It doesn't help that the CEO actively antagonized a large portion of the site not too long ago.
It's not that different from what Facebook is doing with Threads. They are not interested in making money from social media, they are just hoping they can become the main infrastructure provider.
I love that this statement could apply to either Tumblr or WordPress. CEOs are such an expensive liability lately.
I don't think there are many platforms in which users are willing to give the platform money.
If you asked me whether I'd give money to support Reddit, I'd say just let it crash and burn.
Reddit gold is a pale version of this. Neither Twitter nor Bluesky show any signs of getting it.
The article is saying the opposite though: they are not adding federation directly to Tumblr's own codebase. Instead, federation will come about from some planned future migration of Tumblr onto WordPress.com infrastructure, which already has that feature.
The public blog network is a minority of traffic. If you've never actually been a Tumblr user, you won't have an understanding of the product at all.
SOLID or ActivityPods, on the other hand...
Can you elaborate on this? I would think giving control to the end user is exactly what a federated model would do.
That's a lot to assert without elaboration.
When they changed it a lot of folks were unhappy https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-n...
Threads was preemptively shitlisted just for thinking of connecting to Fediverse, because a lot of instance admins are ActivityPub or Mastodon maximalists[0] and believed that everyone would just flock over to Threads immediately.
Then it was shitlisted again because Mark Zuckerberg started zucking on Trump, and decided to take their already threadbare moderation team and tie their hands further. This is a more practical concern as most Fedi admins do not have the time or ability to deal with one mega-instance that happens to be both indispensable and willing to flood everyone with garbage.
I could see Tumblr getting shitlisted purely on the grounds of "fuck Matt Mullenweg", because Fedi admins are also hilariously petty[1]. But in practice, "just link Tumblr up to Fedi" is going to be just as much of a problem as "just link Threads up to Fedi".
There's an underlying tension between the Fediverse's technical underpinnings - ActivityPub - and the community of Fediverse servers that use it. The technology wants to be widely adopted, but the community wants to be small enough to avoid harassment and attacks[2], and these are in conflict. The Fediverse's structure is already a lot more centralized than anyone would like to admit, and scaling the network makes this problem worse.
[0] As opposed to general enthusiasm for federated communications technologies. See also the pushback Cory Doctorow got for backing Free our Feeds, a plan to make good on BlueSky's currently vacuous federation promises.
[1] This is why I self-host Mastodon even though it's a total pain in the ass.
[2] Like that one time a bunch of Japanese skiddies decided to spam literally every server from whatever accounts they could register
> The Fediverse's structure is already a lot more centralized than anyone would like to admit
Hi, I'm "anyone", and: no it isn't? Technically and philosophically, no it isn't. Large instances are not a failure of decentralisation, because as you evidently know, their existence does not preclude you or anyone else setting up a server and federating. There's no universe in which "scaling the network" reduces decentralisation, in fact it's the solution to the "fuck Matt Mullenweg" situation you speculate about. The less homogenous fedi admins become, the more the network is sustained by people who don't even know who he is. Your comment is rife with generalisations about the motivations of people on the fediverse, but it's far less monolithic than you think.
