WordPress steps into the fediverse with ActivityPub integration

I’m ready to connect my WordPress blog with the fediverse and watch someone randomly yell at me on Mastodon.

That’s the future that’s available… today! In a blog post, the company announced that WordPress.com blogs are now able to use ActivityPub to make their posts available across the fediverse. This means that, for example, a user on Mastodon (a fediverse social media platform that also supports ActivityPub), could subscribe to your blog right from the Mastodon app, rather than needing to create a WordPress account to do so.

The blog post actually does a great job of explaining the promise of the fediverse — essentially pointing out that email shares a lot of the same characteristics:

The fediverse consists of federated platforms like Mastodon, which are networks of independent websites or servers that can communicate with each other while still operating individually. It’s much like email; you can send emails to users with accounts on different services (like Gmail, Yahoo, etc.), yet all of them can interact seamlessly. Similarly, federated platforms enable users to follow, share, and interact with content across different services in a unified network.

The company confirmed that, in addition to allowing users to follow your blog posts across platforms like Mastodon, Pleroma, and Friendica, they’ll also be able to leave comments on those platforms and have them show up automatically on WordPress as well.

In addition, replies to your posts from these platforms are automatically turned into comments on your WordPress blog, creating a more interactive and dynamic conversation around your content. Synchronicity for the win!

The company says that the ActivityPub integration will be available for all WordPress.com blogs, including the Free, Personal, and Premium plans. For those with a Business or Commerce site, they’ll simply need to install a plugin. WordPress does clarify by saying that once you “enter the fediverse,” only new posts will show up on federated platforms and that it may take up to 15 minutes for them to do so after publishing.

It’s really cool to see such a major player like WordPress hook into the fediverse. This really enables blogs to reach out to a potentially wider audience and for those audiences to have a much easier time subscribing to and engaging with their posts. In addition to WordPress, Instagram’s Threads app has also promised fediverse support — although we haven’t gotten a launch date for that just yet.

Forget the metaverse; the future is about the fediverse!