ActivityPub and the Fediverse had a great year in 2025. With that foundation in place, our 2026 roadmap is all about what comes next: better discoverability, richer interactions, and a smoother experience across the open social web.

As always, this roadmap is not set in stone. Priorities may shift based on community feedback, WordPress developments, and changes across the wider Fediverse. But it should give you a clear sense of where we’re heading this year.

Increase Findability and Reach

One of the main themes for 2026 is discoverability. We want WordPress sites to be easier to find, follow, and recommend across the Fediverse.

FASP Support

We plan to implement support for Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers (FASPs).

FASPs are independent services that enhance Fediverse servers with features such as cross-instance search, recommendations, and spam detection. By integrating with these services, WordPress content can appear in Fediverse discovery tools, making it easier for people to find and follow WordPress blogs.

This work is already in progress, and you can follow the implementation here:

https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/pull/2312

Starter Packs

Starter Packs are shareable collections of recommended accounts designed to help people discover communities more easily.

They address the “empty feed problem” by giving new users curated lists of accounts to follow. This makes it easier to find interesting voices and become part of the network more quickly.

Reader v2

The next phase of the Reader will focus on deeper interaction and a more complete social experience.

Reactions

We plan to show likes, boosts, and comments directly in the Reader view, so users can see how posts are being received across the network.

Interactions

Users will be able to interact with Fediverse content directly from the Reader — including:

• Commenting on posts
• Liking posts
• Boosting posts

This will make the Reader a fully interactive space, not just a passive timeline.

Activity Stream

We’ll introduce an Activity Stream to notify users about important requests and events, such as:

• Follow requests
• Starter Pack invitations
• Other actions that require approval

Users will be able to accept or decline these directly from the interface.

Reply Context Import

We also plan to improve how conversation threads are displayed.

By parsing reply collections and context from incoming posts, the Reader will be able to fill in missing parts of a discussion, even when some replies were created before the post was indexed. This will make threads feel more complete and easier to follow.

Direct Messages

As part of the evolving Reader experience, we’re planning an initial version of Direct Messages.

This will start as a proof of concept, helping us explore the technical challenges while already delivering a useful and frequently requested feature. Over time, we’ll iterate based on real-world usage and feedback.

Client-to-Server API

In addition to server-to-server federation, ActivityPub also defines a Client-to-Server (C2S) API:

This API is primarily intended for mobile apps and other clients, allowing them to publish content directly to a server.

For WordPress, this could:

• Enable mobile or third-party clients
• Allow WordPress to act as a proxy for other publishing tools
• Open new workflows for federated content

The first step will be enabling POST requests to the Outbox endpoint using application passwords.

This is currently being worked on, and you can track the implementation here:

https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/pull/2851

Ongoing Improvements and Interoperability

Alongside these larger initiatives, we’ll continue working on a wide range of improvements across the plugin.

A key focus is better interoperability with the broader WordPress ecosystem. We want it to be easier for other plugins to integrate with the Fediverse, so that features like comments, reactions, events, and other content types can work seamlessly across federated networks.

We’re also continuing to refine the experience for long-form content. WordPress is known for blogging and publishing, and we want to make sure that articles, threads, and conversations feel natural and readable across the Fediverse.

In addition, we’ll experiment with smaller features and fun ideas, such as activity statistics and other lightweight insights, to help site owners better understand their reach and interactions.

These improvements may be smaller in scope than the major roadmap items, but together they play an important role in making WordPress a more capable and enjoyable citizen of the Fediverse.

Staying Informed

We’ll continue to share updates throughout the year.

Each release will include posts about new features and improvements. For larger initiatives, like Reader v2 or Direct Messages, we’ll publish deeper updates as the work evolves.

As always, your feedback helps shape the future of the plugin and the growing WordPress Fediverse community.

If you have thoughts or ideas, we’d love to hear them in the comments.

Every now and then, it’s time to tidy things up.

Version 7.9.0 is a spring-cleaning release: fewer rough edges, better defaults, and a lot of small improvements that make the plugin feel smoother and more predictable in daily use. No big rewrites — just many thoughtful fixes and refinements.

