Tumblr’s transfer to WordPress and fediverse integration is ‘on maintain’

Automattic’s plan to maneuver Tumblr’s backend over to WordPress is now “on maintain,” Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg says in a Decoder episode revealed as we speak.

The corporate introduced the plan to maneuver over the greater than half a billion blogs on Tumblr final yr, saying that the change would “make it simpler to share our work throughout platforms.” However Mullenweg says on Decoder that, “what we determined is that we need to focus as a lot on the issues which can be going to be noticeable to customers and that customers are asking for.”

It appears as if the transfer is likely to be on the desk sooner or later, although. “I nonetheless need to do it,” Mullenweg says. “It’s simply cleaner. However proper now, we’re not engaged on it.”

The choice to halt the change additionally seems to imply that Tumblr posts gained’t be obtainable within the fediverse within the close to future. WordPress.com at the moment provides an ActivityPub plug-in, so Tumblr transferring onto WordPress would theoretically let individuals deliver Tumblr posts to the fediverse. “That will’ve been a free method to get it,” Mullenweg says. “And in order that was one of many arguments for migrating all the pieces to WordPress.”

Within the meantime, nonetheless, “I feel if there was an enormous push to implement fediverse, we might simply do it on the Tumblr code base,” in keeping with Mullenweg.

Automattic bought Tumblr from Verizon in 2019.