Making the ActivityPub wordpress plugin work

After I installed the ActivityPub plugin, I couldn't actually find myself from the Fediverse. Wordpress "sitehealth" tool gave me an unhelpful message that my webfinger was not returning valid JSON.

In fact, it was not returning anything at all! Searching for my website on "https://webfinger.net/lookup" returned a 404 result.

After a lot of online searching, I figured the problem (with the help of the ActivityPub github discussion board) - I had not set up pretty permalinks in the blog.

The solution was to change my Apache configuration to allow redirects. I did this by changing the configuration file for this website with the following info:

(... other configurations ...) AllowOverride all

That did the trick!

If you have the same problem as I do, but you cannot change your apache configuration, another workaround is to manually create the webfinger file, following this thread.