he’s asking me, so I’ve got to do something here. This is cool. From there, I think, of course, we all had to get over and recuperate from CloudFest. And then along the way, somewhere, I talked to you, Derek, and I mentioned what Matthias had said. As I recall, you were also maybe at the level I was. I mean, you understood the Fediverse, but we were both also kind of learning through this process. But when I mentioned it, I know that you had a lot of things going on in your head around how it seemed like something perfect for Do the Woo.

Derek:
It really did. One of the core missions of our work with the Automattic Special Projects Team is to see where we can showcase the best of what WordPress can do and push the boundaries. So anytime there’s an opportunity to enhance something that is already existing, like ActivityPub, we find that a welcoming challenge. I know early on, Bob, you mentioned that you wanted to bring comments back to the site and to bring the blog back and just have that community aspect of Do the Woo be more conversational.

And my very limited understanding of the Fediverse and ActivityPub made me think, “Okay, this is the perfect opportunity to actually expand the reach of that conversation through the ActivityPub plugin and into the Fediverse.” That’s why I was very excited to be able to reach out to Matthias and say, “Hey, let’s collaborate on this together.” But I also didn’t know there were possibly going to be some of those limitations with the audio and the fact that Do the Woo is a very unique site in that it’s a multi-author site because there are hosts for every single show. I didn’t know those were going to be challenges, and I was very grateful to Matthias for not only being up for that as a challenge but also seeing that as an opportunity to expand what he’s doing with ActivityPub.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think that was the thing. Between this initial conversation and then we got talking, I thought this is not just having you put the plugin in and we just kind of run with it. There are some cool things coming our way. So what did come our way? It is live on our site right now. Matthias, why don’t you start talking a little bit about some of the things Derek touched on—what was the interest, what was the challenge, and what did you do for Do the Woo?

Matthias:
So I think the biggest one was to bring audio into the Fediverse—and not only audio, but to provide a foundation to hook podcasting plugins onto the ActivityPub plugin because there is no real general way to have podcasts in WordPress. So the first big thing was to support audio in general. The next step was how we could build a bridge between the implementation, the special implementation of Do the Woo, and the audio implementation of ActivityPub. We learned a lot. It was really nice to work directly together with kind of a client and to have direct feedback, iterate on features, and see and directly test if what we built actually worked.

There were some other smaller things, like what Derek already mentioned with the multi-user functionality and the combination between multi-user and site-wide users. We also iterated on the blocks we already provided. There’s a block that helps followers or potential followers with the quite complicated following process in the Fediverse. Derek brought up a nice idea to make that follow widget context-sensitive so that it tries to get the author from the page it is on. That was a nice feature built by my colleague Matt Wiebe.

Yeah, it was a lot of different small things we had to improve and tweak a bit, but I’m very happy with the outcome in the end.

BobWP:
Was there anything, Derek, aside from what you’ve already talked about that, along the way, you saw being implemented that you thought, “Wow, that’s great, that’s cool”? I know that one of the things we had talked about at one point was having the hosts but also allowing people to guest post. At that time, it was, if they are on the Fediverse—and let me see if I can say this clearly enough—they would be able to share their post with the Fediverse. Then again, we would all be interconnected. That, to me, was a little bit of an added bonus for somebody that guest posts because they’re even getting a little bit more exposure. And before I get back to Derek, is that correct, Matthias, in the thinking there?

Matthias:
Yeah, in the end, it helps to make the different authors of the blog posts more visible, but it also allows for one single point that you could follow. If it were only following authors, it would be quite complicated because you’d have to follow everyone on the blog. So the combination of both—being able to follow the whole blog and/or single authors—was a really nice combination in the end. The visibility is clearly an opportunity there.

Derek:
To me, what’s exciting about this is that Do the Woo is a small-scale news and media outlet. You have the entity of Do the Woo, which is the single publisher—that’s what Matthias was saying—you can follow the single publisher. For example, I want everything to come from the New York Times, ESPN, or whatever your favorite publisher is. But then, usually on those individual authored posts, there’s the author bio and a whole bunch of individual social media icons. That’s a burden if you have 10 different authors that you like and want to follow each one of them across all the individual platforms.

