[Plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com] Enhanced Distribution

I’m wondering the same question! We are not getting much info on this new feature!

This page has a little bit more detail: https://en.wordpress.com/firehose/

Turning off Enhanced Distribution will prevent your published posts and comments being sent to the companies that consume the WordPress.com firehose. This doesn’t mean they can’t get the data; it’s all available on your site feed. It just means they get it faster and they don’t have to poll your site.

The benefits might not be immediately apparent but they are there. Every company that receives firehose updates has the opportunity to show your content to more people. And they subscribe under terms that basically requires them to flow traffic to you rather than simply steal your content. They are not scrapers.

If you want people on the internet discovering your site, I can’t think of any good reasons to turn it off.

Thanks Andy, sounds like a good thing to have activated. Appreciate the response.

Yeah, I was wondering about this as well, especially that there is no enough information about the Enhanced Distribution feature in the panel!

Thanks Andy for the info!

The firehose info page mentions the im.wordpress.com service, but when I try to subscribe to my self-hosted blog with that bot, it says it can’t find it (I have jetpack+e.d. activated). Should it work? Would love to have more info about this stuff.

@kb_unhammer: you can not currently subscribe to a Jetpack blog via im.wordpress.com (but it’s something we’re looking at for the future).

I just found out by using that enhanced distribution part of the Jetpack plugin that if your hosted somewhere like Fatcow.com it will cause an extreme increase of load on the server and will get your site suspended.