Bring Federated Events to Your WordPress Site

Matthias Pfefferle:
Welcome to my second episode of do the Woo’s Open Web Conversations. No longer a one hit wonder. My name is Matthias Pfefferle and in this show I will talk with my guests about the Fediverse decentralized social networks, the open Web, and but not necessarily about WordPress. But I’m really happy that also my second guest is perfectly combining both worlds. So welcome Andre.

Andreas Menrath:
Hello, it’s nice to be here and to speak to you again.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, we met before, so it’s not the first time.

André Menrath:
Yeah, yeah.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But before we start, maybe you could start with a brief introduction.

André Menrath:
My name is Andre and what I usually like to tell people is that I came to software development by accident, mostly because I studied audio engineering and piano. And then during the first COVID lockdowns, I couldn’t do those usual things I did in the past. And then I kind of focused into like the digital sphere a bit more and soon began to start developing the tools I missed out there. And this is where the videos also took my attraction. And since then I became a feedback developer and part of this community. And I’m very glad. And it also became kind of my job because two years ago I also got funding by lnnet, which is like money from the European Commission. And I feel very honored actually to do this now.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So you haven’t learned coding? No, studying in this direction, this was really a by accident thing.

André Menrath:
I mean when you study something audio engineering, you get some basic C programming courses and you have something in Matlab where you do like signal processing, but on a very high level. Not at all. Web programming or front end stuff or css, Nothing like that.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay. Yeah. But for now, doing that for a living. That’s quite nice, isn’t it?

André Menrath:
For now it is at least. Really? It depends on what I’m doing. I’ve never been in the position where I had to do any software I didn’t like, was urging for like I really want this, this thing to see life and used by people and replacing other harmful stuff. And that’s why it makes so much fun because I can see and experience the results myself. And I also use the tools myself and the communities I know in my town use those tools now. So this is very nice.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay, so. But that is not the only thing you do. So when I did my math and did some research, I stumbled. Or it’s mainly Graz Social, what you can see if you search for Andres Vita. So what is that about?

André Menrath:
It was also during the first COVID lockdown. I mean the first thing I wanted. Everyone invited me to Zoom Calls at that time and I was just upset and because there’s free software. And then I was just, for the first time ever, I rented a virtual server somewhere in the wild and I installed Jitsi Meat and I needed a domain for this and I already knew about Masterton. I had an account on a community server in Germany which was really lovely. Technics.de like the admin Milan greetings to him. If he hears that he’s doing great stuff. And the domain grants that social was free. And because I had this mind of maybe doing a Mastodon server in the future, I just rented that one and actually I set up both. I just went through the tutorial or guidance how to set up your mastodon server on Mastodon.org and how to do hardening on a basic Linux machine. I mean, I had. I was touching the command line, command line for quite some time, but I never was a system administrator. I just got into it by doing it. And at first it was very small, there were only like 10 or 20 users. But then during, when Musk bought Twitter, we suddenly became thousand users, like overnight, basically. And I was funding an association bit because I could not deal with it on my own any longer. I was like at some point was too much to do it in my own. But now we have a solid team of moderators and of administrators and we have solid funding by a lot of donators. And it’s like exploring the Fediverse firsthand what people need and then developing the tools on the other side. It’s a nice thing to do. And we also go into. We have a lot of talks with members from our city, with associations there and educate about the Fediverse, because you do this part with this association.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So when I first looked for your projects, I thought this would be a more official thing. So I thought about that you were the moderator for the official Macedon instance of cards. But this is all side project things.

André Menrath:
This is all side project things. Yes, always has been.

Matthias Pfefferle:
And like so many good projects, it started With a domain. I have a nice domain. What should I do with that?

André Menrath:
Yeah, actually I looked already. I think when I first got into Mastodon, I was just having my bachelor’s in piano finished and then I was like, I have some free time and I was already thinking about doing something like that. But at that point the domain Radstar Social was not free. It was supposed to be sold for like thousands of euros. And I was saying, oh, then not. And then I forgot about this idea. But then because of the pandemic, I looked at this domain again, then it was free and I just. It was quick back then and now it’s our domain.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay. And this is not the only project.

