FYI: Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Tumblr and co-founder of Wordpress
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pleroma/comments/z16d9s/tumblr_soon_connecting_to_pleromaactivitypub/
Tumblr Soon Connecting to Mastodon / ActivityPub
- Thread starter bnew
- Start date
FYI: Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Tumblr and co-founder of Wordpress
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pleroma/comments/z16d9s/tumblr_soon_connecting_to_pleromaactivitypub/
Artificial Intelligence
Not Allen Iverson
I have no idea what this means after reading every tweet but cool 
tumblr is my main
tumblr is my main
Fiji Water
Every moment is an opportunity
Very interesting. I forgot about my mastodon. Might have to dust it off
I have no idea what this means after reading every tweet but cool
basically activitypub is a federated protocol which makes mirco-blogging posts(tweets) accessible on multiple services.
email is federated meaning you can send an email from gmail to an account on aol,yahoo or live.com, and etc.
people will soon be able to post on tumblr and have their posts be accessible on Mastodon , Gamedev Mastodon , Urbanists.Social or any website that supports the activitypub protocol and vice-versa.
it would be like if twitter users could retweet a instagram post or comment on one if both sites supported activitypub.
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Threads Adopting ActivityPub Makes Sense, but Won't Be Easy
Threads will soon connect its 100 million users to the fediverse via ActivityPub. But Meta faces a number of technical and social challenges.thenewstack.io
Threads Adopting ActivityPub Makes Sense, but Won’t Be Easy
Threads will soon connect its 100 million users to the fediverse via ActivityPub. But Meta faces a number of technical and social challenges.
Jul 12th, 2023 7:21am by Richard MacManus
From a developer point of view, the fact that Meta’s Threads app has quickly gone over 100 million sign-ups isn’t the most interesting part of this latest Twitter clone. More intriguing is Meta’s promise to make Threads a part of the fediverse, by adding support for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ActivityPub specification.
The fediverse is a collection of decentralized social media services that interconnect via ActivityPub. The most prominent member of the fediverse is Mastodon, a microblogging network that launched in 2017. But many other Web 2.0-style apps have been built on ActivityPub — including Bookwyrm (Goodreads), Lemmy (Reddit), PeerTube (YouTube), and PixelFed (Flickr).
I reached out to Meta for further comment on its proposed ActivityPub support. I was told that Meta has more to share about this, but not right now. Regardless, we know enough to do some early analysis on how Threads might support ActivityPub and what it will mean for current fediverse applications (especially microblogging ones, like Mastodon).
What Is Threads and How Will It Join the Fediverse
First, let’s clarify what Threads is. It looks and feels a lot like Twitter — “posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.” But it is also noticeably influenced by Instagram. First and foremost, Threads inherits Instagram’s social graph — you’re invited to log in to Threads using your Instagram account, and with one click you can choose to follow the same people you already follow on Instagram.
The algorithm driving the home feed is also very similar to Instagram — it’s not a straight chronological feed, but a “‘black box” that delivers you a mix of content from people you follow along with trending content from celebrities and influencers. The lack of a straight chronological feed has been one of the main criticisms so far of Threads; in response, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has said that a feed of just the people you follow is being worked on.
Threads also inherits the slick UI of Instagram.
Threads was built by the Instagram team (under Meta’s banner), and so Instagram’s help page on Threads is useful context about its plans to join the fediverse. Instagram states:
“Our vision is that Threads will enable you to communicate with people on other fediverse platforms we don’t own or control. This means that your Threads profile can follow and be followed by people using different servers on the fediverse.”
Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko was cautiously optimistic about Threads on the day of its release. In a blog post, Rochko said that it was “validation of the movement towards decentralised social media” and “a clear victory for our cause.”
Incidentally, Meta’s announcement stated that “Threads is Meta’s first app envisioned to be compatible with an open social networking protocol.” So Meta might end up supporting more than just ActivityPub — but it’s too early to speculate about that.
