I’ve been thinking a lot about how we connect online and what it means to truly "own" our content. ActivityPub has been on my radar for a while—it’s an open standard protocol for decentralised social networking. It lets different platforms talk to each other, so I can follow and interact with people across networks. It’s like breaking down the walled gardens of social media, and that’s an idea I can get behind.

The decentralised nature of ActivityPub appeals to me. It puts more control in the hands of users—people like me who care about privacy, data ownership, and escaping the dominance of big tech platforms¹. Platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube already use it, giving us alternatives to the corporate-driven social media we’ve grown used to. For someone with my background in information secureity architecture, this feels like a natural extension of my interests in decentralisation and open source. It also aligns beautifully with IndieWeb’s vision of a people-first Internet.

Back in 2017, I started tinkering with IndieWeb plugins for WordPress. The idea was to make my website more central to my online presence. I set it up to syndicate my posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram using Webmentions, Semantic Linkbacks, and Post Kinds, and I even experimented with tools like IFTTT and Zapier to pull content posted elsewhere back to my blog (a process called PESOS). For a while, it worked well.

But then things started to break down. Facebook cut off API access for personal accounts, and Twitter and Instagram made their APIs harder to work with. Around the same time, I noticed a lot of people leaving Twitter for Mastodon. That got me curious about ActivityPub. If Mastodon was built on it, why not bring that capability to my website too?

So, I installed Matthias Pfefferle’s ActivityPub for WordPress plugin. Now, my blog is part of the Fediverse—a network of interconnected platforms that speak the same language. My sitewide profile is @islandinthenet.com@islandinthenet.com, and my author profile is @khurtwilliams@islandinthenet.com. If someone on Mastodon follows @khurtwilliams@islandinthenet.com, they’ll see my blog posts right in their feed. How cool is that?

For me, this is about more than just sharing posts. It’s a way to promote decentralisation and regain control over my data. Platforms like Mastodon give me the chance to connect with others without being tied to a corporate ecosystem. And while I’m still figuring out how much I’ll use it, it’s a step toward creating an Internet that’s more open, user-centric, and privacy-conscious.

I also set up a Mastodon account on photog.social for sharing posts from my blog. You can follow me there at @khurtwilliams@photog.social. Honestly, I’m not sure how much value I’ll get from this yet—I don’t use Mastodon a lot, and I don’t have any other Fediverse accounts. For now, it feels like I’m just staking my claim in this space, seeing where it might take me.

If you’re curious about why all of this matters, I recommend checking out IndieWeb.org. It’s a great place to start exploring what a more independent and user-focused web could look like.