André Menrath:
Yeah, it’s like from the very beginning I was like, it was not meant to be like the one Mastodon server of Graz, but I really wanted to demonstrate like the diversity of the 3D verse. And then I was hosting like all applications that were out there at the time. I was setting up a Pixel Thread server, I was setting up a mobile source server, I was setting up a Lemmy server, I was setting up a funkwhale instance. And it was really funny because at the first time in Brussels I met the Funkwhale guys and the first thing they told me when I was telling them yeah, I’m running an instance, they were like, oh, there are users that was so enlightened to hear that. Plenty of services I forgot. And also we ran like this Jitsi server and other open source tools, but mostly Fediverse stuff.

Matthias Pfefferle:
And what is driving you to host all of that?

André Menrath:
Because like the decentral world needs just needs these things hosted. Like in the beginning there won’t be that much offers where you can join. And from the very beginning I also like the regional aspect of the thing because I mean it is all federated. But to have this nice local timeline in Mastodon really makes a lot of sense. And it makes even more sense to have a local instance, for example MobileISO like event servers, because events are mostly local. There are online events and maybe it’s sometimes nice to look what is going on in other cities, but mostly it’s just made to look up what’s going on tonight in our town.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So that’s funny. I wasn’t aware that this is a whole other story. We could spend about an hour talking about everything you are hosting. Okay, maybe you will join for second episode, but I mostly invited you to talk with you about your WordPress project and how did that come together. So you are mostly running already existing things that Are simply you install it somewhere and then it works. Why building something else to bring events to WordPress federated events. Or maybe you.

André Menrath:
I think you made the perfect bridge. Just made the perfect bridge. Because you know, as we’re setting up this mobile source server and you know this when you try institutions for example, or organizations to. To convince them to join the Fediverse and they don’t see the Fediverse when they first know about it, about the end solution to all these problems we have with centralized networks which are not federated. They see it as a further network which will be there for some time and then will be gone and then will there be the next thing. So they don’t see the real chance that is within this open protocol Activity pub which drives the feedback. And I was trying a lot of organizers though there’s this platform now you can post your events there. But people already said it’s so much work. We already post them on our website, we post them to the official calendar of the city of Graz and we post them on Facebook and we do Instagram. We prepare pictures where we can post. And now we should also do it on your platform and we should be the first ones. There are no other events almost so why would anyone look there and see our events? And then I had first the idea, okay, a lot of these people have WordPress websites. So I built a plugin for WordPress where if you have a group on mobile, so and post your events there, you can show them on your WordPress website.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Kind of a widget?

André Menrath:
Yeah, not a widget, but really like a mirror. It schedules like every hour it looks on the mobile socket or the new events and then it shows them on the webpage side. But then when I saw your plugin where you made the WordPress website itself an activity pub instance and I was having this like popping in my upping my head this idea why not doing it the other way around? It should be the other way around because the website is like the most silver ran thing. People have an organization like this little bar which organizes like concerts twice a week and it already posts the events there. So if I somehow could make it work that we are also possible of listing events which are not created on this MobileISO website. But as an administrator you can say I want to list like. Which it’s basically same thing as I want to follow other accounts and other servers and list them on my website. So my idea was if you have this mobile resource server and there are this like I looked up all the organizers in Graz and so like 80% have a WordPress website and use one of the big plugins and if I could make something and convince them to really use this stuff, then I could just aggregate all their events automatically with our mobile server, for example, and then they would not have this extra work, which was always the first argument. We don’t want to do extra work and publish our events somewhere else.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So maybe because you mentioned that so many times, maybe you explain a bit what Mobilizon is and I think we will do that over and over again. But I really love the idea that everyone in this show will try to explain the Fediverse in their words, because I think it may be different for the explanation are very personal and everyone has a different view on that. So maybe we have the perfect mashup in the end of the year cutting together all of the explanations. So maybe some words about what is the Fediverse and what is Mobilizon and what is the role of Mobilizon in the Fediverse?

