Despite delays, plans to connect Tumblr’s blog site to the wider world of decentralized social media, also known as the “Fediverse,” appear to still be in the works. More than a year ago, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg (who acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019) announced that the site is the protocol that powers Twitter/X rival Mastodon and other decentralized social apps. It posted on Twitter that support for ActivityPub will be added “soon.” However, as time passed since the announcement, it wasn’t clear whether Tumblr was still moving in that direction.
To further complicate matters, Tumblr has recently cut a number of jobs, reassigning many of them to other projects within the parent company. automatic, which operates WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts, and more, including the recently acquired Texts.com. The reorganization was intended to relieve financial pressure on Tumblr as it continued to make losses. But at the same time, many Federation supporters began to wonder if Tumblr’s plans to join the world of decentralized social media were also scrapped.
In addition, Posted by Tumblr Employees They said that the Fediverse project had been moved to Tumblr Labs, Tumblr’s testing ground, which seemed to indicate that the project is currently on the back burner.
Now, CEO Matt Mullenweg is laying out the current state of Tumblr’s various ambitions in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) shared on his Tumblr blog.in response In response to a question from TechCrunch, Mullenweg said that despite the reorganization, which will see many Tumblr employees move on to other projects at the end of the year, Automattic is moving someone to Tumblr to work on the Fediverse integration. He explained that he had done so. new Year.
Still, Mullenweg cautioned that so far, Automattic has yet to see significant user demand for federated social media.
” activity pub and friend Both plugins for WordPress are provided by Automatticians, which has allowed us to work in this space, understand the community and protocols, and assess user demand. ” he writes Mullenweg. “We have less than 10,000 users on either side at the moment, so there hasn’t been a big user push for this yet,” he said.
But he said people will “dig into Tumblr’s codebase” to see what they can do to move forward with federation.
Reading between the lines, it appears that while Mullenweg supports a more open internet in general, the company isn’t ready to go all-in on ActivityPub.
“While I continue to be a strong believer in open standards and user freedom, I do not claim that any particular standard holds the truth about which is better or best, but in order to serve our customers. “We sincerely support doing everything we can to give our users more freedom, choice, and avoid lock-in,” he also said in the AMA. (Mullenweg said earlier this year that the company is also evaluating the value of other protocols such as his AT protocol for Bluesky and nostr).
Only one lap of Mastodon today. 1.5 million monthly active usersActivityPub has been going from strength to strength lately. Especially since his other Twitter/X competitor, Instagram Threads, is promising integration with Fediverse. Many in the community expect it to happen in early 2024. In the meantime, Threads users can take the first step by checking their profile on Mastodon. Other startups have also launched to make Fediverse more approachable for beginners, including Mozilla-backed app Mammoth and indie apps like Ivory, and companies like Flipboard and Medium have also embraced his Mastodon. Masu. This gives Tumblr the tools he needs in 2024 to determine whether ActivityPub is worth his time and whether it technically makes sense to bring his Tumblr blog to Mastodon. You might get a boost.
In other words, work is being done to integrate Tumblr into the Fediverse, but no agreement has been reached at this time.
In another AMA responseMullunweg also said the company is considering a large-scale effort to migrate Tumblr’s 500 million blogs to WordPress backend in the new year.
“We’re going to work on it, but we don’t know when,” the executive said.
Source: techcrunch.com
