Feature Request: Add more flexibility to send_announce or make send_activity_to_followers a public function.

[Menrath]

What

Currently the send_announce function is not suited for handling general announces, it is tied especially to the blog/user actor behavior, where the blog actor might announce posts of users of both actor types are enabled.

Why

General reasons:

• Other plugins might want to send Activities to followers that are not native to the ActivityPub plugin.
• There could also be the desire in the future that e.g. an Announce can also be done for external ActivityPub objects.

Concrete use-case:
E.g., for the ActivityPub Event Bridge WordPress-Plugin, I was implementing a feature that would schedule a single self-announce of an Event ActivityPub object at a defined time before the event starts.

How

Two solutions come up my mind:

1. Make the send_activity_to_followers a public static function, allowing other plugins to totally create custom activities.
2. Make the send_announce function more flexible: add a third user_id param that might override the current behavior.

[pfefferle]

This a general problem we have to address! The current dispatching is only working for the current setup and scales not very well.

But this is such a big feature, that I procrastinated it :)

See: #593

[Menrath]

I totally forgot about #593. It's on hold for quite some time indeed! Since that might indeed be a breaking API change, a possible clean solution until then could be that we create a public static wrapper for send_activity_to_followers which will be deprecated once #593 gets completed. Or once the API part is already clear one could already provide that public function but internally still use the old ones. But I am not in a hurry, I will merge features like that on our side once things are settled here!