André Menrath:
Let’s start with the fediverse first. Like for me I think the word of the protocol which drives the fediverse Activity Publisher is so it’s like hitting the nail on the top. Like Publish activities, it’s all about you have some kind of content and you want to publish it. And activity Pub or 3D verse knows different content types and it should give like everyone the right tools or instances where they can sign up or websites where they can publish the content. And what is now the thing. If you publish it via Activity Publish, others can interact with it the same way as they used to in social media. That means like they can comment on it or they can directly follow your account so they will receive new updates, or they can like it, or they can just share it with one click. And it’s so seamless because they just use their interface of their choice and they can like consume all this stuff which is out there. But as we know, most of the part of the Cineverse is driven by Mastodon and Mastodon only focuses on short notes. So if you have events, you kind of have a problem. And I think the fediverse, what we are experiencing today is still a very little part of what the fediverse can be. Because I really believe in fediverse where all content types not equal, but where really users understand that they have to choose the right tool. If you want to publish events, you use a tool for publishing events. You won’t set up a pixel fat account which is like a pit up to Instagram. It’s similar to what Instagram once was, but nowadays Instagram became like the tool of news already or for events, but it’s not made for that. It’s so easy. Yeah, it’s just inaccessible for all kinds of maybe blind people because all the information is put in pictures and I cannot search for an event. What is happening today? You have to scroll through four hours a day at Instagram to maybe get this one event which interests you for this day. And I don’t want to see this behavior copied in the Fediverse. So that. And this is actually what I’m experiencing as an administrator that I see like people are registering on our Pixel Fit instance because they want to share their events there. And I think that we have a lot of educational work to do. And the tools, actually, I understand because the tools, Mobilizon are not that mature enough. They have to be better. And now we come to Mobilizon. What does Mobilizon do? Mobilizon is a platform where you can organize and share events and it’s really made for both organizing and sharing events. And this is actually quite a lot, actually. And this is also what confuses people because when people have a look at Mobilizon, it’s just at the homepage it has the feeling of, yeah, you can just post events there and look for them. But under the hood we have this whole functions of. You can make groups, you can have different capabilities or roles, like one are administrators, one are moderators in the group and then they are just members of a group. And a group can post events and the administrator can say, only groups can post events or other individuals too. And then there’s this thing. If an individual account posts an event on Mobilizon, it is not visible on other federated Mobilizon servers because they say events from a person that should not be that visible because only groups should have a visibility. And then there’s an internal forum built in and there’s so many features, even the developers did not know that they exist. They just were created by accident. And it was. It’s, in my opinion, just. It’s like the solution we need at the very end, but with a lot of bugs at the moment. And that’s why so many people are a bit of disappointed from this piece of software still. And it’s. I was quite sad that Framersoft, which developed Mobilizon, it’s a French nonprofit software organization, quit maintaining it or developing it further. But luckily now some people are doing this job and also get funded by Net to do this and I hope over the time we can make also a good future rich product. But that is what Mobilizer is doing. It’s doing quite a lot, but has some drawbacks because it’s just doing too much from the very start.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So thanks for the explanation and I agree that there is a lot to explain to classic social media or social web users how the Fediverse works differently. But the nice thing about the Fediverse, you kind of mentioned that as a downside. But I would say that this is a big opportunity of the Fediverse. Even if you choose to use Pixel Phat, the image platform for subscribing or publishing events, it is possible to follow these events from other platforms that maybe structure that a bit better so it’s not completely a dead end and it’s easier to migrate your account from one server to another server. So it’s even better than using classic wallet garden social media. But you already teased that when installing all of that. The idea of having WordPress as your main event solution because it’s was very hard to convince site users to use yet another tool to publish stuff. Which is by the way, one of the biggest issue we have, especially in the WordPress community, because over the last, let’s say, 10 years we taught them that cross posting is the way to go. So if you publish something on your site, install a lot of plugins to push that information out in every big social network and to kind of craft a special excerpt for every different social network, choose images especially for that network. And that was really work to do, or that still is really work to do. And most of them had not yet understand that the Fediverse is not yet another social network that has to be feeded, but that simply the blog is then now part of this Fediverse. And the blog provides in the best case, every information it has about the blog post, like every image, an excerpt, a long form, content, tags, you name it. And the consuming platform can choose from that list of attributes what they want to show or what they do not want to show. And that needs to be understood by everyone finally. So it’s not yet another network, it’s the network, it’s no longer cross posting.

