7.9.0 — Spring Cleaning 🪣🧹

Every now and then, it’s time to tidy things up.

Version 7.9.0 is a spring-cleaning release: fewer rough edges, better defaults, and a lot of small improvements that make the plugin feel smoother and more predictable in daily use. No big rewrites — just many thoughtful fixes and refinements.

And yes, there’s one change you’ll notice immediately.

Emoji, But Make Them Emoji 🎺

Custom emoji from the Fediverse now finally show up as… emoji.

Instead of seeing placeholders like :sad_trombone:, federated posts now render the actual custom emoji they were meant to display. It’s a small detail, but one that makes conversations feel more human, and a lot less like reading raw markup.

Sometimes polish really is about the little things.

A Healthier, More Predictable Setup 🩺

A quiet but important part of this release focuses on making things fail less often — and recover better when they do.

Version 7.9.0 adds new Site Health checks to detect common issues that can silently break federation, including missing scheduled events and security plugins blocking REST API access. When possible, the plugin now attempts to repair these problems automatically.

We also tightened up activity scheduling and outbox processing to reduce edge cases where federation could stall or behave inconsistently. These changes don’t add new buttons or screens, but they make ActivityPub for WordPress more resilient in real-world setups.

Following, Reading, and the Social Graph 👥

This release also includes a few improvements that move us one step closer to full Reader support — while keeping things deliberately cautious.

With the new Fediverse Following block and Extra Fields improvements, it’s now much easier to build a proper profile page in WordPress, similar to what many other Fediverse platforms offer. You can surface who you follow and how you present yourself, using blocks instead of custom code.

The Reader itself remains behind a feature flag and is still considered experimental. This release focuses on preparing the surrounding pieces — navigation, feedback, and presentation — rather than enabling it by default.

If you’re curious about where this is heading, you can enable the feature and try it out today. As with earlier previews, feedback is very welcome and helps shape what full Reader support will eventually look like. (See the initial Reader announcement for upgrade notes and details.)

Changelog 🪵

Added

• Add Fediverse Following block to display accounts the user follows.
• Add global default quote policy setting that can be overridden per-post.
• Add health check to verify scheduled events are registered and auto-repair if missing.
• Add location support for posts using WordPress Geodata post meta fields.
• Add Podlove Podcast Publisher integration for podcast episode federation.
• Add site health check to detect when security plugins block REST API access.
• Add Social Web item to the admin bar for quick access to the reader.
• Add soft delete support with Tombstone objects when post visibility changes to local/private.
• Custom emoji from the fediverse now show up instead of looking like :sad_trombone:.
• Make actor table columns filterable.
• Send Add/Remove activities when changing a post’s sticky status to improve interoperability with the featured collection.
• Show warning instead of reply link when logged-in user cannot federate replies to fediverse comments.

Changed

• Defer outbox processing to async execution to improve publishing performance.
• Move Jest mocks to tests/js directory for better project organization.
• Remove redundant __nextHasNoMarginBottom props now that @wordpress/components 32.0.0 defaults to true.
• Revert to synchronous outbox processing with improved timeout handling and WebFinger error caching.

Fixed

• Don’t filter the comment query when type__not_in has been set.
• Filter comments on ActivityPub posts from REST API responses.
• Fix duplicate media attachments when featured image is also in post content.
• Fixed Federated Reply block embed appearing squished at 200×200 pixels for same-site embeds by passing explicit width to wp_oembed_get().
• Fixed pagination metadata leaking when “Hide Social Graph” privacy setting is enabled.
• Fix migration activities not being scheduled for federation due to hook registration timing.
• Fix older comments with empty type not being federated.
• Fix quote requests from Mastodon not being received.
• Fix users not being accessible after re-enabling ActivityPub capability.
• Hide admin REST API endpoints from discovery index.
• Show informational notice when trying to follow an already-followed account.
• Skip fetching public audience identifiers which are not actual recipients.

Downloads

• WordPress.org: activitypub.7.9.0.zip
• GitHub: tag/7.9.0

Thank You 💛✨

A huge thank you to everyone who tested early builds 🧪, filed bug reports 🐞, shared feedback 💬, reviewed pull requests 🔍, or helped improve docs 📚. Your input directly shaped many of the fixes and cleanups in this release.

And thanks to everyone running ActivityPub for WordPress out in the wild 🌍 — that’s where spring cleaning really shows what needs sweeping 🧹.

You make this project better, one emoji (and one fix) at a time 🥰