Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

This isn’t unexpected; I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker as well. I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.

Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...

(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.

Honest question from an outsider. WordPress is open source, so why hasn't the project been replaced with one that doesn't include him?

Momentum. Heavy objects in motion have inertia. Oddly works in a similar fashion with software projects.

20+ years of OSS contributions and Matt leading the project is a LOT of inertia. You can fork the project right now yourself, but until some significant number of contributors move their efforts to your fork, you get no change of direction.

The value of WordPress is in the brand, the ecosystem, and the community, and we’re all trying desperately to hold that together.

WordPress is a lot more than it's core code. There's a whole ecosystem of plugins, for example, and the usual place to share them (wordpress.org/plugins) is, essentially, controlled by one guy. It's not so easy to fork that.

I've been saying this on twitter for months now. I don't believe this is a mentally healthy individual. His continued defence of his behavior with the whole "if you knew what was happening you would understand" style responses indicates he's lost in the sauce.

If he's not having some sort of mental health crisis it really begs to question how we got here with someone like him running those organizations for this long.

If he is, and he makes it out of this state, I feel for the emotions he's going to have to deal with when he sees (with a different perspective) what he's done to what is ultimately his life's work.

It's sad. All the way around, truly just sad.

If you're in leadership it's a good idea to get some outside advisors/mentor/muse.

Hard to find but, much cheaper than a lawyer. Many times just rubber-ducking the problem with someone can help build a more complete thought experiment.

I thought that too until you go down the rabbit hole and realize it's been this way since apparently the beginning. It's also interesting to note just how hard everyone was tearing the author apart in the comments only for it to basically become true a decade later.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....

I guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. Just never get to see it in the beginning.

Maybe stop doing that? There's a reason revolutions usually involve total destruction at some point along the way.

Makes me wonder with the apparent lack of strong will just how much of the dissent is actually a (very) loud minority.

Tangential, but I see the same arguments being made as I discuss completely abandoning social media this week - "But where else can we go to find out about X/Y/Z?".

I dunno, but we can figure that out, we always have. Maybe, like you said, we should just start with not desperately holding something like that together. Maybe not everyone in the world needs to be in the same place at the same time, maybe a hodgepodge is okay. But people have the need to inform and be informed, so a solution will eventually crop up.

That guy was right predicting conflicts. The comments on that post are something.

I think the conflict of interest is obvious, but most people did not know about it. I think it is so glaring that I would have assumed it would not have been set up like this.

> guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality.

I think there is an element of seeing himself as the good guy and therefore entitled to things as a reward.

Been following your posts since the beginning of this. We met a while ago after a Milwaukee WordCamp and I remember talking about API v2 and how WP was going to be brought into the modern era.

Honestly, the project just feels stagnant to me. I get wanting to support plugins/the community for as long as possible, but I fear not having a sensible web framework has done nothing but given credence to the common criticism that WP shouldn't be taken seriously.

From my perspective as an owner of a small open source project, Matt's comments have been petty and vindictive. I personally probably will never touch the platform again. There's too many other frameworks out there, whether you want something similar like Statamic, Grav, Drupal.. or if you want to build with an actual app framework with Laravel, ASP.NET Core, etc.

Nah, this is just what they call “mask off.” The amount of people like this at the top of orgs is not small, nor is this atypical. One could speculate as to the many reasons why this has become more obvious over or they’ve felt emboldened to make this clear over the past 10 years or so, but I’ll leave it to others to draw their own conclusions.

“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.”

Presuming he has a problem. What makes your think you think he would welcome intervention, or seek professional help, or respond to help?

He's clearly ignoring blunt feedback, and I've yet to see anything that suggests he thinks he's doing anything wrong.

Our society has been validating his behaviour with his half-billion dollar business: clearly some of his behaviour has value. Our society seems to reward and encourage similar behaviours in other founders (especially in current zeitgeist).

Sadly in my experience we don't have many options to help, and sometimes all we can do is watch someone burn themselves and those around them down.

He's losing his game and I can't see Automattic surviving the reshuffle that's coming. Business clients hate this shit and they have agency. Matt has been giving employees non-voting shares (a different class): https://ma.tt/2024/10/owner-mentality/ although he owns 84% of the normal shares (although details of control depend on agreement with investors).

