Despite delays, the plan to connect Tumblr’s blogging site to the wider world of decentralized social media, also known as the “fediverse,” is still on.
Now, CEO Matt Mullenweg is clearing up the status of Tumblr’s fediverse ambitions in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) shared on his own Tumblr blog. In response to a question from TechCrunch, Mullenweg explained that despite the re-org, which will see many Tumblr employees move to other projects at the end of the year, Automattic did switch someone over to Tumblr to work on the fediverse integration, which will continue in the new year.
Still, Mullenweg cautioned that, so far, Automattic hadn’t yet seen outsized user 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 noted.
But he said that folks will “dig into Tumblr’s codebase” to see what it can do about moving forward with federation.