If ActivityPub gets really popular, there won't be a single service that's winning. For example, if each Youtube profile is suddenly a fediverse account which you can follow, the owner of that Youtube profile doesn't need a separate Twitter or Wordpress account - simply the act of uploading the video to Youtube will appear in user timelines of twitter, mastodon and all other services. Same would happen with blogs, instagram accounts, etc.

And if we get to such future, it's possible that we won't even need a Mastodon/Twitter account to have a timeline. iOS and Android could build native support for following accounts and displaying timelines in the operating system.

I agree. Wordpress powers something like 40% of all websites. 40% of the web having a low friction way of publishing to the fediverse is a big deal. Sure, this doesn't mean that almost half the web is suddenly "on the fediverse"; the more ad-dependent a site is, the less likely it seems that they'll enable this unless they can do so in a way that brings users to them.

I want to be able to have a fediverse feed that's as much RSS feed as news feed, but that's my preference. I'm really glad WP is making it easy for folks to use ActivityPub.

Corporate publishers are probably feeling the burn of the enshittifcation of Medium and then Twitter, and annoyance from the Instagram ad volume and Threads uncertainty. I bet they would welcome an something more boring like a Wordpress blog that was totally under their control. The critical part that's missing is an easy way for end users to subscribe (e.g. a popular/easy RSS/Atom/feed reader standalone product or feature).

I'd love for that to be true, but social media has been trending away from blog-type textual posts for a long time. Last stat I saw, wordpress.com published around 77 million posts per month. I think twitter needs less than 4 hours to hit 77 million tweets.

Also, the brand is in really bad shape. Super outdated and stale. I know a lot of people wish it didn't, but that kind of thing really matters when you're trying to get lots of people to think your product is worth investing time into.

While I wish this were true... considering how long it took to get Gutenberg, I wouldn't hold your breath.

And GB was rushed out the door, not even half-baked. Too often tt's a beta product pretending to be production worthy.

well luckily WordPress would be interoperable with Mastodon and maybe Threads if they stick to their commitment to federate with the ActivityPub protocol.

Bluesky insists on building its own protocol and is making empty promises (https://atproto.com/specs/atp#future-work) to turn it over to the IETF or W3C at some undetermined date.

I really think it's a mistake to assume that there will be one thing which replaces Twitter. This has ~never happened (I think possibly the only example would be the Digg->Reddit migration); normally people leave a dying social network for a _variety_ of other things, not for a copy of the dying thing.

In an ActivityPub world, this is particularly unlikely to happen. Arguably, we've actually had a social media ecosystem a bit like this before; there was a time when Wordpress (self-hosted or service), MovableType and a few others could interact via things like pingbacks (a sort of early quote-tweet).

It would be great if conversations weren't siloed inside one corporation's servers, but I don't think WP will change anything re: Twitter.

Twitter and Mastodon are cognitively low-maintenance tools. The authoring is very simple, and designed to be within 280/500 characters. Wordpress is the opposite. The UI assumes you're there to write, not view other people's sites and comment on them.

Automattic owns Tumblr, and that type of UI is probably what would get people thinking of posts as "tweet-length info" instead of full-on blog posts.

can you elaborate? Wordpress or (personal) blogs in general?

Not OP but I think this mainly due to the newly supported cross platform fediverse profile capability. From the article:

"Your WordPress blog can now become a profile for the fediverse. This means your readers can follow you and receive all the latest posts from your blog directly on their preferred platform. More so, they can engage in enriching conversations by replying to your posts, with their replies reflecting as comments on your blog post, creating a synchronized and interactive experience."