The saddest thing is that I'd guess he will toxically blame Jason Cohen. I'm sure Jason can deal with it (surely dealt with in past) and Jason seems smart enough to take strong advantage of the opportunity he's been gifted by Matt.

Then start with a new place to share plugins.

Let him destroy Wordpress with his antics. Something better will emerge and it’ll not have this man-child at the helm.

Honestly, my first response to this whole fiasco was "people still use WordPress?" It turns out to still be very popular despite HTML infrastructure subsuming many features that WordPress used to offer (on one side) and competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing.

Doesn't he seem to be following the trend: Embracing contempt for anything but ego and power? That's what Musk does, prioritizing those things over profit and the well-being of his businesses. Zuckerberg is all in, so are many others. It's 'founder mode'. In a way, they are following Trump.

Why treat it like a novel case, or like he has a mental health issue - unless all these people do.

That’s a brilliant snapshot. Thanks for sharing. It also really shows the value of things like archive.org — this context would otherwise be lost if a site disappears.

It’s also inspiring to see how Ben handled most of the comments/criticism.

Same for Elon. He still runs several companies.

See also your presidents (current and next), both not fit for any job.

not really - there's a lot of existing investment in wordpress which would be lost if this is the case.

I think it's better for wordpress community to push out Mullenweg, and establish a community owned source. It is both a fork, but not just of the source code.

I think surviving this sort of disaster makes the whole stronger/resilient in the future. Starting anew will surely just have history repeat.

Exactly. It's a SPoF. Depending on ego and whims of a malicious tyrant is stupidity or insanity.

The first people to take this step will most likely have their plugins stolen, just as Matt did with ACF. This means taking this step is a massive danger for the first contributors - those with the highest impact are those with the most to lose.

What do you exactly mean with „stolen“? Honest question.

He forked the plugin and pointed the original uri to his fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821400

Let us ponder for a moment that this is how autocracies go astray, but instead of the banhammer, it is jail or gallows for the dissidents, and possibly a war against an external enemy. No checks on an individual's power will result in self-defeating madness, at least sometimes.

It is also a counterpoint to the "just educate people more" crowd. That doesn't save bad institutions from going haywire. Matt Mullenweg is almost certainly a highly educated, well-traveled individual, and yet he rules his roost like Mao once did.

Is Jason still at WPEngine?

“Something better will emerge” could be a libre fork of the project without him. He is the problem.

But also technically it would be (inertia not withstanding) good if the project were replaced with something else, something better.

Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.

Pushing out a founder is fine and all and I’m here for it to happen.

> Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.

https://wagtail.org/ is a solid CMS

>I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.

Harsh lesson to learn. He who builds on the people builds on mud. GG.

Matt's company will fork your project, replace your original plugin listing and claim all your reviews as theirs, while also stopping you from distributing security updates to force people to switch to their fork.

Imagine if you make your money from selling your plugin, and Matt does this to you. Every WP plugin developer has to live in fear of this happening at any moment, and you can be certain it will happen if you show any kind of resistance towards Matt.

> could be a libre fork of the project

They should call it PressWord.

Then get a ton of free publicity when Microsoft sues them.

Thank you for the "direct link to the bottom of the rabbit hole". This article makes the point clearly and succinctly.

The plugin system is pretty amazing, and block themes allow really much better styling/ management of sites.

It’s not perfect but its easy to use and a lot of people know how to use it.

We switched our non profit to using it so we could have more people helping post content. We could teach something else, but this was fairly easy..

When I've worked with the REST API I've been quite pleasantly surprised by its flexibility. I thought it was quite cleverly designed. Good job mate.

I like FreePress or LibrePress

> Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.

The generosity inherent in this sentiment is fundamentally a mistake. Mullenweg will keep dominating his domain if people cannot even recognize that he's an adversary, not a friend in need.

I'd suggest guerilla-scraping the entire plugin site under the radar, unbeknownst to them. Go live with a new site that simply has all the same directory data as the existing site and additional mirror site links for each plugin, And create a process for plugin authors to claim the existing page in the directory.

