ActivityPub for WordPress

2025-06-11 13:00:00

Our 2025 Roadmap: Building the Future of WordPress Federation

We’re excited to share this roadmap — there’s a lot happening with the ActivityPub plugin, and we can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.

We often refer to this roadmap in GitHub issues and discussions, but until now, we haven’t published a full roadmap post — nor a formal changelog. This post is a first step toward keeping the community more informed about what’s planned and what’s coming up next.

Our goal for this year is to finalize the full ActivityPub experience — so that WordPress can be used as a first-class citizen of the Fediverse. This means enabling not only publishing to the network, but also following, reading, interacting, and moderating — all in a seamless way that feels natural for WordPress users.

This roadmap is not set in stone — priorities may shift based on community feedback, WordPress updates, or changes in the wider Fediverse. But it should give you a good sense of where we’re going.

Followers/Following

This is what we’re currently working on. You can follow the progress on GitHub.

Right now, the plugin supports only Followers. It doesn’t yet offer a way for your site to follow others in the Fediverse. But with new initiatives like the “Reader Experience,” this will need to change.

To support true two-way relationships — both Followers and Following — we need a database model that can clearly represent both types of connections. The current system, which relies on GUIDs to track remote actors, wasn’t designed for this. At the moment, it can store a remote actor as a follower of your site, but it doesn’t easily support the ability for your site to follow them back.

Implementing Following cleanly will require rethinking how this data is stored and connected.

Actors

This ties into a broader challenge with how the plugin currently models actors — both local users on your site and remote users from other Fediverse servers.

Today, the plugin uses virtual users to represent these actors. This was a practical choice early on to get federation working without rewriting how WordPress manages users.

But as the plugin grows — especially with features like Following and the Reader Experience — this approach is creating friction. Virtual users don’t behave exactly like regular WordPress users, so each time we add new features, we end up writing special workarounds.

Over time, this adds complexity and makes the system harder to maintain. Moving toward a more unified model for actors — one that integrates more naturally with WordPress’s existing structures — will keep the plugin flexible and reliable.

Moderation

Currently, the plugin relies on WordPress’s built-in “Disallowed Comment Keys” system to filter unwanted content at the inbox endpoint — before any ActivityPub request is processed. This mechanism allows you to block activities based on keywords or domains, using the same rules you’d apply to comments.

However, this approach is fairly blunt: it’s a simple keyword filter, not a nuanced moderation tool. This limitation will become more important as the plugin expands — for example, when adding support for image-based comments or richer media interactions.

Building a dedicated filtering mechanism is an important step toward giving site owners fine-grained moderation tools that are tailored to the unique challenges of federated content.

More details:

👉 GitHub — Question: How does this plugin interact with moderation and trust & safety on the fediverse?

Reader

A full Reader experience is one of our long-term goals — it’s the final big feature needed to give WordPress sites a complete ActivityPub/Fediverse experience.

Today, the plugin lets others follow your site, but there’s no built-in way for you to subscribe to and read content from others — in other words, there’s no “timeline” yet inside WordPress.

We plan to start with a simple, flexible approach: focusing first on storing remote posts in a way that’s compatible with tools like the WordPress.com Reader or third-party plugins like Friends or the Event Bridge for ActivityPub.

Once this foundation is in place, we’ll iterate on direct support — making it possible for site owners and users to follow and read Fediverse posts right inside WordPress.

Direct Messages

As part of this evolution toward a full Reader experience, we’re also exploring support for Direct Messages.

This is a frequently requested feature and an important part of richer Fediverse interactions. We plan to start with an initial implementation that enables private messaging — and then build on it as we learn from real-world use.

Fully delete profiles

One key principle of the GDPR is the “right to be forgotten.”

Currently, the plugin supports remote deletions, but does not trigger Delete Activities for local user actions.

The challenge is that WordPress operates differently from most federated social networks. Users might expect Delete Activities for certain actions that could have major consequences — for example, deactivating the plugin.

But deactivating a plugin is also a common troubleshooting step in WordPress.

To address this, we first need to define different use cases and guide users on how to trigger Delete Activities appropriately.

More details:

👉 GitHub — User Delete Milestone

Client-to-Server API (exploration)

In addition to the way servers communicate with each other across the Fediverse, ActivityPub also defines a “Client-to-Server” API.

This API is mainly designed to allow apps and clients (such as mobile apps) to publish content to a Fediverse server.

In the future, this could open up interesting possibilities for WordPress — for example, allowing WordPress to act as a bridge or proxy, making it easier to bring in and federate content from other tools or platforms.

At this stage, we’re exploring and evaluating this based on community interest and potential use cases.

Staying Informed

We’ll continue to keep you informed about the progress of this roadmap.

For each new release, we’ll publish posts highlighting the latest features and improvements. For larger projects — like the Reader experience or expanded moderation tools — we’ll also share regular updates so you can follow along as the work evolves.

As always, we welcome your feedback and ideas — they help shape the future of the ActivityPub plugin and the growing WordPress Fediverse community! 🚀

Followers v2 and Following v1 Milestone · Automattic/wordpress-activitypub

ActivityPub for WordPress. Contribute to Automattic/wordpress-activitypub development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub