Recently, npm co-founder Laurie Voss tweetedComplain about Mastodonclaiming to have spent 7 hours trying to set up a Mastodon instance on the server.

WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg invited Laurie Voss to consider using Tumblr after seeing it.and repliedthe company’s Tumblr service will soon add support for the ActivityPub protocol to achieve the “interconnection” of Tumblr and Mastodon.

ActivityPub is an open source, decentralized social networking protocol currently used by apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, and streaming service PeerTube.It provides a client-to-server API forCreate, update and delete contentand aFederated server-to-server API forDeliver notifications and subscribe to content.

▲ ActivityPub operating principle

Take Mastodon, which rose to prominence recently through Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Since Mastodon adopts the ActivityPub protocol, it allows other cross-server users to interact with the content of this server and users in various forms, including but not limited to: create, delete, like, repost, report, update, cancel, etc. .

In addition to communicating with each other, each independent Mastodon instance can also interact with other applications that support the ActivityPub protocol. For example, Mastodon users can interact and follow each other with users on Peertube without creating an account in a new application.

It can be seen that the design ideas and practices of the ActivityPub protocol are exactly the opposite of today’s walled garden-style social networks. Today’s social networks are centralized platforms, and posts on their respective platforms cannot be directly read by users on other platforms unless they are re-uploaded or republished, or referenced on other platforms by sharing links.

If Tumblr adds support for ActivityPub, it means that Mastodon users can subscribe to Tumblr users’ posts, and Tumblr users can enter the federated universe without registering on Mastodon’s different servers — bypassing the complicated process of first registering with Mastodon.

Automattic has paid attention to and supported the ActivityPub protocol for a long time, such as the one provided for WordPress The ActivityPub plugin, which allows WordPress blog readers to also follow posts on Mastodon and other social platforms that support ActivityPub.