André Menrath:
And also in addition to that, if you mentioned cross posting, like I saw so many times how people misunderstood how the Fediverse works for the receiving people. Like people are so used if they, for example, they have a WordPress page and they have a certain NGO association and they do like a real news post like every three weeks, for example, but on social media, on Instagram they have an account and to stay visible there they need to post like at least they think they need to post every day as another image which has not this much of information. It’s just to get the attention and screen time from the followers. And if you have this kind of content, usually just have a timing base, a timeline which has no algorithm. It just shows you the newest post first. And at this point in the fediverse at least that’s the common thing. Like Mastodon and Pixel Fat and most other huge platforms do it that way. And it can get really annoying. If you follow like an ngo, which is interesting you and you see actually this post every day which has no information and it actually makes you unfollow.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Them and huge learning curve.

André Menrath:
This is like people are just. They just treat the feedback the same way as they are used to with commercial social media. And that’s just not the way it works.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But now let’s talk about your plugin. What does it do? Why is it so important that we have to talk about that in a podcast?

André Menrath:
Yeah, my plugin was basically does because a lot of websites already exist out there and many of them have events they share and most of them use the big event plugins to do so. And what my plugin actually does, it translates those events published with big event plugins on a WordPress website to the activity Pub specification so that these events are part of the fediverse right ahead. And it basically uses the plugin you wrote to do all the federation stuff. So it does not have to care about how is the content sent to other servers. How does this things work. But it only focuses how to translate an event which is already there on the website to give it to your plugin to federate it properly.

Matthias Pfefferle:
I wanted to highlight that. So you played it down a lot. So it is not simply bridging things. And that’s why I have to say something about that. So I really appreciate that you did what you do to not build yet another plugin and implement everything but with federation and decentralization. Because it’s from my perspective it’s way more work to use what’s already there and bridge things and work around things that are not yet possible. So what Andre did is he’s talking to the main biggest plugin event plugin developers. He’s talking with me, he’s talking with Mastodon, he’s talking with the Mobilizon developers to have a working product in the end. And I really appreciate that and we met in. When was it? In March at the Cloud Fest for the first time and shame on me, this was the first time I really had the time to look into your plugin a bit more deeply. And this is amazing what you did and trying to push everyone as hard as possible to implement what you need is really hard work and the really nice thing about that is you do not have to change your current workflow or behavior. So it’s not if you want to have federated events, you have to install yet another event plugin, migrate all your events to that plugin so that it will work. It’s simply you have to install two other plugins, one that is implementing all the protocol stuff and your plugin which is translating from let’s say the proprietary event persistence of the plugin to that standardized format to then send it out and worked so nice. It always seemed to me that this is highly work in progress and you’re still trying to get everyone to the table to talk about what needs to be done. But this works quite good and has really nice feature sets, so not bad.

André Menrath:
Thank you. Thanks a lot.

André Menrath:
Want to mention one point like when we talk about this interoperability thing because for example Mobilizon was the first software in the fediverse which focused on events and the specification of activity Pub is very not that specific about how to handle events. I mean there was also Friendica and there was Hapsilla, but the events they had and the interfaces are more focused on I invite you to my birthday party and you accept it. And this is not like you have this big calendars, it’s also working there but it was not the main focus and it did not get the attention like it got Mobilizon saw like publishing events and Mobilizon saw so quickly the need for extending their specification and it basically did so only with their needs in mind. We have our software and we know what like what is in the federation of only mobile source servers what needs to be there. And they extended it just with this mindset and actually when the next event Fediva software came up, which was for example Gun show or like my plugin things got really. Things broke because like there were so many assumptions which just did not make any sense for another software which has a different use case or interface. And then it now drove a process to like unify this behavior and to get a proper enhancement of the activity specification like an extension of the specification, how to handle events and what is like the most common miniature like to really make things work in federation. And this process has been really rewarding but also very exhausting. Like it’s very tough to talk to all those stakeholders all the time.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So you are referring to the. I had to look that up because I was not sure about the abbreviation. Yeah, it’s called FEB F E P Fediverse Enhancement Proposals. So it’s. How can you compare that to something. It’s the RFC of the Fediverse. RFCs are standards so it’s maybe not comparable to RFCs but what I wanted to say it’s a community driven thing so it’s not directly under the W3C but it’s. Most developers agree on that proposal thing and it’s the nearest you can get to extending the specification. And you wrote a proposal how the ideal event would look like not by defining it from scratch but putting together every kind of. The best of all implementations out there yet kind of.