With ActivityPub and especially the follow block, it simplifies that. To your question, Bob, what excited me the most is that we’re building everything in Gutenberg with blocks now. Even myself, as maybe an advanced DIY, non-technical WordPress user, I can go to the single author post template, add the block to follow an author, and set it to inherit. That was the enhancement Matthias mentioned they did. Now, instead of you coming to the site and having to follow individual X, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts, you just click “Follow” for that one individual author.

To me, I feel like this is a great potential case study for large media industries and publishers to adopt. It just makes a lot of sense.

BobWP:
Very cool. So I’m leading the way. The three of us are—you’re trailblazers if you like.

Matthias:
Yeah, this could really be the case. I think there are already platforms—podcasting platforms—on the Fediverse, but I’m not aware of a single podcast that is self-distributing the audio to the Fediverse and is followable without any third-party tools. Hopefully, we can make a point here.

Derek:
And it just works so well. I remember when we first launched this, Bob, and I was looking on Mastodon, trying to see how everything was working. One of your recent episodes was playing in Mastodon, and I thought, “Wow, this is really cool.” But then I wondered, did this come from your site? Was this through the ActivityPub plugin? Or was it like, did you upload an audio file into Mastodon? It’s so magical how it all happens. I thought, “Wait, did this really do what we set out for it to do?” All credit to you, Matthias, and Matt for making it work and feel so seamless. That’s what it felt like.

Matthias:
It’s also not only to our work but to Mastodon itself, which has the option to have such a nice player. It really looks nice with a little preview picture and a nice audio player. That worked out pretty well.

BobWP:
When I saw it the first time, I thought, “Whoa, where did that come from?” Well, I knew where it came from, but it was very impressive. Anything else you want to add about this before we let people know to go and follow us and do all that cool stuff?

Matthias:
What I also like a lot is the combination between the podcasting episodes and your articles. Every content type looks really nice on the Fediverse and focuses on the content type it should focus on. This played out really nicely.

BobWP:
Very cool. Derek, anything else?

Derek:
Yeah, I think at the basic level of what I’ve understood ActivityPub and the Fediverse to do, what’s been really appealing to me is if you have a small blog and don’t get a lot of engagement and comments, this is a way to boost that engagement. It feels more natural for people to comment on something like a Mastodon post. Then to have that show up on your site’s podcast or blog post is awesome. It makes your site look active, and people can see that there’s a conversation happening. It doesn’t feel like the conversation is happening in 20 different places because it all comes back to that one centralized spot.

Matthias:
Yeah.

BobWP:
Yeah, I agree. That’s a really good point. It’s important to be able to play the podcasting episode directly in Mastodon because this way, you could use Mastodon as your podcasting platform and can comment and boost directly after you hear the episode. That’s really easy, and I hope that drives engagement a lot.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yep. Well, that’s my next thing on the plate—strategy and working that out. I’m spending a little bit more time on Mastodon. I’m just, as usual, constantly impressed, and I really appreciate you two working on that to get this to where it is now. I’m excited people can actually go on now and easily follow it. We have a page with our followers, which we’re starting to build up slowly but surely. Everything takes a little bit of time.

If you’re listening and you are on the Fediverse, make sure to go to dothewoo.io. You’ll see it up at the top there, “Fediverse,” and you can’t miss it. We put it on the main menu at the top. That’s perfect. Wanted to highlight that.

That’s it. People, do check this out. I’m just waiting for Matthias to think of another wonderful thing or something for my site. But I’ll give him a break for a while, I think.

Matthias:
No need for a break. The next thing is to show up likes and boosts nicely on your site.

Derek:
That’s the first I’ve heard of that, and it already sounds amazing.

BobWP:
Yeah, I know, that does. We learned something new today, Derek.

Derek:
That’s right.

BobWP:
Alrighty, well, thank you both. Matthias, where can people find you, follow you, learn more about what you’re doing, and, of course, where they can get the plugin?

Matthias:
I would say the easiest way is on Mastodon because my blog is in German—not everyone speaks German. So it’s my last name, Pfefferle, at Mastodon.social. That’s the only social network I use besides my blog.

BobWP:
And Derek, where’s the best place for people to find you?

Derek:
Yeah, you can find me personally at derekhanson.blog, and then you can see the work our team does at specialprojects.automattic.com.

BobWP:
Cool. Well, again, thank you for coming on. Thank you for this amazing work. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes and what other cool stuff comes down the road with the Fediverse. Have a great day, and thanks again.

Derek:
Thanks, Bob.

Matthias:
Thanks.