WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub

Bloggers and other publishers using WordPress to host their site can now use it to join the fediverse through an official ActivityPub plug-in, announced today by WordPress.com.

ActivityPub allows social networks to talk across platforms, meaning users can see and engage with content on other platforms from where they are without making a new account. WordPress.com owner Automattic acquired the ActivityPub for WordPress plug-in earlier this year, and the feature is now available for anyone to install through WordPress settings.

In the case of a WordPress.com blog, audiences will be able to follow a publisher through other federated platforms like Mastodon. Responses on other platforms will automatically turn into comments on a publisher’s WordPress post, allowing them to interact directly with off-platform audiences. The setting is available across WordPress sites on free, personal, and premium tiers — millions of blogs will now be able to join the fediverse in a few seconds.

An official ActivityPub setting for WordPress comes as social networks try to compete with X, formerly Twitter — and many users try to figure out where to go. X alternatives like Mastodon, Bluesky, Meta’s Threads, and Tumblr (also owned by Automattic) have intermittently received surges of users, but so far, each space has its own — and competing — vibe. Meta says it plans to make Threads part of the fediverse in the future, potentially opening up content users share there to other platforms like Mastodon or WordPress. So far, that hasn’t materialized, though Meta did in recent months introduce a way to verify your Threads profile via Mastodon.