How to troubleshoot?

Depends on what exactly isn’t working. But if you see the toggle and have checked it (or it is checked by default) and nothing seems to be going through after you’ve hit “Publish,” it could be there’s a conflict of sorts with another plugin; or that your Mastodon server somehow still rejects WordPress’ requests. (Mastodon.social would publish my posts all right, but somehow reject all attachments; indieweb.social works just fine.)

We also had a couple issues around that time that would impact only a small percentage of WP installs, so … have you tried again since? (I’m guessing you have, but …)

The most obvious start is to enable WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG in wp-config.php and enable the debugging checkbox under Share on Mastodon’s settings.

The resulting debug log (usually in wp-content/debug.log, unless you specifically set it to a different location or your web host has WordPress or PHP write to a different log file) may then tell us something.

Although it could also be, as another user reported, that the “sharing” flag seemingly doesn’t get saved at all. (We’ve never really figured that one out, unfortunately.)

So what you could also do, if that’s something you’re comfortable with, is after the toggle’s definitely enabled and the post was saved, check the (wp_)postmeta database table for a row with your post’s ID, and look for a _share_on_mastodon meta field; it should say "1".

The delay relies on WP-Cron, which is triggered only when an actual request reaches your site. Like, if you were to serve all of your pages from Cloudflare’s edge cache, it could simply be the case that there isn’t enough traffic reaching WordPress and that the 5 minute delay becomes a 1 hour delay (or something). But you browsing the admin interface would be such a request, so … I mean, it should still work, probably. Merely protecting the login page likely isn’t the culprit (but who knows).

But you might wanna disable the delay just in case. There could be something else preventing WP-Cron from working reliably. (The WP Crontrol plugin can give some insights here.)

Your suggestions are much appreciated, I’ll follow up on them over the weekend (except for the delay, which I’ll disable now & test).

Cloudflare is not being used for anything except protecting my login url, my cache is handled by my server (SpinupWP). I also found a blog post today about ActivityPub & SpinupWP’s cache but I’m not sure that affects your plugin.

I finally picked this up again and it turns out that the sharing works fine if no delay is used. Now to head over to the thread about the delay not working…