The News
Tumblr’s move to WordPress on the backend, and with it, the ability to integrate with the fediverse is “on hold”, says Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg. Automattic announced the plan last August, and news on the move has been sparse ever since. In an interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Mullenweg says that fediverse integration was “one of the arguments for migrating everything to WordPress.” On the fediverse integration, Mullenweg also said: “I think if there was a big push to implement fediverse, we would just do it on the Tumblr code base”. The plans to connect Tumblr to the fediverse never seemed to have found much trust within the community that it would actually happen, and I’ve seen very few references to it in the last year on the fediverse. Mullenweg seems more interested in the Matrix protocol currently, calling it “the dark horse in the corner”. Automattic acquired universal messaging client Beeper last year, which uses Matrix.
Mastodon’s upcoming update 4.4 is getting closer to launch, and the release candidate of the software is now available. Mastodon is taking a gradual approach to implementing quote posts, and 4.4 will release the first part: the display of quote posts made on other platforms. A later update will include the ability for Mastodon to also create quote posts. Mastodon also published an overview of update 4.4 aimed at developers, which goes into details for all the new features and functions.
NLnet’s latest grant round includes support for various platforms, including better interoperability for Events on the fediverse, an ActivityPub-based poll plugin for WordPress, and for various improvements to NodeBB and Funkwhale.
Bonfire has added support for long-form articles, and also created a separate feed on the platform for articles as well as RSS. They also added the ability to write blog posts from Bonfire itself, making it a platform that can be used for both microblogging as well as long-form writing with the same account.
Radio Free Fedi was a community radio for fediverse artists, that shut down operations early this year. It is back for the summer, with this July being Radio Free Fedi Fest, a month-long event with shows featuring artists from the fediverse.
The ActivityPub for WordPress team shared what they’ve shipped so far in 2025, which includes a new onboarding flow, more robust scaling past a thousand users, as well as the basis for supporting account migration. The team notes that due to spotty support of the ‘Move Activity’ (ActivityPub vocabulary which facilitates account migration) within the larger fediverse this work is currently on hold.
Wafrn, the fediverse platform that’s Tumblr-like and also supports ATProto natively without bridging, has added support for account migration, allowing fediverse accounts to migrate to and from Wafrn. The team also shared a guide on how to self-host Wafrn.
Tim Chambers wrote a 2-part series on issues facing the fediverse from a user’s perspective, and how to fix them. WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley also wrote a response further expanding on the ideas in there. I have some of my own thoughts on this, mainly related to the question of the nature of the fediverse itself: to what extend are servers portals that all lead to the same place, and to what degree are servers separate places? I’ll write more on that in this week’s email essay, so subscribe below to get it in your inbox this Friday.
The Links
- Rediscovering the Magic of the Blogosphere, with John O’Nolan and Matthias Pfefferle – Dot Social Podcast
- Digital Belonging: Why Language and Locality Matter – Jaz-Michael King
- The PieFed project now has their own chatrooms.
- Mastodon has created a sticker pack that can be used in Signal.
- The Newsmast organisation is close to launching channel.org, a custom feed and community builder for the fediverse, and they already shared a demo video of what it looks like to create a channel.
- Lemmy Development Update June 2025.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- FIRES is an in-development project for building moderator servers that advise T&S actions for other servers to take. A demo video for the update on locatisation also gives an impression on what the admin flow looks like to use.
- Fireside Fedi hosted an Owncast livestream with James Smith, the creator of 3d file sharing fediverse platform Manyfold.
- Owncast Newsletter July 2025.
