Tumblr is being converted to WordPress technology
Tumblr and WordPress are owned by Automattic. Both will soon share the technical basis. It should then be possible to interact with Mastodon & Co. from Tumblr.
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The blogging platform Tumblr is still to be connected to the so-called Fediverse. A planned switch to the WordPress infrastructure would have to be completed first. Automattic, the company responsible for both services, has now confirmed this to TechCrunch. However, the company did not provide a timeline for either plan and only assured that the progress of the migration to WordPress is "exciting".
The plan is that once the conversion work is complete, every Tumblr user will be able to interact with the Fediverse, including accounts on Mastodon, the photo platform Pixelfed and threads from Meta, via the ActivityPub protocol.
For a much larger audience
Tumblr announced its intention to support the ActivityPub protocol, which forms the basis of the Fediverse, at the end of 2022. This was at the time when interest in Mastodon was at its highest following the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk. Things have since quietened down somewhat around Mastodon, but there are still services that are announcing or implementing a connection to the Fediverse. The magazine app Flipboard, for example, is working on an integration and has already completed several stages. The short message service Threads is also to be extensively connected, but so far this has been very slow. What they all have in common is the promise that users can reach a significantly larger audience through the link.
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Automattic only announced at the beginning of December that Tumblr would be migrated to the WordPress infrastructure. From a purely external perspective, nothing will change, it's just about the backend. This should facilitate development work for both platforms and also ensure that Tumblr runs on the "rock-solid infrastructure" behind WordPress.com. The blogging portal has been connected to Fediverse for a year and a half. Just a few days ago, Tumblr explained in a blog post that the planned connection to the Fediverse is a major reason for the migration to WordPress technology. However, there is no indication of the timetable there either.
(mho)
