Adventures in setting up ActivityPub + Webfinger on a Flywheel-hosted WordPress site

Update: We got it working! Take a look at this post for more.

I recently moved my hosting from NFSN to Flywheel. NFSN had served me beautifully for years, very economically, but I just don’t have as much time for admin anymore and Flywheel’s managed WordPress hosting was a useful move to cut down on that stress.

Alongside the hosting move, I’ve been trying to set up the very talented Matthias Pfefferle’s ActivityPub and Webfinger WordPress plugins to get this site on Mastodon.

Unfortunately, Flywheel doesn’t seem to play super nicely with the plugins. Part of this is Flywheel’s NGINX configuration which they lock down tight with good reason. But the bigger sticking point is Flywheel’s full-page caching mechanism. Though their caching provider supports content negotiation, Flywheel itself does not. This causes issues where JSON can end up being cached instead of HTML on various pages, most notably the homepage. (Apologies if you saw a JSON blob when visiting this site recently!) We tried to get around this by forcing the content type on the homepage and Webfinger endpoints, but JSON was still served up on the homepage whenever a client sent through a header with Accept: application/activity+json.

For now, I’ve deactivated the plugins. I’m hoping that Flywheel might look in to supporting them more broadly, but that realistically depends on demand from their customers. For posterity since I hope to revisit this in the future 🤞, here is the discussion about all of the above within the Webfinger repo, including some tips from Matthias.

Flywheel’s support staff have been pretty fantastic through all of this and I’ve been really happy with the hosting thus far so I’m not tempted to move hosts (again) for this. Not yet at least!