Honestly, this whole thing has been a royal pain, but also to be honest, I can’t see how trying to set up something else would have been any easier. I’m really just hoping this works at this point and if it doesn’t I’m probably going to need to make a Github account to file a bug, because I’ve been fighting with this for days now.

I just wanted to see if by some miracle this would post, but if it does, I’ll say how I managed to get it working.

Update

Turns out I could not get it working. I went to post on the Github page and my last response in the issue has been unanswered for something like a week now, so I decided to use the Mastodon Autopost plugin instead, which works despite having thrown a weird authentication error.

I’m guessing that AwardSpace is doing something to block ActivityPub by way of WebFinger and to be brutally honest, I’m not smart enough with Linux, PHP, OR Apache to figure it out and as such, while I’m a little disappointed, it’s at least a good opportunity to give my Mastodon.social account a better reason to exist outside of boosting my own polls and as a backup in case tech.lgbt is down.

This isn’t to say ActivityPub is bad as a plugin, just that I quickly reached the limit of my ability to figure out what’s wrong with my setup and whether it’s even something I can control. AwardSpace is an excellent service that’s cheap and makes it incredibly easy to manage your site, but that also comes with the caveat that there may be some trade-offs to save costs. That’s fine! I’ve been nothing but happy with the service because I’m just not equipped to manage a web server. It just means I’ve had to find an alternative solution that maybe isn’t a bad idea in the long run.

Update 2

Apparently that doesn’t work, either. I just got a fatal error trying to use it for a real post despite the test working fine. WHEEE~!

Update 3

Now a PHP error I can fix! Looks like someone messed up a simple Boolean by trying to count it, ironically right before checking the Boolean. Turning off auto-updates for that plugin just in case, but seeing as it’s been a year and it’s untested on this version of WordPress, that might not be a huge concern.