Introducing FediBoost

A few months ago, I turned on the ActivityPub plugin for this site. I loved it—my blog became followable from Mastodon, posts federated out automatically, and people could reply to my posts from their own instances. This is what indieweb is all about.

But something bugged me. My posts were federating from my site’s identity—@kraft@kraft.blog—which is great. But my Mastodon followers on @kraft@religious.social weren’t seeing anything unless they happened to also follow my blog. Two identities, no connection between them.

I used Jetpack Social which pushes posts to Mastodon when you write a new post on your site, but it wasn’t pushing my site’s own Fediverse post. It was creating new ones—which is great, but not what I was looking for.

So I built FediBoost.

What It Does

When you publish a WordPress post, FediBoost automatically boosts (reblogs) it on your connected Mastodon account. Your post federates via ActivityPub as usual, and then your Mastodon followers see the boost in their timeline too. Two distribution channels from one publish action.

The important bit: FediBoost doesn’t duplicate your content as a separate message. It boosts the original federated post, which means replies, favorites, and boosts all flow back to the ActivityPub version on your WordPress site. One canonical source.

That distinction matters to me. Your WordPress site is the source of truth. Mastodon just helps people find it.

How It Works

After you hit publish, FediBoost waits a short delay—30 seconds by default—for ActivityPub to do its thing. Then it searches your Mastodon instance for the post’s ActivityPub URL and reblogs it. The delay matters because Mastodon needs time to discover the federated post before it can boost it. You can tweak the timing with a fediboost_boost_delay filter if 30 seconds doesn’t fit your setup.

The whole boost runs through WP-Cron, so publishing stays fast.

You can connect multiple Mastodon accounts if you’re on different instances. The OAuth flow includes SSRF protection, and tokens are encrypted at rest.

Why This Matters to Me

I’ve written before about why I contribute to WordPress and what the open web means to me. FediBoost comes from the same place. The fediverse is the most exciting thing happening on the internet right now for people who believe you should own what you publish. ActivityPub turns your WordPress site into a citizen of that network. FediBoost just closes a gap I kept bumping into—ensuring the people who follow me actually see what my site publishes.

Try It

FediBoost 1.0.0 is on WordPress.org. Install it, connect your Mastodon account, and your next published post gets boosted automatically. Requirements are minimal: PHP 7.4+, WordPress 6.9+, and the ActivityPub plugin.

Matthias Pfefferle—who built the ActivityPub plugin—helped improve how FediBoost integrates with it, which was generous. Chuck Grimmett added WP-CLI support, because, of course, the first feature request after “it works” is “can I run it from the command line.” Open source FTW.

If you run into issues or have ideas, the GitHub issue tracker is the place. The source is there too if you want to contribute. The best features come from people actually using the thing, so don’t be shy.