Definitely liking how ActivityPub works with my two blogs. However, there are a few limitations.
I’ve been using activitypub for wordpress for several months now, before it was officially supported by wordpress.org and then wordpress.com. Otherwise I don’t have any good knowledge of the plugin, so this is just « random user knowledge », not expert or even power user answers.
But replying to two of the flaws you highlight with the plugin, Elizabeth:
- I do not know of a way to log into the Fediverse account of the blog through a Fediverse app
Me neither. Actually, I’m pretty sure you can’t. But I also don’t see why you’d want to do that, outside of replying to some posts on the Fediverse, which brings me to…
- If you reply from your blog it won’t appear on the Fedi acc post thread and the commenter won’t be able to see it
I recommend using Post Kinds, which seems to be available on WordPress.com. Marking my posts as « reply » make the answer show up, at least on Mastodon. It’s unfortunate that it doesn’t seem to be native, but hopefully eventually all this will work together seamlessly!
- You can’t add followers to the Fediverse account
Unless I wildly misunderstood what you mean by this, it would be very much forbidden by several consent laws (such as GDPR) anyway. Either people subscribe on their own or they don’t at all – I don’t think you can force-subscribe people to your Mastodon feed either!
Not all comments will appear in the blog. Exactly why this happens is a mystery
What I saw on my blog was that mentions that aren’t in reply to a specific blog post or don’t link to one don’t go anywhere, because there are no comments on the blog’s homepage. Maybe that’s also your issue?
Finally, hard agree on:
- You can’t follow people from the account
I use RSS feeds to follow people (including their Mastodon accounts), usually, but this is a pain point for me too as I’d love to not have to open a new WordPress tab and manually enter my response URL and the content. Maybe this will come someday, but it would probably be solved by being able to log in via third-party Fediverse apps and websites, as you mention above.