One of the things I love about the Fediverse is the sense of community. When someone from Mastodon, Pixelfed, or another ActivityPub-compatible platform likes or boosts one of my posts, it feels like a genuine connection across the decentralised social web.

Until now, the Cornerstone theme was showing Gravatar placeholders instead of the actual profile pictures of the people interacting with my posts. You’d see those generic silhouettes or, if you were lucky, a Gravatar that happened to match—but not the carefully chosen avatar that person uses on their Fediverse instance.

That changes with version 1.1.0.

What’s New

The Fediverse Interactions section at the bottom of posts now displays the actual avatars from Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other ActivityPub platforms. When someone boosts your post from mastodon.social or likes it from indieweb.social, you’ll see their real profile picture—the one they chose to represent themselves in the Fediverse.

This works thanks to the ActivityPub plugin’s local avatar caching feature (introduced in version 7.8.0). The plugin stores remote actor icons, and Cornerstone now knows where to look for them.

How It Works

I added a new helper function called cornerstone_get_activitypub_avatar() that checks multiple possible storage locations for cached Fediverse avatars:

1. ActivityPub actor icon — The primary storage location used by newer versions of the plugin
2. Avatar URL meta — An alternative storage method
3. Actor data — Embedded icon information in the actor metadata
4. Webmention avatar — For compatibility with the Semantic Linkbacks plugin
5. WordPress get_avatar_url — Allows ActivityPub plugin filters to work
6. Gravatar — Final fallback if nothing else is found

The result is a graceful degradation chain that should display the best available avatar for each person who interacts with your posts.

Performance Improvements

While I was in there, I also updated the avatar images to use:

• Explicit width and height attributes to prevent layout shift
• Native lazy loading (loading="lazy") so avatars below the fold don’t block initial page render

Get the Update

Version 1.1.0 is available now on GitHub:

https://github.com/khurtwilliams/cornerstone/releases/tag/1.1.0

Requirements

To see Fediverse avatars properly, you’ll need:

• ActivityPub plugin version 7.8.0 or later (for local avatar caching)
• Existing likes and boosts may not have cached avatars—new interactions will

Thanks

This update was inspired by seeing how the ActivityPub plugin’s official blog displays reactions with proper Fediverse avatars. I wanted the same for Cornerstone.

Cornerstone is a minimalist WordPress theme built for the IndieWeb, with full support for microformats2, ActivityPub, and Webmentions. It’s open source and available on GitHub.

Also posted on IndieNews

• Micro.blog