Owner and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says Tumblr’s ‘fediverse’ integration is ongoing

Tumblr’s connection to the “fediverse,” or decentralized social media, appears to be proceeding despite delays. After acquiring Tumblr from Verizon in 2019, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg tweeted that the site would “soon” support ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon and other decentralized social apps. Tumblr’s progress wasn’t clear after that announcement.

To complicate matters, Tumblr recently laid off staff and moved many to Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts, and most recently Texts.com. As Tumblr lost money, the reorganization was meant to ease financial pressures. However, Fediverse advocates wondered if Tumblr’s plans to join decentralized social media had been scrapped.

Tumblr employees posted that the fediverse plan had been moved to Tumblr Labs, suggesting the project was on hold.

CEO Matt Mullenweg answered questions about Tumblr’s diverse ambitions in an AMA on his blog. Mullenweg told TechCrunch that Automattic did shift someone to Tumblr to work on the fediverse integration, which will continue in the new year, despite the reorganization, which will see many Tumblr employees leave at the end of the year.

However, Mullenweg warned that Automattic had not yet seen significant user demand for federated social media.

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

But he said people will “dig into Tumblr’s codebase” to see how it can help the federation.

Despite Mullenweg’s support for an open internet, the company appears not to be ready to fully invest in ActivityPub.

“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 said in his AMA. Earlier this year, Mullenweg told us the company was also considering Bluesky’s AT Protocol and nostr.

While Mastodon has 1.5 million monthly active users, ActivityPub is gaining steam, especially now that Instagram Threads, another Twitter/X competitor, is promising fediverse integration. The community expects that early in 2024. First, Threads users can verify their Mastodon profile. Startups like Mozilla-backed Mammoth and indie apps like Ivory have also launched to make the fediverse more accessible to newcomers. Flipboard and Medium have also adopted Mastodon. That could help Tumblr decide in 2024 if ActivityPub is worth its time and if Mastodon is a good fit for its blogs.

In other words, Tumblr’s diverse integrations are still in progress.

Mullunweg also said in another AMA that he may migrate Tumblr’s half-billion blogs to WordPress on the backend in the new year.

“We’ll tackle it, but I’m not sure when,” the executive said.