Darnell (Seize The Day)

So Automattic is attempting the most significant technical hurdle the company has ever faced by replacing Tumblr’s foundation with WordPress.

Since Automattic acquired Tumblr we’ve made it more efficient, grown its revenue, and worked to improve the platform. But there’s one part of the plan that we haven’t yet started, which is to run Tumblr on WordPress. I’m pleased to say we’re kicking off that project now!

We’re not talking about changing Tumblr. We’re not turning Tumblr into WordPress. That would defeat the purpose. We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction. We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside.

Running Tumblr on WordPress will make it easier to share our work across platforms. We can build something once and bring it to both WordPress and Tumblr. We can run Tumblr on the rock-solid infrastructure behind WordPress.com. Tumblr will benefit from the collective effort that goes into the open source WordPress project. And WordPress will benefit from the tools and creativity we invest into Tumblr and contribute back to WordPress. (Automattic)

If successful, Tumblr users could begin to activate WordPress plugins on their sites, which means that we could finally witness Tumblr users entering the Fediverse via the WordPress ActivityPub plugin.

However, this is easier said than done, & there is a high risk that the whole thing could fail due to technical hurdles. Tumblr could also give up waiting for change to arrive & end up fleeing to other federated platforms (like Goblin, Loforo or even Micro Blog) or even non-federated alternatives like YouTube (yes, seriously!).

But Automattic needs to do something to revitalize Tumblr, especially after they promised to bring Tumblr to the Fediverse before realizing the process was too expensive using Tumblr’s current code.

Discovered via TechCrunch)

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