Feature Request: Post as Blog User

[DeadSuperHero]

What

Our blog makes use of the ActivityPub-WordPress plugin. It's great, and we want to be able to use that integration in conjunction with this one.

There's just one problem: clients used will instead post as the logged-in user, rather than the special blog user created by the plugin. In other words, if the ActivityPub plugin opts to post everything via @[email protected], posting with a client will instead post with @[email protected]

Why

Over at We Distribute, we're super interested in talking a Fediverse-native approach to publishing. One thing we want to experiment with is using ActivityPub to post articles, podcast episodes, and status updates. In the future, it might be worthwhile to get rid of our Mastodon account, and instead post everything from our blog Actor.

This API integration would allow our team to use whatever Mastodon apps we prefer, maybe even a team app like Buffer. We could basically do everything we need to do in one place.

How

The plugin could offer a checkbox to defer to a predefined Actor upon login. I could see this working in one of two ways:

1. Any WordPress user with an Admin role could log in via a Mastodon client, and anything they post goes to that Actor
2. The plugin could generate credentials for the blog Actor, which could then be used with a client.

[pfefferle]

Hey again @DeadSuperHero 👋

So, the Blog user is only a virtual concept, it is not a real user and you can not post as this user, even with WordPress or the ActivityPub plugin itself. So this is nothing that could be solved in the "Enable Mastodon Apps" plugin.

We thought about making the Blog-User a real WordPress User, but this is still in discussion and I am not sure about that yet.

[krafit]

+1