Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?

"Maybe he's right about WP Engine, but the way he has and continues to handle everything has been disastrous."

This is the best single line distillation of the current lunacy. I mean with every passing day, it all becomes more and more unhinged, and I see no good outcome in the long term. The overall damage to the ecosystem I think begins it's death spiral now.

It's a boon for competitors I suppose, but that's about it.

Well, he's not right about WP Engine.

Wordpress is an open source project. If he's "right" about WP Engine, then he's "right" about basically every user of every open source project, and there ceases to be any such thing. OS is take-it-or-leave-it, if he wants contributions back, put it in the licence and also offer support.

> It's a boon for competitors I suppose

I would think so too, but it’s not guaranteed.

Everyone thought for sure that Twitter would die with what Elon Musk has been doing to it, but somehow it seems to still be alive.

Likewise, everyone thought there would be a total exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy or Kbin. And while those platforms did get a lot of new users, it feels like it didn’t reach the level of significance of the Digg -> Reddit mass-migration.

Therefore I am not convinced that people will actually be leaving Wordpress in droves. No matter how bad the situation currently seems for WP users.

Twitter is dead, it just hasn't stopped twitching yet. Turns out network effects are extremely durable. There is no time like the present to move to BlueSky if you haven't already.

I think revealed in this is that Matt has no understanding of the Wordpress userbase, and bizarre unpopular features like Gravitar and Gutenberg now make more sense in hindsight.

ACF was one of the most important enterprise plugins in the ecosystem when they hijacked it. They essentially did a supply chain attack on the top WordPress users and expected there to be no repercussions.

He was also apparently upset that WP Engine was not pushing Jetpack, Automattic's own thoroughly mediocre service package that they try upselling to every WordPress user.

So I get the impression Matt is really, really, really out of touch with his own userbase, and he still sees the primary feature of WordPress as a blogging platform.

Way too many progressive people proclaim the virtues of free and open and then <pikachu_face.gif> when others take them for their word.

If you want compensation of any kind you must stipulate them before the fact.

Indeed, network effects are durable but not unbreakable. I haven’t deleted my Twitter account yet, mostly because there are those (increasingly rare) occasions when it’s necessary to log in to view some thread or the like, but when I find myself there, it always feels like a raging dumpster fire. Building a new network on BlueSky took a while, but it was definitely worthwhile, and while there are a handful of people I miss from Twitter, I have a good community that fills the need that Twitter used to. I suspect that for most tech people, Mastodon is going to be the new destination and there will never be a single destination for social networking again, but maybe that’s a good thing.

He's right about every user of every open source project. The license gives you code, it doesn't give you trademarks, infrastructure support or moral support.

I am amused to see the usual HN vibe both complaining that commercial entities crowding out creators with their own software is violating the "spirit of open source," and insisting that FOSS maintainers don't owe you anything morph into commercial entities don't owe the FOSS maintainers of the software users anything, and are owed trademarks and access to infrastructure.

WP Engine is a hedge fund spinning money out of FOSS. It's fine, it makes more choices available for people. But the idea that Automattic has to acknowledge them, and that acknowledgement cannot be hostile, that's not in the license.

> It's a boon for competitors I suppose, but that's about it.

There aren't that many when it comes to the usual wordpress "niche" aka "slap it on a 5$ VPS and be done with it". Virtually everything else has a muuuuch steeper learning curve, and you gotta be lucky to find third party integrations for more than the usual suspects (WP, Drupal, Joomla).

> I think revealed in this is that Matt has no understanding of the Wordpress userbase

Ironically, ever since past data of "active installs" was removed from the plugin directory [1], Matt is, as sole owner of WordPress dot org [2], the only person in the world with unfettered access to plugin usage trends.

[1] https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-w...

I am confused. Is WordPress trying to change the open source license to a more restrictive one? Suddenly trying to enforce some terms of the existing license that they never did in the past? Or is it an old fashioned legal dispute where each party says the terms of the contract mean something different?

Reddit is much worse today than before the exodus, it is recovering and maybe it will eventually fully recover. The issue with the Reddit exodus is that people fled to various different platforms and not just one. Plus some people likely just stopped using social media. This shattering to various different platforms stopped the momentum from totally killing Reddit. And maybe the same will also project WordPress.

I am still at Reddit but many subreddits are just not the same.

But is Matt progressive in any sense of the word?

Yeah, entire parts of reddit have been hollowed out and a lot of the subs have changed in many ways. I don't enjoy using reddit any more, even as someone who mostly didn't care about the protest.

Well if we are just going by what's "allowed" legally and going by the license... automattic also hasn't done anything that's either illegal or a breach of the license. So going by that logic, they haven't done anything wrong either.

Shit, I'd forgotten that Gravitar is Matt's.

Just deleted my Gravitar profile/account, which required me to delete my Wordpress.com account too.

> Matt is really, really, really out of touch with his own userbase.

I think Matt probably has some idea of a "user base" for which he's "fighting the good fight". But it doesn't include _me_. Or any of the place IO work at's clients who're running WP for their website. Or the ACF plugin developers, or any of the other developers publishing themes or plugins on wordpress.org who must be thinking "WF actual F" about now.

As I commented elsewhere:

So far as I can tell, when Matt talks about "the WordPress Community", he means:

  - Matt
  - the people who didn't quit Automattic last week
  - _maybe_ the WP core developers who don't work at Automattic, so long as they keep their criticisms to themselves

And the community of people who _use_ WordPress to run their websites, and the people who help them to do that, and the 3rd party plugin and theme developers who make WP work for so many different kinds of websites - can all go and get fucked.

Perhaps in the "progressive cognitive dysfunction" sense...

If that guy was a progressive, he'd give 70% of his income straight to the government.

What is he right about exactly?

And is Automattic providing trademark, infrastructure and moral support to WP Engine? As far as I understand WP Engine is just a WordPress plugin.

He's (pretending) to operate under an alternative history where wordpress requires contributions to its ecosystem proportionate to your revenue, and forbids any use of its trademarks or any related terms.

He's actually engaged in rich-vs-rich corp warfare and playing the open source community like puppets on a string.

I mean, I think it probably depends on your use case, but yeah, it is, at the very least, dying. I haven't felt the need to use my dormant account for just under two years (with the latest AI nonsense I should probably just delete it; I'd been holding off until now because, well, it's 18 years old, and I have some sentimental attachment).

Mastodon's been a largely acceptable replacement.

Gravitar isn't such a terrible idea, just look at how successful something like Linktree is. The problem with Matt's ventures in general is that they're half-assed. Wordpress.com sucks compared to Wix.com. Gutenberg sucks compared to Webflow, etc. Even WordPress sucks as a CMS which is why people even needed stuff like ACF in the first place. Like why in 2024 any CMS wouldn't have that functionality baked in makes no sense to me, unless as you say you just think of it as a blogging platform like it's 2004.

Apollo was the only reason I could tolerate Reddit. I only wanted to use Reddit on my phone, and most other apps were meh at best (especially the official app, eww). When Reddit pulled the API crap and Apollo officially shut down, I left and haven’t gone back. As someone who spent hours a day on Reddit, I had no qualms leaving.

As someone who worked years in the Wordpress space, I’m feeling the same about never touching it again which is a shame. I’ve enjoyed the projects, I’ve enjoyed contributing to the WP Stack Exchange and helping other people, and I’m done.