Alternatives if you can’t edit well-known?

The problem on Dreamhost isn’t if you can edit .well-know/webfinger, but that when you have the ActivityPub extension added to your WordPress install, WP takes over management of the file and keeps it elsewhere, so you have to edit the .htaccess file in the .well-know/ directory to redirect any ActivityPub service that tries to check your webfinger can find where WP is keeping it.

The .htaccess file that Dreamhost defaults to in that directory looks like this:

# Permit access to the challenge files but nothing else
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[.]well-known/acme-challenge/[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+$
RewriteRule .* - [L]

RewriteRule .* - [F]

I changed mine to look like this:

# Permit access to the challenge files but nothing else
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[.]well-known/webfinger+$
RewriteRule .* /wp-json/activitypub/1.0/webfinger [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[.]well-known/acme-challenge/[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+$
RewriteRule .* - [L]

RewriteRule .* - [F]

I hope this helps!

I apologize for the delayed response! I apparently got mis-flagged as spam in the process of trying to edit my previous reply asking if we could add what I found out to the FAQ since Dreamhost is such a popular WordPress host.

I was so frustrated when trying to figure out what was wrong for my site, and I don’t even remember *how* I found the page that explained the solution — I think it was multiple links from one of the search results in DDG. All I know is that it looked like the plugin just wasn’t working without an error message, and what little I could find in the error logs didn’t really point me at *what* was causing the problem.

TL;DR: Yes, please add this information to the FAQ and save others the frustration!