Why Meta Chose to Support ActivityPub
It’s no coincidence that Meta chose ActivityPub and not an alternative decentralized protocol for its Threads product. Certainly, ActivityPub is the most mature “fediverse” protocol, but there are others out there — such as Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid and Bluesky’s AT Protocol. But ActivityPub perfectly suits Meta’s goals, I suspect, and here’s why:
With ActivityPub, the server manages your identity and data. So when you join Mastodon, for example, you are essentially entrusting management of your data to the server (“instance”) you join. As fediverse developer Ryan Barrett put it in a post this week, your ActivityPub “identity, data, and administration are all tied to your instance, for both technical and cultural reasons.” Among other things, this architecture enables your instance to make moderation decisions on your behalf. You’re still free to move to another instance, at any time and for whatever reason, but you can’t port your data (your posts and media) from one instance to another.
I mention all this because it plays right into Meta’s strengths. Meta will still control the identity layer even when it integrates with ActivityPub — and that’s immensely valuable when you’re the owner of Instagram’s social graph. Since Threads is also hosted on Meta’s servers, all your data is managed by Meta too.
There’s no way Meta would’ve wanted to join the AT Protocol or Solid, because in both cases they would potentially be handing over control of identity and at least some data to their users. As Barrett put it in a separate post: “One core difference between the fediverse and the AT Protocol seems to be that AT decouples many key building blocks — identity, moderation, ranking algorithms, even your own data to some degree — from your server.”
Challenges for Meta and Threads
This week a representative from Meta, a software engineer named Ben Savage, joined the ActivityPub working group in the W3C. Savage is based in Singapore and has worked at Meta/Facebook for over ten years. He says he’s represented Facebook in W3C forums like the Private Advertising Technology Community Group and the Privacy Community Group, and he seems genuinely keen to help Threads adopt ActivityPub. “I’m really excited for the moment when ActivityPub integration is launched and I can start following my friends on Mastodon,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post about his assignment.
Evan Prodromou, one of the creators of ActivityPub and who runs a weekly “issue triage live session” for the ActivityPub working group, gave Savage a warm welcome.
But unsurprisingly, others gave him a less than warm welcome (“The company you work for does disgusting things,” wrote one member, citing as an example that Meta “builds walls and lures people into them”). There’s also a small group of Mastodon instances that are threatening to “defederate” from Threads if it joins the fediverse — meaning they won’t include Threads users in their extended networks. This doesn’t seem to be a widespread feeling among Mastodon maintainers, but it does illustrate the social pressure that Meta will face as it moves forward with its plan to adopt ActivityPub.
There are, of course, also technical challenges that will need to be overcome. As another W3C working group member, Johannes Ernst, put it, “I think one of the things we are all very interested in learning is just what exact stack of protocols Meta is implementing, and then the higher-level policies not prescribed in the standard.” Ernst pointed out that “merely implementing ActivityPub in itself is not sufficient to produce interoperable software nor make what’s happening comprehensible to users.” For example, which of the activity types will Threads implement? Will it allow hyperlinks and HTML markup? These are the specific kinds of technical questions that Threads will need to address in the coming months.
Conclusion
It’s early days, but in my humble experience Threads feels like a text-based version of Instagram: the content is a mix of aspirational and motivational, and the current algorithmic timeline is peppered with celebrities and influencers peddling their memes. Perhaps the biggest challenge integrating with fediverse apps like Mastodon will be the cultural differences between the two communities.
That said, there will always be at least a few people you want to connect with on alternative networks — and that’s the beauty of ActivityPub. So, if nothing else, I hope Meta does successfully adopt the protocol so that Mastodon users like me can add a few Threads users to their feeds. The ideal outcome would be a bunch of new apps getting built that tap into both Mastodon and Thread’s social graphs, but I think that’s too pie-in-the-sky right now. Let’s just get the two networks connected first.
WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including Mastodon | TechCrunch
In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse -- the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon
techcrunch.com
WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including Mastodon
Sarah Perez@sarahintampa / 11:49 AM EDT•September 14, 2023Comment
Image Credits: Automattic
In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse — the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon and others — with the acquisition of an ActivityPub plug-in that allows WordPress blogs to reach readers on other federated platforms. Now, the company is announcing ActivityPub 1.0.0 for WordPress has been released allowing WordPress blogs to be followed by others on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies back as comments on their own sites.
Since the acquisition, the company has improved on the original software in a number of ways, including by now allowing the ability to add blog-wide catchall accounts instead of only per-author. It also introduced the ability to add a “follow me” block to help visitors follow your profile and a “followers” block to show off your followers, noted Automattic design engineer Matt Wiebe, in a post on X.
