Tag Archives: mastodon

Enable ActivityPub Plugin on Bitnami WordPress instance with LetsEncrypt

ActivityPub plugin is a very cool piece of WordPress addition. With this plugin installed users of Mastodon and other such federated platforms that support ActivityPub can follow your blog as if it were another instance on the Fediverse.

Unfortunately if you run a Bitnami instance of WordPress (for example one provided by AWS LightSail with LetsEncrypt service providing a TLS certificate for you site – you may encounter an incompatibility issue. LetsEncrypt uses /.well-known/acme-challenge path on your site for certificate validation, but ActivityPub plugin uses /.well-known/webfinger path to return relevant profile information. It conflicts with LetsEncrypt and the WebFinger path returns “404 – not found”.

Fortunately there is an easy fix. Continue reading →

Easily verify yourself on Mastodon with GitHub

Mastodon unlike Twitter doesn’t have official (or paid, thanks Elon Musk) verification badge for account profile, but it does offer a way to verify yourself – by placing following link tag into HTML of a website/page you own (your blog for example):

<a rel="me" href="https://your.instance/@YourHandle">Mastodon</a>

where “your.instance” and “@YourHandle” are the Mastodon server you use and your profile handle respectfully. But what if you want to verify yourself with your GitHub profile? An ideal place would be something like a README.md file. Unfortunately every link placed into a markdown file automatically gets rel="nofollow", so it’s a no-go. But there is a way to do this. Continue reading →

Writing first Mastodon bot

Over the years I’ve written quite a few Twitter bots. But since Elon Musk took over – the bird site has become unbearable, so I, like many others, migrated to Mastodon. What Mastodon is, and how it operates is a whole another story, but for our intents and purposes it is similar to Twitter: there is a home timeline where posts from people you follow appear, and you can post to the timeline as well.

Back on Twitter I used to have a bot that would tweet one-liners from Pink Floyd lyrics every hour. Follow me along as I recreate it on Mastodon.

First and foremost you have to make sure the Mastodon instance you’re on allows bots. Some do, some don’t – read the server rules to find out. I am using botsin.space instance that is specifically meant to host bots. Continue reading →