Matt may be able to fork plugins, but they won't be able to fork every single plugin in the directory, as it isn't very feasible.

It also would then not necessarily be obvious to Matt which plugin listings in the new directory have been claimed, and which plugins are being updated by other people from the community.

> competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing

Have a favorite one? (Not a list of ten, please, just one or maybe two.) I've found WP easy & pleasant to use for my personal blogs, but I'm open to switching to something that's better and not associated with this nutbar.

And supposedly Matt tried to get him fired for this post!

>TLDR. In May 2010 Ben Cook wrote a post titled Why Matt should resign. [..] The post, a well-balanced, well-argued, and respectful post, was not liked by Mr. Mullenweg, who reached out to Ben Cook’s employer, Network Solutions, and tried to get Ben Cook fired. Network Solutions did not fire Ben Cook.

Why? Because THAT POST "borders on hate speech"

https://kindness.is/examples/2010/mullenweg-the-coward/

Just scraping the site isn't quite enough. You'd also have to fork Wordpress to be able to use a plugin directory not under Matt's control, which is important for the average admin to quickly patch security-relevant issues.

But even when you do that, I'd expect him to just give people an ultimatum - either "officially" host on his plugin directory, or others, but not on both. You'd have to reach critical mass pretty much immediately, or Matt can bully the ecosystem into compliance.

FWIW, Matt has never claimed to own 84%. He's only ever claimed to "control" that percentage. Presumably, some investors have assigned him their voting rights by proxy. Oops.

Yep. I’ve tried to avoid it but for groups where less technical people need to be able to edit pages and contribute content, WP continues to be the go-to solution. The last time around I tried to avoid it but after trying everything I could find, I gave up and installed it again. I’d love to see some alternatives spring up, but the plugin and theme ecosystem is so large I think it’d be hard to replace anytime soon.

Sounds fun. You would only have to provide listing editing if the plugin is not on the other site.

If anyone fills a complaint and can prove ownership a redirect can be provided.

Could maybe perhaps train an llm on a plugin and have it assist.making a free or not bloated version of some popular ones.

If that mass doesn't accumulate fast enough he is right and people want him to run things the way he does. It might look weird to me or others, they might even say the opposite but only ones actions count.

What do you mean? If you create a neopress.org and host the existing open source plugins there, how can they be stolen?

Just the code of WordPress needs to be updated that the plugins are downloaded from the new URL.

It's not so hard.

No, that's not how consent and preferences work. If someone has power over a group of individuals, and that group doesn't act due to threats, it's not confirming that they want to be controlled by that someone.

Thanks for sharing. I had no idea about them. Taking a look

Did you look at the other comments, where someone asks the same question, and I give an answer?

I'm a Python fan condescending on PHP, but doesnt the world still depend on deploying instantly via FTP and cheap hosts enjoying the low overhead of a 100000 sites on a server? On the other hand, cheapest Namecheap and Digitalocean plans are neck to neck on first glance.

Do you mean that your plugin can get stolen?

Well, you can ask plugin owners to upload a particular file with a particular key to their plugin on WordPress.org. That way they can prove they have access, and they should be allowed ownership of the plugin on the fork.

No, that's not the "stealing" I'm referring to. Instead of guessing what I could mean, just read my response to the person who first asked what I mean with "stealing".

They are to blame for his power. If someone else decided the time to act is now then they must choose now. The default is to not change anything.

I may ignore what people say and look what they do. I do this to make people angry :-)

What is the alternative? To tell people how sad it is they can't possibly anything ever? Why bother? Does more harm than good.

> competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing.

The "just" is your explanation there. Most businesses want a blog, but also a half dozen other things. An event calendar, a mailing list, contact forms, an online store, etc, etc.

WordPress is kind of a mess technically, but you'd probably be surprised at some of the name-brand sites that use it. I want to say the NYT was using it at some point. It's the epitome of "don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough". You could build a better site by duct taping together a dozen services or open source products, but WordPress is generally good enough.

Yeah you mean he takes control of the plugin on WordPress.org? But if we all move to a different domain, you don't have that problem?

Only problem is that existing WP installations would need to be manually patched to the new domain name. As long as users don't do that they'll still be in Matt's control.

