WordPress owner buys plugin for Mastodon integration, among other things

The owner of WordPress.com and WordPress.org, Automattic, has purchased the ActivityPub for WordPress plugin. The developer joins Automattic to further expand the functionality.

ActivityPub for WordPress

Through the acquisition, Automattic wants to give the developer more options to expand the plug-in, reports Techcrunch. The plugin, which has been installed 35,000 times, allows blogs to be published via the ActivityPub protocol. For example, blog posts are posted on Mastodon, after which comments from Mastodon are automatically placed under the blog post. That also works for other ActivityPub software, such as PixelFed.

The developer will start at Automattic in April. It is unknown what changes are coming for the plugin, but the developer himself refers to it as beta so far. WordPress is not the only publishing platform that integrates with services in the fediverse, the range of federated web services. For example, Medium has its own instance, just like Flipboard.