WordPress and the fediverse

WordPress has their moment to shine in the fediverse news cycle. I reported on it some of the developments last week. The news that Automattic became the author of the ActivityPub plugin, as well as the developer joining the company, gained major traction in the feeds, especially after TechCrunch and WPTavern devoted major articles to it. I'd like to explore this news in more depth, particularly its long-term implications.

The plugin implements the ActivityPub protocol on your WordPress website, allowing people to follow your website from their fediverse account. Every WordPress post has an author, and when you install this plugin, the author gets a fediverse-compatible username. For this blog, this is laurenshof89@fediversereport.com. You can then follow this user just as you would any other fediverse user, by searching for them. Same as you'd search for a user on Mastodon. When you follow this user, new posts created by them on their WordPress website show up in your feed.

The plugin has been around for a few years already and is slowly growing in numbers. Today it is at 2000+ active installations, which is only a small number of the total of tens of millions of WordPress sites around.

The acquisition of the plugin by Automattic, with the developer Matthias Pfefferle also joining the company, fits with the wider strategy of Automattic. The company has been explicit about supporting open-source, and the CEO has been open about experimenting with other ActivityPub integrations in their software such as Tumblr. The timeline on the Tumblr integration is a bit unclear, recently the CEO stated to look at all options, including BlueSky and Nostr, and stated to be worried about the potential to overwhelm the fediverse culture if suddenly tens of millions of Tumblr users would join.

A look at potential future impacts

It's not hard to imagine the major impact down the line of the ActivityPub plugin, simply by looking at the numbers. Many people did so on posts that went around on the feeds, talking about the massive potential new users for the fediverse. There is a lot to be excited about the mainstreaming of the fediverse in this way.

It also fundamentally alters the dynamic of the fediverse in a few significant ways, by adds a new style of content to the fediverse. Up until now, blogs and websites are barely represented on the fediverse. All of a sudden, there is the potential for millions of them to join the fediverse by simply adding a plugin. How this will impact the fediverse and its culture is unknown, and uptake of the ActivityPub plugin is far from guaranteed. But it is useful to have some form of understanding of how this can impact the fediverse.

Hashtags and search

One example of the potential impact of this development is on hashtags and search. WordPress allows you to add tags to a post. These tags function very similar to #hashtags, with the difference that they do not have to be visible in your text itself. Because the plugin makes the post part of the fediverse, your post now show up if you search for those tags.

First, the good, useful case. Writing hashtagged keywords in a post like this is an eyesore, but I would still like to be found on the fediverse with certain hashtags. So I add terms like fediverse and WordPress to the tags for this post. This is great for discoverability, and if used responsibly, valuable for both users on the fediverse and website owners. You are basically adding your website to a search engine for specific keywords.

The problem with having a good and useful feature however is that it just might be too good and useful. It might just be providing significant value for more spammy and SEO clickbait websites as well. SEO is a huge industry that aims specifically to get as much clicks as possible, and tries to game the system by getting high ranks in Google search results. It seems likely to assume that websites that purely exist to get as much clicks as possible, to game every system in such a way to get more clicks.

Current hashtag search is functionally a search engine, and for some SEO websites that simply means a new way to be found on clickbait websites. As such, we should expect that this type of website is also interested in using the ActivityPub plugin, in order to be found in new and different places.

How this will evolve, and the impact on the fediverse, is something worth keeping your eye on. One thing that seems guaranteed though, that the potential massive influx of new users will change the current culture that exists on the fediverse in ways that are hard to oversee yet.