Tumblr pauses fediverse integration, WordPress switch

Tumblr is ditching — or, at least, suspending — its plan to migrate over to WordPress. Relatedly, that also means pausing plans of integrating Tumblr into the fediverse.

That news dropped Monday on the Decoder podcast from The Verge. Automattic, which owns Tumblr, announced last year it planned to move Tumblr‘s backend of its website to WordPress. But Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg told Decoder that idea was on hold because the company decided it wanted “to focus as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users and that users are asking for.” That tracks: Changing the backend of a website is a major undertaking but one that isn’t obviously noticeable to most users.

The seemingly temporary shift away from WordPress could have downstream effects. For instance, Tumblr might now be slower to join the fediverse, which is a network of publishing platforms that are interconnected in order to make a decentralized social media landscape. In other words, your following, follows, and posts migrate across all the platforms.

Tumblr’s migration to WordPress would’ve made integrating the fediverse easy. That’s because WordPress has an ActivityPub plug-in that allows users to connect to other platforms on the fediverse. Now that’s no more.

“That would’ve been a free way to get it,” Mullenweg told Decoder. “And so that was one of the arguments for migrating everything to WordPress.”