Automattic’s plan to maneuver Tumblr’s backend over to WordPress is now “on maintain,” Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg says in a Decoder episode published today.
The corporate introduced the plan to maneuver over the greater than half a billion blogs on Tumblr last year, saying that the change would “make it simpler to share our work throughout platforms.” However Mullenweg says on Decoder that, “what we determined is that we wish to focus as a lot on the issues which are going to be noticeable to customers and that customers are asking for.”
It appears as if the transfer may be on the desk sooner or later, although. “I nonetheless wish to do it,” Mullenweg says. “It’s simply cleaner. However proper now, we’re not engaged on it.”
The choice to halt the change additionally seems to imply that Tumblr posts received’t be accessible within the fediverse within the close to future. WordPress.com presently offers an ActivityPub plug-in, so Tumblr shifting onto WordPress would theoretically let individuals deliver Tumblr posts to the fediverse. “That may’ve been a free technique to get it,” Mullenweg says. “And in order that was one of many arguments for migrating all the pieces to WordPress.”
Within the meantime, nonetheless, “I feel if there was an enormous push to implement fediverse, we’d simply do it on the Tumblr code base,” in accordance with Mullenweg.
Automattic bought Tumblr from Verizon in 2019.