Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that today is powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in response to a Twitter user’s complaint about Mastodon’s complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg — whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 — suggested the user “come to Tumblr” as the site would soon “add activitypub for interconnect.”

The folks at Flickr are considering it, too.

ActivityPub presents an opportunity for us to have the social web I’ve always wanted — you pick and choose the type of social networks you want to use — whether that be a focus on photos, video, short messages, general purpose, etc. — and mix and match them as you please. And all of it would be tied together by a common protocol.

If I want to share short messages and photos, I can use Mastodon and Pixelfed. If you would rather publish video and have a more general purpose social experience, you can use PeerTube and Tumblr. And we can follow the components of our social lives through the interface that we prefer.

It’s exciting.

➝ Source: techcrunch.com