March 14, 2023
Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform WordPress.com, has announced the acquisition of an ActivityPub plugin. Users of WordPress.com will be able to join the Fediverse, a network of interconnected social media platforms that use the ActivityPub protocol, as a result of this acquisition.
ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol that enables users to interact across multiple social media platforms. It enables interoperability between different services, resulting in a federated network that is not controlled by any single company or organization, and it allows users to connect with one another without being constrained by the walled gardens of social media behemoths like Facebook and Twitter.
WordPress.com users will be able to join the Fediverse by installing the plugin on their blogs as a result of this acquisition. Their blog posts will be automatically shared on other platforms that use the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon, Friendica, and Diaspora, once installed.
The plugin will be available for both free and paid WordPress.com plans, and it will be part of the Jetpack plugin suite for self-hosted WordPress sites, according to Automattic. According to Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, the company will also hire one of its developers.
The purchase price of the plugin has not been disclosed, but it was not a large sum because the plugin is a small, one-person operation. The developer will begin working for Automattic in April.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechCrunch.
