WordPress Blogs Can Now Be Followed in the Fediverse, Including Mastodon

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WordPress Blogs Can Now Be Followed in the Fediverse, Including Mastodon​

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... For the time being, the software supports self-hosted WordPress blogs, but Wiebe teased that support for WordPress.com blogs was "coming soon."

 

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WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub

Mastodon audiences will be able to interact with blog posts.

www.theverge.com

WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub​

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The ActivityPub plug-in is now available for all WordPress.com plans, allowing users to communicate with each other across other federated platforms like Mastodon.​

By Mia Sato, platforms and communities reporter with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.

Oct 11, 2023, 4:29 PM EDT|11 Comments / 11 New

Photo illustration by Pavlo Gonchar / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Bloggers and other publishers using WordPress to host their site can now use it to join the fediverse through an official ActivityPub plug-in, announced today by WordPress.com.
ActivityPub allows social networks to talk across platforms, meaning users can see and engage with content on other platforms from where they are without making a new account. WordPress.com owner Automattic acquired the ActivityPub for WordPress plug-in earlier this year, and the feature is now available for anyone to install through WordPress settings.

The ActivityPub plug-in is available for WordPress.com plans. Image: WordPress.com

In the case of a WordPress.com blog, audiences will be able to follow a publisher through other federated platforms like Mastodon. Responses on other platforms will automatically turn into comments on a publisher’s WordPress post, allowing them to interact directly with off-platform audiences. The setting is available across WordPress sites on free, personal, and premium tiers — millions of blogs will now be able to join the fediverse in a few seconds.

An official ActivityPub setting for WordPress comes as social networks try to compete with X, formerly Twitter — and many users try to figure out where to go. X alternatives like Mastodon, Bluesky, Meta’s Threads, and Tumblr (also owned by Automattic) have intermittently received surges of users, but so far, each space has its own — and competing — vibe. Meta says it plans to make Threads part of the fediverse in the future, potentially opening up content users share there to other platforms like Mastodon or WordPress. So far, that hasn’t materialized, though Meta did in recent months introduce a way to verify your Threads profile via Mastodon.