What is the status of Tumblr being connected to the fediverse, given the re-org? More recently a Tumblr employee confirmed it was delayed (source: https://www.tumblr.com/cyle/722492285243293696/serious-question-obviously-youre-not-the-best) and is now a part of Tumblr Labs. Is there another reason beyond the financial pressures for the delay? Is Tumblr scoping out other protocols, like nostr or bluesky's AT protocol?
This is a very interesting area, especially with the launch of Mammoth that you covered quite well. The Activity Pub and Friends plugins for WordPress are both from Automatticians, and have allowed us space to play in this space and understand the community and protocols, and also gauge user demand. Right now both have under ten thousand users, so there hasn’t been a big user push for this yet.
But maybe that’s because WordPress sites are too much of an island already, so the same folks are now digging into the Tumblr codebase to see what we can do here. So at the end of the year (Dec 31) we’ll have a chunk of the team switch away from Tumblr, but right now we’re actually having someone switch toward it to work on this and they will continue in the new year.
I remain a huge believer in open standards and user freedom, though I don’t claim to have the truth on which particular standard is better or best, to serve our customers we will support everything we can in good faith to give users more freedom, choice, and avoid lock-in.