Hi, creator of the bot here. I did not create this post.

I did not though the title as misleading at first, at the end this is a way to federate. I have been experimenting with ActivityPub for my site (https://maho.dev/2024/02/a-guide-to-implement-activitypub-in-a-static-site-or-any-website/) and I have seen others federate as Threads half implementing ActivityPub (not receiving replies for example). At the end MSFT DevBlogs is unofficially “federating” through a bot. I would think that adding the words “unofficially” and maybe “through a bot” would be enough to clarify everything.

But in a second though, federating can mean many things, and certainly one of the things I appreciate more, is not only consume news/articles, but also interact with them. That anyone who replies to a post from my blog, will appear also in my blog site, or anyone replying to this comment from mastodon will see their comment here. So, in that sense, devblogs is not federating, not even unofficially, and I can see the title as “misleading” people to think otherwise.

As a background, I am part of on the teams behind one of the blogs of MSFT DevBlogs, we do reviews, content edition, manage the CI/CD pipeline to publish, review analytics and finally the Wordpress part. I am trying to push from the inside to officially federate (although navigate to find the right person is always a struggle in big tech), but without data (how many people are actually reading or interacting from the fediverse) it would be difficult to make a case. I decided to create this bot, to see if it would be something useful for the fediverse, it has certainly been useful for me. I explored first things as https://rss-parrot.net/ but decided to create my own for different reasons, including the possibility to customize the content of the posts, and tag authors that are already in the fediverse (e.g. https://dotnet.social/@msftdevblogs/111992708317070935 and https://dotnet.social/@msftdevblogs/111990100520283347). I can see the points made against big corporations as microsoft/google/amazon, but there are many amazing, smart and kind individuals working out there in bigtech, and these blog series are mostly driven by such individuals.