The doors of Fediverso have reopened. And this time, bringing in a company whose commitment to the open protocol that Mastodon uses could have a huge impact. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced the acquisition of an ActivityPub plugin in March of this year. Now the stable version has recently been released to the public.

With this move, Now any WordPress blog can be followed on Mastodonas if he were any other Fediverso user. Not only follow each other, but also comment directly and get replies.

The integration has been polished over the last few months. Now in addition to sending messages, when they add the plugin from the WordPress based website, they can also include a button to follow the website, as if it were a button to follow a user. And likewise a button for the number of followers.

Follow blogs as if you were a Mastodon user

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, is a persuasive advocate of the possibilities of Fediverso, a concept that encompasses decentralized, open and connected networks like Mastodon. Besides WordPress, other giants such as Tumblr or Meta Threads have also announced their intention to participate, but for now, WordPress is the first company to offer this option.

Some users have already started using this option. Currently, it is an optional tool that administrators must install manually, although it is not officially supported.

Although Automattic’s developer, Matthias Pfefferle, announced that they were working on this Mastodon compatibility will soon be brought to all blogs created on WordPress.com. It’s a leap that will greatly expand Fediverso.

WordPress’ reach on the internet is huge. There is currently no prediction that Automattic will add this plugin to WordPress core, so it is unlikely that all websites running this CMS will be included in Fediverso overnight. However, technical work to add this compatibility has already been done.

43.1% of all Internet websites run on WordPressAccording to data from W3Techs. If we only talk about websites with CMS, this rate increases to 63%.

According to the latest official data, Mastodon has 1.7 million active users. The data is still quite low compared to centralized social networks like Twitter.

We’ll have to wait to find out the impact of this WordPress move. A. a first step that could accelerate adoption by other major companiesLike Flipboard, Medium, or Meta, who have already expressed interest in joining Fediverso.

Image | Stephen Phillips

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