WordPress.com is putting its commitment to the fediverse into practice this month with the launch of ActivityPub 1.0.0 for WordPress, a new plugin designed to connect blogs more closely to the fediverse.
The news comes from Automattic Design Engineer Matt Wiebe, who posted on X: “ActivityPub 1.0.0 for #WordPress released today! Activate and your WP blog can now be followed in the Fediverse and receive replies back as comments.
The WordPress plugin comes just months after the company acquired ActivityPub, which provided insight into the company’s involvement in the Fediverse in March.
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin works with the fediverse
Wiebe added a to the X-thread changelog for the plugin now owned by Automattic, which includes some feature improvements and bug fixes.
Currently, the plugin only supports self-hosted WordPress blogs, but when asked about the future of WordPress.com on X, Wiebe said support for Automattic’s platform would be “coming soon.”
While the Fediverse remains a niche area of the market, more and more social media users are migrating to platforms like X’s Mastodon, formerly known as Twitter, since drastic changes to the platform and its operations were introduced by new owner Elon Musk.
In the months since Musk’s takeover, more and more companies have shown interest in the Fediverse. At the end of last year the Vivaldi browser (which says it was the first with a Mastodon instance) integrated the social network directly into its browser.
Popular for its decentralized structure, fediverse promises to give users more control over their data and the content they see. In an era of declining trust and dissatisfaction in traditional social media, services like Mastodon could see healthy growth in the coming years.