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.