But yeah, can't we create some bots that scan the internet for WP sites and send the webmasters an email informing the corruption going on inside WP and the option for them to move to the new community.

You're completely ignoring that the individuals have a high risk when doing this, even more so when they are the first to take this step. It can often happen that individuals make choices to minimize risk, which lead to increased risk for the whole group. It's just game theory. But it sounds like you're ignoring this deliberately to make people angry, so I'll leave you with one last thought:

You're legitimizing Matt's bullying (by telling people "well, if you don't act counter to game theory and deliberately worsen your own standing, you obviously want to be bullied!") and thus actively telling people "they can't possibly anything ever". What you're doing does far more harm than good.

If you could move all WP plugins & plugin developers to a different domain at once, sure, there's no problem! But unless you have a magic wand, this won't happen. Then the question is: can you move enough at once to clear the network effect?

If you cannot do that, every developer that moved with you potentially just lost their livelihood. That's the crux of it. There's no technical issue to solve here, it's purely a social and economical one.

Well it can still go gradually. First move the plugins, one by one. Then update the WP sourcecode to the new domain. Then update existing installations.

> Could maybe perhaps train an llm on a plugin and have it assist.making a free or not bloated version of some popular ones.

And we are now back at the "having your plugin stolen" problem.

Not that I think it's "the right thing to do", but WPEngine could almost certainly "move enough at once to clear the network effect".

They host a _lot_ of sites. They were forced by Matt to maintain a mirror of the .org theme/plugin repos. They could very easily come up with a list of plugins that'll allow 99% or 99.9% or more of WP sites to work. They 100% have the technical skills and the cashflow and the business case to do this. They could very easily build and deploy this, and donate it to a properly managed foundation - the way Wordpress.org _ought_ to be.

My guess is the only reason they haven't done it (or gone public with it if they're already building it) is because they're waiting for the lawsuit to give them most of Matt's and Automattic's money first.

I suppose the only advice one can give are things one would do in that situation.

I've build many great popular things on other people's turf/platforms of which nothing remains.

I have a wp blog too since the beginning! We tried to rebuild our lost communities there. Then akismet started banning people for posting comments with links and I discovered it has no appeal mechanism.

Meet the new boss..

You are still ignoring the point I've brought up repeatedly: those who move first have the most to lose.

You act like moving gradually has no danger for the plugin authors. You've moved 5% of plugins over. Whoops, Matt stole their listings, and since you didn't reach critical mass nobody uses your WP fork which points to your new plugin directory.

You've just wiped out the livelihoods of 5% of plugin developers.

I don't understand, you mean in the case that most people don't patch their WordPress installation, and keep getting updates from WordPress.org?

You have to move all installations to the new domain, but you don't have to do that in 1 day. You can create bots scanning the internet for WP installations and mail the webmaster and inform them about the corruption at WordPress and give them info how to patch their instance.

Matt would have to clone all the plugins and keep them up to date by copying the plugins from the new domain. But he would be risking a lawsuit for each plugin he does this with. Seems like a lot of work with a lot of risk.

> You have to move all installations to the new domain, but you don't have to do that in 1 day.

YES, YOU DO! At least you have to move the majority of all installations day 1. I don't know why you keep repeating this.

Matt stealing a plugin isn't a theoretical issue. He has already done it. It has happened. I'm not constructing some unlikely scenario, I'm telling you what already occurred. WP plugins are GPL licensed, so there's no legal risk if he doesn't behave incredibly stupidly.

You keep throwing technical solutions against a social and economical issue. It doesn't work. There's no technical solution here.

Every plugin you move gradually is a livelihood you potentially destroyed. Can you at least acknowledge this?

Oh yeah ok, I guess I did forget a bit the important detail that most WP plugin developers are making money from a subscription plan on the WordPress.org site. So yeah their income is basically tied to that domain name.

Yeah ok, that sucks pretty hard.

Ok, then what about DDOSing wp.org during the entire transition? Just an idea, maybe a bit crazy.

Please give LiteGUI a try (https://github.com/SiteGUI-platform/litegui), like Wordpress it was built for freelancers/agencies to create more plugins/apps/themes easily.