I turned my website into a personal social network that connects to Bluesky and the Fediverse—here’s how.

I’m tired of posting on so many different social networks, so I built my own. All it took was a WordPress website, two plugins, and a lot of fiddling. But what does this mean? To get an idea you can browse JustinPot.com. The main feed is now a combination of my longform articles and shorter social-media style posts. You can follow my website on Bluesky or from any Fediverse server. My short posts will show up in your timeline, as is; my longform posts show up as a short excerpt followed by a link. But this isn’t just syndication—it’s a two way connection. If someone replies to a post from either protocol it shows up as a comment on my website. If I reply, my reply shows up in both places. Basically, I’ve turned my personal website into a way to communicate with people regardless of which social media platform they want to use. I’m happy with it. People have asked how I did this, so I thought I’d briefly talk about how this works behind the scenes. It’s actually not that complicated to do, at least to start. My website is built on WordPress—has been since 2010 or so. I used two plugins to connect this existing site to the social web. The first is ActivityPub, which turned my WordPress website into a Fediverse-compatible server. The second is ATmosphere, which connects my website directly to a Bluesky account. I installed both of these plugins and tweaked them to work the way I wanted, mostly by poking around in the settings. Neither is particularly hard to use, but there is a subtle difference between them. The ActivityPub plugin turns your website into a Fediverse instance, meaning your website itself is the social network. You can’t connect the site to an existing account on a Mastodon server—your site becomes the server. (You can migrate your followers but that’s a can of worms I haven’t opened yet—for now I simply boost posts from my existing Mastodon account). The ATmosphere plugin, meanwhile, connects to a Bluesky account. It guides you through changing your handle to your domain name, but you keep your existing Bluesky account. Posts you make on WordPress are pushed to Bluesky, but posts you make on Bluesky aren’t pushed to WordPress. That difference aside, the two plugins work in a similar way. Any comments made in response to a post will show up in the WordPress comments backend, allowing you to moderate them the same way you would comments published on the site directly. Likes and reposts from both social networks also show up as comments. There are a few hangups. Bluesky users cannot see Fediverse posts from Bluesky itself, or vice-versa. It’s not possible to reply to a conversation in one protocol from the other. And I’m still trying to figure out why some comments syndicate properly while others don’t. It’s a lot of trial and error, which is to say it’s a WordPress setup. I’m comfortable with that jankiness, but I understand that not everyone would be. I brought everything together with a custom WordPress theme that does a few things. First, it compiles the like and repost count from the WordPress comments backend and displays them as a number. Second, it makes it easy for both Bluesky and Fediverse accounts to share the article directly from their preferred protocol. Finally, it makes it clear which comments are coming from which protocol. What about other social networks? I’ve connected a few, sort of. I used Zapier (an old employer of mine) to automatically push posts to LinkedIn and Facebook. Status-style posts are pushed as is; longform posts push a few paragraphs followed by a link. The closed nature of these networks means things like comments, likes, and shares don’t show up on my website, and neither of these networks is a priority of mine. Still, I figure if I can reach a few more people with my writing it might be worth setting up. I could expand this to connect to more networks in the future—it’s all pretty flexible. My ultimate goal is to build connections on platforms I control. My newsletter is one such platform—it’s a list of email addresses. But the open nature of both the Fediverse and ATProtocol means any followers I build on those platforms are also something I own. No large company owns those relationships, which is a win. And now I can connect to both networks from a website, which I control completely. It’s been a fun little project—one I hope will help me connect with more people. If you also want to take more ownership of your internet presence, consider setting up something like this.