Eight releases since 9.0.0. Modern HTTP signatures are now on by default, podcast episodes travel with their audio, and you can switch off emails about likes and reposts. Most of the summer went into security reports and fixes, and this post explains why that is a good thing that still slows us down.

ActivityPub for WordPress 9.0.0 is here. Unpublishing a federated post now sends a real Delete instead of a placeholder. Be aware that this can be permanent on other servers. A new Distribution Mode keeps federation from overwhelming smaller servers, your blog can now be featured in Starter Kits, images get blurred color previews, and the ActivityPub API moves closer to the W3C standard.

Radical Speed Month is over, and the Reader's new Social section is now live. Your Fediverse-enabled WordPress site can be used from inside it, and the plugin's ActivityPub API has its first real client in production.

This post isn’t about the ActivityPub plugin. ATmosphere is a separate plugin from the same small team, for the other half of the open social web: the AT Protocol, the open network behind Bluesky. We’re posting about it here because the audience overlaps and the mission is the same. If there’s enough interest, we’ll spin […]

Two weeks into Automattic's Radical Speed Month, the WordPress.com Reader has grown a Mastodon tab, a Bluesky tab, and a Google Reader-compatible API. Here's what shipped, what's still to come, and how it connects back to the ActivityPub plugin.

ActivityPub for WordPress 8.1.0 is here. A new Fediverse statistics feature leads the release: a dashboard widget, monthly and annual email reports, and a shareable stats block with sharepic. Alongside it, an experimental ActivityPub API that lets third-party Fediverse apps post to your blog, Starter Pack imports in the Pixelfed and Mastodon formats, and richer EXIF metadata for photographers via the Vernissage namespace.

Hashtag discovery in the Fediverse is limited by which servers yours knows about. tags.pub, a global hashtag server by the Social Web Foundation, fills that gap. It collects public posts and redistributes them by hashtag, so your content reaches people across the network. It works out of the box on WordPress.com. Self-hosted sites can connect by adding a relay in the ActivityPub settings. The project is open source, privacy-conscious, and respects opt-outs.

WordPress ActivityPub 8.0.0 makes your blog more interactive in the Fediverse: visitors can Like/Boost posts directly on-site, with faster repeat interactions and clearer guidance. New Fediverse block patterns/templates speed setup, a pre-publish panel suggests post formats, community snippets land in-repo, and remote media caching is rebuilt for reliability. PHP 7.4+ required.

The 2026 roadmap focuses on making WordPress easier to discover and interact with across the Fediverse. Key areas include better search and recommendations through FASP support, Starter Packs to help users find communities, a more interactive Reader with reactions and replies, direct messages, and client-to-server APIs. Alongside these, we’ll continue improving interoperability, long-form publishing, and overall federation features.

Version 7.9.0 is a spring-cleaning release for ActivityPub for WordPress. Custom Fediverse emoji now render properly, profile and following blocks make it easier to build richer identity pages, and new health checks improve reliability. Alongside performance tweaks and many fixes, this update focuses on polish, stability, and smoother everyday federation.

With 2025 behind us, this post looks back at the roadmap we set out last year, what we worked on, and what shipped along the way. It reviews progress across core areas like moderation, following, and the experimental Reader, and highlights additional work that emerged throughout the year as we look ahead to 2026.