I activated a number of plugins last year to help make my blog part of the IndieWeb and Fediverse ‘communities’. I definitely support their intentions, particularly relating to owning my own data. Unfortunately, something ‘broke’ with Discord some time back that I’ve been unable to fix.
I am, for now at least, disabling a key part of my Fediverse connection: ActivityPub.
The problem with Discord
For reasons I do not comprehend, Discord prioritizes ActivityPub over OpenGraph tagging. OpenGraph allows me to specify summaries and images that I want included in my post references, whereas ActivityPub sort of does its own thing to summarize without my input. As an example:
My OG tagged summary
The ActivityPub powered Discord summary
Disabling ActivityPub in WordPress
For self-managed WordPress sites: you can simply either never install the ActivityPub plugin itself or deactivate it if it is already there.
For folks with WordPress blogs hosted WP.com itself: I am relaying this second-hand based on conversations on the Blaugust Discord forums- Under Tools=> Marketing=> Connections, disable ‘Fediverse‘
The future…
I would like my WordPress based site to be a proper participant in the Indieweb and Fediverse. But I also don’t like what Discord does to my link summary when ActivityPub is active. So for now I will leave ActivityPub disabled.
What I would like is for the Discord developers to do one of two things. For sites that have both OpenGraph and ActivityPub they can either:
- Prioritize the OpenGraph tags over the ActivityPub summary when both exist; this seems simple and reasonable to me as OG tags are the more ‘precise’ way for the content owner to define how the summary should appear
- Provide a ‘switch’ in the user’s profile to pick one or the other as the ‘priority‘; this seems (in my opinion) needlessly complex and means that what the viewer sees might differ from the content owner’s intent based on their personal profile settings
I kind of suspect that Discord doesn’t even know that this problem exists or that it is a ‘problem’ to begin with. But as a blogger it is rather irritating.
Yep, this is exactly what I dealt with and it took me a while to find answers until I realized all I had to do was disconnect Fediverse. Thanks for sharing this information, it’ll help others dealing with the same issue for sure. I do hope Discord fixes this as it seems to be the only place where this is a problem.
Thanks, Emily!
I also opened a support ticket with Discord, but I’m not sure whether that will get much traction. Fingers crossed, though: I would like to re-enable ActivityPub to stay as a ‘proper’ participant in the Fediverse and IndieWeb community 😉
It never hurts to try as this is annoying for any writer no matter which way their site is hosted on WordPress.
If it were up to me, I’d give up Open Graph sharing to Discord long before I’d drop ActivityPub. Open Graph is nice for link previews, but ActivityPub is what keeps you connected to the Fediverse—real interoperability and decentralisation. Losing that would be a much bigger compromise, in my opinion.