André Menrath:
And also at some points I had to be very strict and I invited also for example the developers. I had quite a lot of exchange with the developer and he was reviewing like my work from the very beginning and gave me so much input. Also other people which work in the 3D verse world gave a lot of reviews. Actually the Mobilizon team gave the least reviews. Maybe I should invite them once more to contribute there. Because it’s always. It’s always the thing if you do such community work you always have to be so careful that people don’t get missed out. And for example I once and don’t feel like they are not seen. For example, I once hold a talk about my event when it was in the very beginning a year ago at the Graza Linux Target which is the biggest Linux conference in Austria. And I was only mentioning Friendica and Hubzilla like for one second also because I never used them myself so I couldn’t speak firsthand and I speak and I spoke to a big audience. But the developers of Hubzilla and Friendica were a bit sad that I did not mention them and now it’s even harder to ask them for participating in such community driven like interoperability projects. And sometimes I’m also just human and sometimes it’s taking a lot of power. But it’s also in the end if you have nice talks like this, it’s very rewarding too. I try to do my best, you know.

Matthias Pfefferle:
That’s why I wanted to highlight that. So it’s not bridging things and working on interoperability is not the easy thing. So I would say that the coding in the end is the way more easier part in that whole thing.

André Menrath:
Yeah. Also when it comes to interoperability also is about when it comes to changes in your project because I made a lot of pull requests, you may remember, and there were a lot of issues where I told you like couldn’t we have this flexibility in your plugin? Because then we would have to. I would have the freedom to this and not have all these workarounds and actually it would have maybe been easier to just do all those workarounds. But I always think we have to do maintainable software which will be there for a long time and serve us good and not will be like fast. Aha. And then with your next version maybe things break again. So. Yeah, and that’s why it also took.

Matthias Pfefferle:
This reminds me a lot about my first experience. So when I was asked why I implemented things the way I implemented that because in the spec it was mentioned completely different or defined completely different, I always told them that I have not built an Activity Pub server at the beginning, but I kind of reverse engineered what Mastodon already implemented. But I really liked that and how it turned out. Because you. Yeah, there is frustration afterwards if a platform is at least at the beginning focusing on their protocol and to federate with their platform. But at least it’s working code. And I really like the idea of the indie web movement. They prefer working code over specifications. So I really like to be hands on and to have something working and then step back and see how you can define that in a proper way and change your software to that. Regards that it will work with that kind of ideal definition of that. So I agree that it’s exhausting if you are not a developer on this specific platform but want to be interoperable. And not only interoperable with that platform, but with every other platform too. This is quite tricky and yeah, but from their niche perspective it might be the best way to go. Not convinced.

André Menrath:
I mean I see the point and we are all human and everyone is different and some people prefer that way and I prefer working the other way. Actually. I’m the standards guy. Yeah. And I always. But not making new standards, but as close to shaping standards that it’s that others can still migrate to those conventions, you know.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But working like this, you. You’re kind of the event contributed to all of the big platforms. You even have a pull request for Mastodon merged. So.

André Menrath:
Yeah. And I have further plans for masterclass.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So you’re officially famous.

André Menrath:
Yeah.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So, but what are your plans with the plugin or maybe also what big event plugins do you currently support with your bridge?

André Menrath:
The plugins I mostly focused on was the events calendar. The first is because it’s just the most installed event plugin which is out there, which is like half a million of installations, active installations. And galapres on the other hand is a very new event plugin which is in alpha state and it’s solely community driven and it’s like doesn’t have all this legacy stuff going on. And the thing is, and when I ask, I did a lot of research before starting doing any coding. Like we already found out and I was talking to a lot of like 10 plus organizations like mostly based in Austria, about which already had WordPress platforms and about their needs of publishing events. And actually I found out that most of them were not really satisfied with the event plugin. And there was the one or other way and you just teased what are my future goals? And I’m not quite sure how to do that. But I think what also the Fediverse needs is like a real community event plugin which has most features just built in. For example, with the events calendar you want to have a custom listing of your events. You already need to pay like for such simple things, which I think okay, that would take me one day of effort to do a proper UI and for a custom event listing, but for many people it’s just already too much, especially for very small organizations. I’m not talking about the big players, about theater houses or something that public wants or. Yeah, and was I answering your question enough or.

Matthias Pfefferle:
I’m not sure. So you are finally planning to make the one and only event plugin that’s federating. So I announced you like the bridging guy that do not want to have yet another event plugin and. And now you’re building it. Ah, shame on me. Yeah, shame on you.

André Menrath:
No, the thing is I’m not building it on my own. I’m others are building an event plugin and I’m actually together helping the Gatherpress people to shape the way they develop their plugin to work it as good as possible and make it to be part of the Activity Pub world just to have some RPE points where they develop things and so that I can very easily make the Activity Pub integrations for it.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay.

André Menrath:
And don’t have to do a lot of workarounds. And especially for example, if you take attendee management, if you just make attendee management per email and hard code it that way, then I will have a hard time of making attendee management via Activity Pub. But if they agree that they already do a flexible way of handling attendees so that there can be many adapters for that. For example, one can be email, one can be local users user account which can register on that website and then there could be a third one which is Activity Pub. And they decided for example to do that in this flexible way because I showed them the need for it and then might become important in the future.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Do you think that it’s valuable enough for event plugin developers yet to directly implement Activity Pub support or do you think you would still have a lot to do to bridge these plugins?

André Menrath:
I would love that actually. That’s what I want to see in the very end I think my plugin solved a lot of issues in this regard and if I would be the events calendar, I would totally encourage them take over this part, take what you need for my software, I mean it’s a very general public license. Take this code and use it and build in all this little custom features I do not know of yet because I for example, if you have the events calendar, you have the event ticket manager for example for managing attendees and they would be the best to know how their things work. And in the end I think in an ideal world my plugin may become useless, but my code will be not because they can just reuse it. But I was like not naive and waiting for all these event plugin developers to do this part. And actually it’s nice to have it done in a joint way because I was really like observing what are the common problems that all event plugins have. And I separated these issues from the event plugin specific issues also in the code I wrote in my plugin. So it should be very easy to understand. Okay, this is like just the event plugin and this is like the general part.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But what is the feedback from the developers so far or do you have any feedback?

André Menrath:
I have no feedback at all and actually I have never tried to get in touch with events plugin developers. Okay, it sounds so natural but this is where my energy was just I was out.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So you try to talk with the people you have to be interoperable with and you try to avoid talking too much with event plugin developers because maybe because it’s proprietary, you simply can bridge that. So yeah, makes sense. Okay, but you mentioned that you would prefer that they would merge your code into their plugin. Do you have any plans when you will go to the plugin developers to pitch that idea?

André Menrath:
I mean I might the future at the moment I’m taking some time off from this project, but I might resume work in summer and actually there I will have to do this step and it’s already on a roadmap, but it’s just not happening yet and I would have to look what their reactions are. I cannot tell yet what’s happening then.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay, But I have to say you are the most well prepared spare time project developer that I’ve talked with. So you did research before starting working on the development. So I’m the total opposite guy. Before I start researching I think I have an idea and a need and then I start coding and then I think about what could I have done better.

André Menrath:
Yeah, it’s really also thanks to lnnet and ngongo like where I got funding to do that because actually they. The first thing is they can’t fund research. But what they can fund is if you can publish something like which is just available for everyone and if the research you do, you can you summarize it in a way to point out important stuff concerning the software and what is needed, then they can fund it. And they also supported me to do that actually. And it and getting funding from them was like so easy. It’s like writing a few thousand words like text and then having a one hour call and then that’s basically it. And then you have so many nice possibilities with them together and they guide you through all this process and really huge shout outs to them. They made this all possible.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So. And what next?