Other updates include a number of bug fixes, the completion of a security audit, and improved compatibility, including with the latest version of WordPress, 6.3.
At the time of its acquisition, the ActivityPub plug-in supported federated platforms including Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, HubZilla, Pixelfed, SocialHome, and Misskey. It had then been downloaded 35,000 times according to its statistics page. Now, that number has increased, as the page shows its all-time installations are at 42,831.
For the time being, the software supports self-hosted WordPress blogs, but Wiebe teased that support for WordPress.com blogs was “coming soon.”
Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg has been bullish on the promises of the fediverse — especially given the open-source nature of its decentralized, interconnected server software. Late last year, for example, the CEO wrote that Tumblr would add support for ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized social apps. But more recently, Mullenweg told us he’s been investigating not only ActivityPub, but also other protocols like Nostr and Bluesky’s AT Protocol.
WordPress’s support for ActivityPub follows a number of moves by other publishers to embrace the fediverse. Earlier this year, Medium announced it would launch its own Mastodon server and integrate with ActivityPub. Magazine app Flipboard also announced it was launching its own instance on flipboard.social and integrated with Mastodon so its users could follow Mastodon updates in the Flipboard app.
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Flipboard is pivoting to ActivityPub and the fediverse
Another walled garden is opening up to the new social web.
www.theverge.com
Flipboard is pivoting to ActivityPub and the fediverse
If you have a Flipboard account, you’ll soon have an account everywhere in the open social web.
By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
Dec 18, 2023, 11:00 AM EST|13 Comments / 13 New
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If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25170996/pasted_image_0.png "Four screenshots of Mastodon posts, on Flipboard.")
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Flipboard has been experimenting with fediverse integration for months now.
Image: Flipboard
Flipboard is taking its biggest step yet into the fediverse. The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
Right now, only 25 accounts (including The Verge’s) have been federated with ActivityPub, but by March Flipboard says it plans to allow anyone on the platform to open their account to the fediverse and allow any Flipboard user to follow any fediverse account from within the Flipboard app. At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts. It’ll be the biggest thing in the fediverse — at least until Threads shows up for real.
“Basically, we’re in the process of replacing our whole social back-end with ActivityPub,” says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “I think Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream consumer service that existed in a walled garden that switches over to ActivityPub.”
That’s a lot of technical jargon, I know. Let’s use The Verge’s account to try to figure out what it means. Starting today, every time we add something to one of our magazines on Flipboard, we’ll also be automatically creating a post that includes a link to the story we’re adding, a link to the Flipboard magazine, and any commentary that goes with it. That post is a standard ActivityPub post, like anything you’d see on Mastodon. From now on, you can follow our magazines on Flipboard or follow our Flipboard account in Mastodon or anywhere else you get fediverse content, and you’ll get the same feed of content either way. The only difference? Flipboard will look more like the reading app it is, and Mastodon will feel more like a timeline.
In spirit, a federated Flipboard shouldn’t feel all that different from, say, one of those Twitter users who would obsessively curate news or information around a specific topic. Flipboard has always relied on curators to find good stuff for users to read — the only difference is that now those curators can post to Flipboard and everywhere else in one fell swoop. Flipboard’s bet is that it can build the best reading and discovery tools, without forcing users to only operate inside its platform.
At first, these posts only go one way. The promise of the fediverse is that if you like or respond to a post, that is also compiled and synced across apps and services, but Flipboard hasn’t quite finished that yet. McCue says that’s coming in January.
McCue has spent the last year telling anyone who will listen (including The Verge) that ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the federated social internet are the future. Flipboard launched a Mastodon instance called flipboard.social earlier this year, and recently announced it’s no longer integrating with X and focusing instead on open platforms.
McCue is still careful to note that there is a lot left to figure out. Flipboard has a long history with content moderation tools and optimizing reading experiences, but there’s so much new stuff here. Should people curate articles through their Flipboard account, or should they also keep a Mastodon account for more standard posting? McCue says he’s keeping all his accounts for now, but says that “I think how these accounts relate to each other is an interesting question.” So much about the culture and interface of the fediverse is still unsolved, and McCue is convinced now’s the time to dive in and figure it out.