Tumblr’s move to WordPress and fediverse integration is ‘on hold’

Automattic’s plan to move Tumblr’s backend over to WordPress is now “on hold,” Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg says in a Decoder episode published today.

The company announced the plan to move over the more than half a billion blogs on Tumblr last year, saying that the change would “make it easier to share our work across platforms.” But Mullenweg says on Decoder that, “what we decided is that we want to focus as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users and that users are asking for.”

It seems as if the move might be on the table in the future, though. “I still want to do it,” Mullenweg says. “It’s just cleaner. But right now, we’re not working on it.”

The decision to halt the change also appears to mean that Tumblr posts won’t be available in the fediverse in the near future. WordPress.com currently offers an ActivityPub plug-in, so Tumblr moving onto WordPress would theoretically let people bring Tumblr posts to the fediverse. “That would’ve been a free way to get it,” Mullenweg says. “And so that was one of the arguments for migrating everything to WordPress.”

In the meantime, however, “I think if there was a big push to implement fediverse, we would just do it on the Tumblr code base,” according to Mullenweg.

Automattic purchased Tumblr from Verizon in 2019.