Plans to Link Tumblr to the Wider World of Decentralized Social Media Continue

Plans to connect Tumblr’s blogging site to the global sphere of decentralized social media (also referred to as fediverse) continue, even though there have been hurdles along the way.

Automattic, which powers WordPress.com and Pocket Casts as well as others, acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019. About a year ago, Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg tweeted that the site would “soon” add support for ActivityPub, which is a protocol provided to a client/server’s application programming interface (API) for creating, updating, and deleting content.

This protocol is currently already in place for X (formerly Twitter), competitor Mastodon, and other decentralized social media apps. However, as significant time has passed since talks began, it has been unclear as to whether Tumblr is still on that same path, according to TechCrunch.

To add more complexities to the mix, Tumblr recently laid off a number of employees with the goal of “relocating many to other projects within its parent company Automattic.” According to TechCrunch, this transition was supposed to reduce the financial strains that Tumblr has been experiencing, as the site continued to lose money. However, this left fediverse advocates uncertain as to whether Tumblr’s plans had come to a halt.

In response, Mullenweg is making his position on Tumblr’s aspiration to join the wider world of decentralized social media clear through his own Tumblr blog in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) Q&A. Responding to a question asked by a TechCrunch reporter, Mullenweg explained, “So at the end of the year (Dec 31) we’ll have a chunk of the team switch away from Tumblr, but right now we’re actually having someone switch toward it to work on this and they will continue in the new year.”

Mullenweg said, “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. Right now both have under ten thousand users, so there hasn’t been a big user push for this yet.”

Speaking to TechCrunch, Mullenweg explained that he remains a big believer in open standards and user freedom. However, he said he doesn’t know which standard is stronger or caters best for their user base. He said, “We will support everything we can in good faith to give users more freedom, choice, and avoid lock-in.”

Responding to another AMA question, Mullunweg also mentioned broader plans to move over Tumblr’s half a billion blogs to WordPress on the back end.