André Menrath:
What next? I mean I have some very urgent features on the roadmap. For example, like what I did was we had this cloud first hackathon where we wanted to develop some things and it was so funny for me to watching all you guys actually needing a whole day to figure out what is already working and what is for example already working. That a WordPress website with for example the events plugin or another event plugin insert can also Work as an event hub. So it can also aggregate events. So you can suggest set up a WordPress website for your town and aggregate events from any activity pub profiles and list them on your event. And there are a lot of feature requests already came up and I already realized how important they are. For example, if I would run a WordPress site I already got a domain for that grads events and I have plans for that to set up a WordPress site there for like events for our town. And I want to follow several actors but there are a lot of activity profiles out there which publish events which have events all over Europe, you know. But maybe I only want to list the events which are part of Graz. So I need like to have some filters which events are am I accepting from followers that I will also import them and list them. And they can be based on several keywords. They can be based on geolocation. Or I could even maybe think of just listing single events. I’m not like following an actor listing all his future events, but just specific ones. I want to just this one event I want to import with one click via activity Pub and receive all the updates afterwards too for example. And such features are in my mind. And also the which is not implemented at all in my event plugin is RSVP like attendee management. I do not anything to do with that. But this is where things become really interesting. And I also think a lot about. I haven’t mentioned it, but I want to mention it. It’s not fitting right here. But the funny thing is we already we talked about this thing. You have your WordPress website and it’s your most sovereign and your most. It’s your ID in the Internet, your domain. But some organizations and people are really still a bit afraid of using this identifier as also a federated source of their content because they see what they can post on commercial social media. If there’s a little company and they do social media posts, things are not that official.

Matthias Pfefferle:
I see. Yeah.

André Menrath:
You know, but if it comes from their website the thing is damn official. And then they have to think twice and then it’s maybe not just can the social media team post on the website sometimes not. There’s a social media team which just has access to Facebook and then they cannot touch the website. And I’m not sure what to do with this information yet. And it’s troubling me sometimes that people lost the courage to like use their website. They just use it as a We need some website because we need also the domain and the domain has the email address with it. And then we have an impressum and a very official way of doing things. But all this public our website, it’s just too serious to do this kind of work too. And I don’t know what to think about this yet.

Matthias Pfefferle:
That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s interesting. And this is not limited to companies. I would say this is a problem you get if you have a certain level of reach and the more reach you have and the more people that are reading your site or your posts, the you the more you force yourself to write into that direction. So I kind of had the same feeling. My, my blog became very technical, but I started as a personal blog. But now that this is kind of part of my identity, publishing something about the fediverse. I’m the WordPress fediverse guy, so I can’t publish something random on my blog anymore. And I’m curious if this might change with, with the Fediverse over time. Hopefully.

André Menrath:
Yeah, maybe I don’t know what will happen and I don’t know what will be the Eli solution, but we will find out and see what’s happening.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So. But you have a next domain gods events. So in the end it always comes back to hosting something. So the development part is only to bridge the needs. So there is no federated plugin yet, so you have to build one. But when it’s built you go back to hosting stuff or what is your profession? What do you want to focus on long term?

André Menrath:
I mean I focus on this stuff because I care about democracy and I care and I think the most turning point in my life towards this work also was reading Surveillance Capitalism by Susanna Shoboff and to understand how all this ads and algorithms on social media make us unfree and make us predictable and actually change our behavior and destroy democracy. And this was my main motivation to get into all this. And the reason I focused on events was basically because I think events are things which bring people together in real life, like with their body, like not only their physical body, but also like where their mind lives in, you know. And this is just so important for me. And that’s why I focused on this part. Okay, so it’s because I see the whole I said this is what nothing else. I looked is anyone doing this job? And no one was doing this work? And I said okay, then I think I can do that. Then this will be my part of like being part of a active and living democratic world to do this job. And I will see if this figure is still needed in the future. Or other people might stand up and say okay, we want to join and maybe become a bigger movement and maybe I can also focus back on other things because like I told you before, I studied piano. I would love to finally get my music out there on stages, you know, and play concerts again which I cannot do like properly with all this side projects. I mean I have a day job, daytime job too.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So yeah, quite a lot for spare time projects. But I like that it’s neither nor that you have a way higher goal so that this is only to get there. But your real drive is something more. More abstract. Cool. So maybe finally what do you have to do to federate your events? How can we or all the listeners do that?