And yes, there’s one change you’ll notice immediately.

Emoji, But Make Them Emoji

Custom emoji from the Fediverse now finally show up as… emoji.

Instead of seeing placeholders like :sad_trombone:, federated posts now render the actual custom emoji they were meant to display. It’s a small detail, but one that makes conversations feel more human, and a lot less like reading raw markup.

Sometimes polish really is about the little things.

A Healthier, More Predictable Setup 🩺

A quiet but important part of this release focuses on making things fail less often — and recover better when they do.

Version 7.9.0 adds new Site Health checks to detect common issues that can silently break federation, including missing scheduled events and security plugins blocking REST API access. When possible, the plugin now attempts to repair these problems automatically.

We also tightened up activity scheduling and outbox processing to reduce edge cases where federation could stall or behave inconsistently. These changes don’t add new buttons or screens, but they make ActivityPub for WordPress more resilient in real-world setups.

Following, Reading, and the Social Graph

This release also includes a few improvements that move us one step closer to full Reader support — while keeping things deliberately cautious.

With the new Fediverse Following block and Extra Fields improvements, it’s now much easier to build a proper profile page in WordPress, similar to what many other Fediverse platforms offer. You can surface who you follow and how you present yourself, using blocks instead of custom code.

The Reader itself remains behind a feature flag and is still considered experimental. This release focuses on preparing the surrounding pieces — navigation, feedback, and presentation — rather than enabling it by default.

If you’re curious about where this is heading, you can enable the feature and try it out today. As with earlier previews, feedback is very welcome and helps shape what full Reader support will eventually look like. (See the initial Reader announcement for upgrade notes and details.)

Changelog 🪵

Added

• Add Fediverse Following block to display accounts the user follows.
• Add global default quote policy setting that can be overridden per-post.
• Add health check to verify scheduled events are registered and auto-repair if missing.
• Add location support for posts using WordPress Geodata post meta fields.
• Add Podlove Podcast Publisher integration for podcast episode federation.
• Add site health check to detect when security plugins block REST API access.
• Add Social Web item to the admin bar for quick access to the reader.
• Add soft delete support with Tombstone objects when post visibility changes to local/private.
• Custom emoji from the fediverse now show up instead of looking like :sad_trombone:.
• Make actor table columns filterable.
• Send Add/Remove activities when changing a post’s sticky status to improve interoperability with the featured collection.
• Show warning instead of reply link when logged-in user cannot federate replies to fediverse comments.

Changed

• Defer outbox processing to async execution to improve publishing performance.
• Move Jest mocks to tests/js directory for better project organization.
• Remove redundant __nextHasNoMarginBottom props now that @wordpress/components 32.0.0 defaults to true.
• Revert to synchronous outbox processing with improved timeout handling and WebFinger error caching.

Fixed

• Don’t filter the comment query when type__not_in has been set.
• Filter comments on ActivityPub posts from REST API responses.
• Fix duplicate media attachments when featured image is also in post content.
• Fixed Federated Reply block embed appearing squished at 200×200 pixels for same-site embeds by passing explicit width to wp_oembed_get().
• Fixed pagination metadata leaking when “Hide Social Graph” privacy setting is enabled.
• Fix migration activities not being scheduled for federation due to hook registration timing.
• Fix older comments with empty type not being federated.
• Fix quote requests from Mastodon not being received.
• Fix users not being accessible after re-enabling ActivityPub capability.
• Hide admin REST API endpoints from discovery index.
• Show informational notice when trying to follow an already-followed account.
• Skip fetching public audience identifiers which are not actual recipients.

Downloads

• WordPress.org: activitypub.7.9.0.zip
• GitHub: tag/7.9.0

Thank You

A huge thank you to everyone who tested early builds 🧪, filed bug reports , shared feedback , reviewed pull requests , or helped improve docs . Your input directly shaped many of the fixes and cleanups in this release.

And thanks to everyone running ActivityPub for WordPress out in the wild — that’s where spring cleaning really shows what needs sweeping 🧹.

You make this project better, one emoji (and one fix) at a time 🥰