Tumblr’s ‘fediverse’ integration continues to be being labored on, says proprietor and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg

Regardless of delays, the plan to attach Tumblr’s running a blog website to the broader world of decentralized social media, often known as the “fediverse,” continues to be on, it appears. Over a 12 months in the past, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg — whose firm acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 — posted on Twitter that the location would “soon” add support for ActivityPub, the protocol powering Twitter/X rival Mastodon and different decentralized social apps. However as time lapsed since that pronouncement, it wasn’t clear if Tumblr was nonetheless shifting in that course.

To complicate issues additional, Tumblr recently cut a number of staff, relocating many to different tasks inside its mother or father firm Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts and extra, together with the recently acquired Texts.com. The re-org was meant to ease the monetary pressures Tumblr has been underneath, as the location continued to lose money. However it additionally led many fediverse advocates to marvel if Tumblr’s plans to hitch the world of decentralized social media had additionally been scrapped.

As well as, a post by a Tumblr employee appeared to point the undertaking was now on the again burner as they mentioned the fediverse plan had been moved to Tumblr’s testing grounds, Tumblr Labs.

Now, CEO Matt Mullenweg is clearing up the standing of Tumblr’s fediverse ambitions in an AMA (Ask Me Something) shared on his personal Tumblr weblog. In response to a query from TechCrunch, Mullenweg defined that regardless of the re-org, which can see many Tumblr staff transfer to different tasks on the finish of the 12 months, Automattic did swap somebody over to Tumblr to work on the fediverse integration, which can proceed within the new 12 months.

Nonetheless, Mullenweg cautioned that, to date, Automattic hadn’t but seen outsized consumer demand for federated social media.

“The Activity Pub and Friends plugins for WordPress are both from Automatticians, and have allowed us space to play in this space and understand the community and protocols, and also gauge user demand,” Mullenweg wrote. “Right now both have under ten thousand users, so there hasn’t been a big user push for this yet,” he famous.

However he mentioned that folk will “dig into Tumblr’s codebase” to see what it may do about shifting ahead with federation.

Studying between the strains, it appears the corporate isn’t prepared to put a full guess on ActivityPub — although Mullenweg usually helps a extra open web.

“I remain a huge believer in open standards and user freedom, though I don’t claim to have the truth on which particular standard is better or best, to serve our customers we will support everything we can in good faith to give users more freedom, choice, and avoid lock-in,” he additionally mentioned in his AMA. (Mullenweg advised us earlier within the 12 months the corporate was additionally evaluating different protocols, like Bluesky’s AT Protocol and nostr, for what it’s value).

Although Mastodon at this time solely has round 1.5 million monthly active users, ActivityPub is seeing extra momentum as of late — particularly now that Instagram Threads, one other Twitter/X competitor, is pledging integration with the fediverse. Many locally count on that to reach within the early a part of 2024. Within the meantime, Threads customers are able to verify their profile on Mastodon as an initial step. Different startups, just like the Mozilla-backed app Mammoth and indie apps like Ivory, have additionally launched to make the fediverse extra approachable for newcomers, whereas corporations like Flipboard and Medium have embraced Mastodon, too. That might give Tumblr a wanted push in 2024 to find out if ActivityPub is value its time, and whether or not or not it is going to make technological sense to convey Tumblr blogs to Mastodon.

In different phrases, despite the fact that there’s work being achieved on Tumblr’s fediverse integrations, it’s removed from being a achieved deal presently.

In one other AMA response, Mullunweg additionally famous {that a} bigger effort emigrate Tumblr’s half a billion blogs to WordPress on the backend is one thing he’s additionally considering within the new 12 months.

“We will tackle it, but I’m not sure when,” the exec mentioned.