From CMS to Fediverse: Drupal's ActivityPub module

What if your CMS could not only host a collaborative blog or a news site, but also directly become a node on the Fediverse — followable, replyable, boostable by Mastodon users?

The Drupal ActivityPub module is turning this into a "just build a website" task. Leveraging Drupal's long-standing strength in flexible content modeling, any content type can map to an ActivityStreams object type, every user is an actor, and pairing it with the Blog module gives you a multi-author publishing platform that the Fediverse can follow.

Funded by NLnet, maintainer Swentel is sprinting toward the 1.0.0 release. Major milestones including Shared Inbox and the Mastodon-compatible API have already landed.

Meanwhile, last year's release of the Drupal CMS distribution and features like Recipes have made Drupal genuinely install-and-go. The pieces are falling into place — this path is finally accessible to non-developers.

In this talk I'll walk through how the module works, demo a multi-author blog being followed from Mastodon live on stage, and share what I've observed as a site builder and small-time contributor about what Drupal brings to the Fediverse.