Our 2025 Roadmap: Building the Future of WordPress Federation
We’re excited to share this roadmap — there’s a lot happening with the ActivityPub plugin, and we can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.
We often refer to this roadmap in GitHub issues and discussions, but until now, we haven’t published a full roadmap post — nor a formal changelog. This post is a first step toward keeping the community more informed about what’s planned and what’s coming up next.
Our goal for this year is to finalize the full ActivityPub experience […]
What we shipped so far in 2025
Alongside our upcoming plans, we’ve already shipped several important features in recent releases. Here are some highlights of what’s now available in the ActivityPub plugin.
Onboarding
We’ve added an onboarding flow after plugin activation to help guide new users through key decisions — such as selecting the Actor Mode.
It’s also a great opportunity to explain Fediverse concepts for users who are new to them.
More details:
👉 5.9.0 — Easier onboarding for your Fediverse […]
7.3.0 – Ctrl+Fed+Delete
Say hello to smoother moderation and a proper goodbye to old accounts. ActivityPub for WordPress 7.3.0 lets you block, filter, and even fully delete your presence from the Fediverse—site-wide or user-by-user. Whether you’re cleaning house or just want more control, this update makes managing your Fediverse footprint easier than ever.
7.6.0 — Command, Sync & Go
This release puts speed and control right at your fingertips. Whether you’re jumping between settings, syncing followers, or handling quotes in real time, version 7.6.0 makes managing your Fediverse presence faster and more intuitive than ever.
7.7.0 — Extra Quotable
Right on the heels of WordPress 6.9 we released a new version of the ActivityPub plugin today, making quote comments visible in the Reactions block and bringing you new ways of customizing your author pages.
7.8.0 – Happy Holidays
As the year wraps up, ActivityPub 7.8.0 lands with stronger moderation tools, more flexible reactions, and a small surprise. Subscribe to shared blocklists with automatic updates and bulk-import domain blocks. Reactions now support a clean, avatar-free summary view. Plus, curious users can preview the new experimental Social Web Reader inside WordPress admin.
WordPress Federation: Recap of 2025
In June, we published our 2025 roadmap: Building the Future of WordPress Federation, outlining the areas we wanted to focus on for the rest of the year.
As we step into 2026, it’s time to look back at how the roadmap held up and what we shipped in 2025.
2025 at a Glance
2025 turned out to be an ambitious and, at times, challenging timeline. Even so, we were able to make meaningful progress across most of the areas we set out to work on.
Over the course of the year, we introduced the Following feature, significantly expanded moderation tooling, refined actor handling, and improved the reliability and performance of core federation workflows. Along the way, we also shipped a first experimental draft of the Reader, offering an early look at what reading the Fediverse inside WordPress could become.
Not everything on the roadmap was completed, but we’re happy with how much we were able to achieve and with the foundations that are now in place for what comes next.
Roadmap
Below is a review of the roadmap topics we outlined for 2025, what we worked on, and what remains open.
Followers / Following ✅
Work in 2025 expanded ActivityPub beyond followers by introducing the Following feature, allowing WordPress sites and users to actively follow accounts on the Fediverse.
Alongside this, we improved the reliability and performance of both follower and following lists, including better synchronization across instances and faster resolution and display of large collections.
This work also laid the foundation for later features, such as the experimental Reader.
Related release posts:
Actors ✅
We continued refining how local and remote actors are represented and resolved. Internal refactors reduced special-case handling and improved consistency and performance across actor resolution, including follower, following, and block lists.
This work primarily affected internal behavior rather than user-facing UI.
Related release posts:
Moderation ✅
In 2025, ActivityPub-specific moderation was significantly expanded. Site-wide and personal blocking now cover domains, keywords, and individual actors, with consistent checks applied to incoming activities.
We added blocklist subscriptions with scheduled syncing and bulk domain imports, including support for community-maintained lists such as the IFTAS DNI list. Moderation handling was also refined with improved reject behavior for quote interactions.
Related release posts:
Reader 🧪
An experimental Reader UI was introduced behind a feature flag. When enabled, it adds a “Social Web” area to the dashboard where posts and shares from followed accounts can be read inside WordPress.
The feature is disabled by default and explicitly marked as experimental.
Related release posts:
Direct Messages ⏸️
Direct Messages were not implemented in 2025. This remains an open roadmap topic for future consideration once related foundations mature further.
Fully Delete Profiles ✅
Deletion semantics were improved to better support explicit federated cleanup. Delete activities are now sent when WordPress users are removed, and deletion-related handling was aligned across activity processing.
A CLI-based self-destruct command was introduced to allow site owners to explicitly remove their site’s federated presence.
Related release posts:
Client-to-Server API ⏸️
Client-to-Server API support was not implemented in 2025. No user-facing features shipped under this topic.
Beyond the Roadmap
While the roadmap helped guide our focus in 2025, not everything that shipped was planned from the start. Some features emerged from day-to-day usage, feedback, and practical needs that became clearer over time.
A few of those are worth highlighting.
Quotes
Support for quote interactions improved significantly over the year. We refined detection and handling of quoted replies and links, added proper handling for quote comments, and improved how quote permissions are revoked when quoted content is deleted. This made quoted interactions more reliable and consistent across instances.
Related release posts:
Onboarding
We also improved onboarding for new users by adding clearer guidance and better defaults after plugin activation. This helped reduce friction for sites federating for the first time and made initial setup more approachable.
Related release posts:
Extra Fields UI
While not originally planned as a roadmap item, work on Extra Fields resulted in a more flexible and user-friendly UI. New blocks and layout options made it easier to display federated profile data in different formats, allowing themes to choose how much structured information to surface.
Related release posts:
Wrapping up
Looking back, 2025 was a year of steady progress. We focused on the foundations we set out to improve, shipped meaningful features along the way, and left room for unplanned work that addressed real needs as they came up.
Now we’d love to hear from you: What was your favorite feature this year? What are you most excited about and what do you still miss or hope to see next?
Your feedback has shaped this project throughout 2025, and it continues to guide where we go from here. We’re already working on our 2026 timeline, and your ideas, experiences, and questions are an important part of that process.
Thanks for being part of the journey and see you on the Fediverse.