André Menrath:
Now if you have a WordPress website already or if you already run one of the events link like go to the plugin website of the Activity Pub eventbridge and just check out if your event plugin is listed there, if it’s supported, if it’s not or if you have a custom event plugin then I just encourage you get in touch with us. There’s a contact mail address there. You can find an issue tracker and we will try to implement it for your plugin if you have some spare time because it should be very little work and there already have been such a request and I will do that as soon as I can. And yeah, and just really feel free to report any issues you discover and because if you don’t report them they will maybe still exist for the next one and there sure are plenty of little issues also which because a WordPress installation is something which is sometimes done by hosters and they have very specific side effects which might cause troubles and we really try to help with that. It was also really funny because like one person was asking or reporting this kind of bugs and the third comment this person wrote was like there’s actually a human person responding to my posts on the WordPress.org support from. It’s not just a commercial. Like if you want support by our product there and it should work and I think we really try to make this work for everyone and to make the barrier to install it and get it running as. Yeah, and actually if you. The setup should be really straightforward like install the Activity Pub plugin for Matthias, read through the settings once at least that’s also what I am recommending in my plugin and read through the settings page once in our plugin in the Activity Pub Eventbridge. It should take you like five minutes and then you basically should not have to worry about it again. And you continue posting your events on the website like you always do. And what you can do, you maybe announce to you have a private Mastodon profile, announce this WordPress activity pub account there so that other people maybe get to know it and it already gets some starting point reach. Or if you know people who run a gun show mobile store server, tell them about it and maybe they want to list your events.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Perfect. And I think we put the links to all the needed plugins in the show notes maybe with some explanation how to install them. And yeah, I’m glad that you bring humanity back to the WordPress forums. So kudos for that. And I wanted to mention that it’s not no longer only me working on the plugin. Yeah, I built that. But I’m happily funded by Automattic and have a lot of contributors and we are a team now. So I’m very glad that it turned out like that for me. But we are also happy about a lot of bug reports feedback, what we can improve, what features are needed. Otherwise we have to assume and that’s not always good. So. So any final words? Andre?

André Menrath:
I think I made most important points over the course of this little talk and I think maybe for last time we can reach out to Mastodon because Mastodon has such a huge influence over the Fediverse and I really hope that the new structure they have like for example the leader Gago, he can now really focus on leading the project and not doing the development and they have more developers at that they now can focus more on other non node format softwares because Mastodon is used by most people who just want to consume things. It’s not everyone in who does not have Infidel account. I recommend to the people Mastodon. If for example people only have an Instagram account, I don’t recommend pixel fat to them unless they really want to post pictures and do the just want to aggregate and maybe make a comment once or twice then I always recommend Mastodon to the people. And the thing is Mastodon, if at the very end I think Mastodon should fully support events because Mastodon is just like the most important like browsing in the fediverse software which is out there and it would be so amazing if they would even support calendars or stuff like that might seem totally unrealistic at this point, but there are a lot of years to come.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But that said, I would agree that this is the case for now, but the ideal solution to all of that would be WordPress because WordPress already has all of these content types, long form, short form, events, podcasts, you name it. And its perfectly UI is perfectly crafted for all of these contents.

André Menrath:
So for posting it, for publishing it, for creating it and for sharing it. But if it comes to consuming, that’s.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Only one step further. So we can make.

André Menrath:
Okay, yeah, it could also be possible and I don’t know. Well, I really don’t focus on any specific software but I see the problem that sometimes because of this huge there are so many MasterCard accounts there, it sometimes lowers my motivation a bit. And it’s not because it’s not the masterbund developer’s fault, it’s just inherent with the whole situation. It’s not anyone’s fault.

Matthias Pfefferle:
And in the end every open source platform is fighting with limited resources.

André Menrath:
So yeah, of course we are.

Matthias Pfefferle:
That were the final words.

André Menrath:
Yeah, I hope that we will can create something that’s so that also like the vast majority of society and people really can get rid of commercial social networks and that maybe in the next generation people will grow up in schools and just use the Fediverse as natively as they use email by now. Yeah, this would be my wish for the future.

Matthias Pfefferle:
These are perfect final words. Okay, thanks a lot, Andre. Thank you that you could make it and I’m very glad that you are so persistent to push everyone to be as interoperable as possible. And I hope that you can focus on the piano very soon because everything would work nicely together.

André Menrath:
I hope so. Yes.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Thanks a lot.