How to configure the mastodon account used by this plugin

Hi there!

The plugin doesn’t create any Mastodon account, but Fediverse users using the Mastodon platform will indeed see a representation of your site’s accounts when searching for an account’s handle in their Fediverse client of choice.

Let’s look at an example:

• My personal site is jeremy.hu. I’m an author on the site, and you can find all my posts and information about me on my author archive page at https://jeremy.hu/author/jeremy/
• The information displayed on that archive page comes from data (a display name, a biography) I added to my profile under Users > Profile in my WordPress dashboard.
• I use the ActivityPub plugin on this site and have enabled Author accounts in the plugin’s settings.
• As a result, the author I mentioned earlier can be found on the Fediverse. If you were to look for my author archive page in your Mastodon instance, you would find that author:

• Of course, on the Fediverse people are more used to look you up via a handle, not a URL, so you can also search for @author@domain.com:

• The information displayed there (and on the profile page that appears if I click on the name) all comes from the user’s profile page, under Users > Profile.
• In my ActivityPub plugin settings, I also enabled a blog-wide account, that will push all posts from my blog, regardless of the author:

• That means that one can now also search for @blog@jeremy.hu in their Fediverse client.
• The information displayed there cannot come from a user profile, since it’s a blog-wide account. As a result, the blog-wide account biography, name, and profile pictures are picked from the site’s general settings just like you mentioned.
  • The account’s name and description come from the site title and tagline, as set under Settings > General
  • The account’s profile picture and header image come from the site’s identity settings, as set under Appearance > Customize.

Changes to the WordPress site’s details above will not reflect on Mastodon straight away.

That’s a good point. Each Fediverse instance does indeed cache the data they fetch about each Fediverse account, to improve performance. But in practice, that means that sometimes information can be outdated until the cache eventually gets cleared.

Hopefully this all clarifies things a bit! 🙂