It’s an exciting time for the Social Web movement: both WordPress and Ghost are experimenting with the ActivityPub protocol, Flipboard is federating their magazines across the network, and Newsmast is doing some really interesting development work regarding curation and content discovery. As we start to put these things together, it’s not hard to see an extremely compelling vision of how publishing and discovery can work here.
In the aftermath of Epic selling Bandcamp to Songtradr, Bandcamp has found itself in a place of instability. Half of the company’s employees were laid off post-acquisition, leading many to speculate over the beloved platform’s future. Most importantly, many artists who depended on the service are left looking for alternatives.
In case you weren’t aware, there’s a plugin for WordPress that lets blogs talk to the Fediverse, and it’s sponsored / owned by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. You can follow a publication, see its articles pop up in your social feed, and comment on them from your own instance. If a blog has comments enabled, your responses will show up on the other end.