Reply by Andrew Shell, April 29, 2026
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More thoughts on Automattic’s new short-form blogging app. I wish I could use WordLand to post to it. That would make things so simple. But their limits are like Twitter’s limits. Tiny little textboxes. And the funny thing is the …
I think the marketing for this new theme missed its mark. Dave thinks this is a new short-form blogging app when it's really just a new theme. I was able to post to it from WordLand with no issues. It's still a regular WordPress.com website. This is just a new theme built in a week by two devs as part of Radical Speed Month.
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This is why they should have seeded developers. ;-)
I'll check it out right now. This is good news.
The question is what does it do with any links or styles, titles? does the timeline reflect editing changes?
The frontend text box for now seems very simple. Capped at 500 characters, auto-detects urls and auto sets the title to the start of the content (default WordPress behavior).
If you go under WordPress Settings > Writing and enable "Use Markdown for posts and pages." you can use markdown in your posts from the frontend.
That's a good piece of feedback. Since it's just a regular WordPress.com site you get all the usual WordPress.com features out of the box, but maybe features like Markdown (or ActivityPub) should be automatically created when you create the site so you don't have to go hunt for them.
I'll pass this along to the folks working on this!
Awesome! Thanks
The other thing they might do is make the default post type "aside" as I think that will pass through correctly to ActivityPub.
how do i see a timeline? can i follow you somehow? i haven't even had the time to go into it to that basic level.
You can check out my test site at https://hooplasocial.wordpress.com/ and out of the box you just follow it with RSS. It's a free plan, so I don't think I can turn on ActivityPub. There is no aggregator built into the theme, but WordPress has its own "reader" app.
> It’s a free plan, so I don’t think I can turn on ActivityPub.
Good news is, you can! The ActivityPub feature is available for all sites on WordPress.com, including those on a free plan. Head over to Settings > ActivityPub in wp-admin and you'll be able to enable the feature. :)