this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Where's the source?
The post link is to the general website, with no indication.
The linked dotnet.social account describes itself with
So I have to take away that it's not federated after all. There's only a bot sharing links.
Federated would mean more than a bot, right?
The source is Maho. He's a Microsoft employee who has added ActivityPub (via the Wordpress plug-in) in his spare time. The 2nd person to follow it was also a Microsoft employee - @DevLeader@programming.dev - who I'm sure would be happy to clear up anything about it (I'm not sure if Maho himself is on here,, but Nick is).
That bots bio says "if you would like Microsoft to bring devblogs officially to the fediverse send feedback here" so I think it's not actually federated nor official
It's not official but it is federated, demonstrably.
The bot's posts are. Microsoft is not posting their content in a federated way. So I think it's very misleading to say the blog is federated.
Hi, creator of the bot here. I did not create this post.
I did not though the title as misleading at first, at the end this is a way to federate. I have been experimenting with ActivityPub for my site (https://maho.dev/2024/02/a-guide-to-implement-activitypub-in-a-static-site-or-any-website/) and I have seen others federate as Threads half implementing ActivityPub (not receiving replies for example). At the end MSFT DevBlogs is unofficially "federating" through a bot. I would think that adding the words "unofficially" and maybe "through a bot" would be enough to clarify everything.
But in a second though, federating can mean many things, and certainly one of the things I appreciate more, is not only consume news/articles, but also interact with them. That anyone who replies to a post from my blog, will appear also in my blog site, or anyone replying to this comment from mastodon will see their comment here. So, in that sense, devblogs is not federating, not even unofficially, and I can see the title as "misleading" people to think otherwise.
As a background, I am part of on the teams behind one of the blogs of MSFT DevBlogs, we do reviews, content edition, manage the CI/CD pipeline to publish, review analytics and finally the Wordpress part. I am trying to push from the inside to officially federate (although navigate to find the right person is always a struggle in big tech), but without data (how many people are actually reading or interacting from the fediverse) it would be difficult to make a case. I decided to create this bot, to see if it would be something useful for the fediverse, it has certainly been useful for me. I explored first things as https://rss-parrot.net/ but decided to create my own for different reasons, including the possibility to customize the content of the posts, and tag authors that are already in the fediverse (e.g. https://dotnet.social/@msftdevblogs/111992708317070935 and https://dotnet.social/@msftdevblogs/111990100520283347). I can see the points made against big corporations as microsoft/google/amazon, but there are many amazing, smart and kind individuals working out there in bigtech, and these blog series are mostly driven by such individuals.
Hi, I've started reading you blog and noticed your mention of activity pub for gitLab. Forgejo is working on exactly that. It's a fork of gitea.
Hi Maho! Good to see you here. I wasn't sure if you had joined here or not.
No, I did (see previous point I wasn't sure if you were on here). :-) Although there is some overlap between here and Mastodon, there are some who are only getting their news here or there, so I made some posts here too. I made the actual original post in the Windows Development Community, and have had a few new subscribers as a result, so that's good. :-)
You might like to make your own, separate post about that. I didn't do one for it yet - needed to explore more what communities we have here that might suit it (e.g. I'm not sure if there's a ActivityPub Community). I just knew it didn't really fit into the Communities I was already subscribed to (though maybe this one?).
That's a big thumbs up from me :-)
Yes, that was the point of my post - can now follow the blog directly.
Well, they're using Wordpress, and Maho has activated the Wordpress ActivityPub plug-in to enable following it. Currently to comment on them you need to login (I guess with MS account?), so yes, would need it to be on official MS involvement for that change to happen, rather than something Maho has done in his spare time, because that would need an organisational change.