Plugin published WP post set to “private”

I set up AP last year, but just now saw that the plugin had published to my blog’s federated Mastodon account a post-in-progress that I had set to “private.” My standard post-writing workflow is to set up the page in WP, create the page title, set visibility to “private” and then continue on to edit in Elementor.

But that post was FULLY VISIBLE on the Mastodon account for the last couple weeks I’ve been working on it. Now, there was nothing damaging, per se, just a mass of all my notes, streams of consciousness, late-night thoughts, and material copy/pasted from a word processor in random order in text blocks to be organized later. Still, I don’t want to have the whole internet or even the 11 people who followed my blog shuffling through all the notes and random papers on my desk either.

I’ve since set the post to “password protected” status and now only the header image from the Elementor layout is shown on the Mastodon account, which I don’t really want to draw any more attention to, but can send a link privately if you want.

Separate but related: In going through the settings, I see I’d set the plugin to upload images, but I didn’t realize that meant it would be uploading every image as I uploaded it to the post in question — even though the post was set to “private.”

So now I want to delete the whole mess, but from reading forums here and elsewhere, it seems that’s not possible yet. I did try deleting as much info as I could, but the bio and name, etc. on the account still shows up on the Mastodon profile page. Maybe it just hasn’t propagated yet. It also shows followers I deleted, but doesn’t show my own Mastodon account that I kept as a follower to monitor it. I’m deactivating the plugin and will see what happens in a day or two.

So, unless you’ve come up with a way to make the whole account go away, I guess I only want to make you aware that it published a “private” post, including images.

In the meantime, I love the idea of federating blogs, but this has a very, very long way to go before it’s functional for anyone but a very experienced developer. It was a nice try and in the long run, no real damage done. I’ll check back in a year or two.