In the spirit of Wellybob the Backwards Cat, who starred in a single episode of a british 1970s children’s television show called “Jamie and the Magic Torch”, I’m going to write this post in reverse order.
I suppose you might call this a “TLDR” (too long, didn’t read) preface, in the style of so many AI generated news articles that tell you what they are going to tell you, tell you it, then tell you what they’ve told you. Yes, they drive me nuts too.
I’m moving my personal blog back to Substack
Despite misgivings about Substack, they pale in comparison to the disaster unfolding at Automattic and Wordpress at the moment. I’ll explain further below.
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Not again! Why? What happened?
Many years ago, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked a little-known open source blogging script called “b2”, and re-badged it “Wordpress”. For those that are not software developers, “forking” means taking the source code of something, and developing it in a sufficiently different direction that it becomes a child of the original.
The internet is largely the result of the open source ideals - where source code is made available for free (as in beer), with the proviso that derivative works should similarly be made available for free.
Wordpress spread like a weed. It allowed those with minimal skills to setup a webserver, and publish content to the web. There were other solutions around - such as Blogger, Drupal, Joomla, and MoveableType - but none captured hearts and minds in the same way that Wordpress did.
During the “Web 2.0” explosion in the mid 2000s, all manner of social networks appeared - many of them competing for hearts and minds among those still wishing to publish online, but not having attained the means or knowledge to do so. The likes of Blogger, LiveJournal, Vox, Yahoo 360, Posterous, and MySpace, Medium, and more competed to remove all friction between the acts of writing, publishing, liking, commenting, following, subscribing, monetising and more.
During this time Wordpress “grew up” - with the formation of Automattic - an organisation led by Matt Mullenweg to manage the development and support of Wordpress. Wordpress had become far more than a platform - more a central nervous system that countless thousands of blogs were entwined with - initially allowing central management of extensions (plugins) and themes, and then an integrated network of identities, comments, likes, and subscriptions - leveraging automated spam defence, and more.
Everything was good. Automattic shone out across the internet as an example to others - not only as a decentralised organisation, but also how to manage, marshal, and protect an open source project at scale.
That all ended for many a few weeks ago.
Many companies have set out their stall as a Wordpress “host” in recent years - automating the installation of Wordpress, and packaging services around the hosting. Each host has their own unique selling points. Some of them even modify the Wordpress source code. Automattic run their own hosting service - “wordpress.com” - in competition with many others. It’s not unusual for the lower-level configuration of Wordpress to be limited, or packed into tiered hosting packages.
Such was the story of “WP Engine” - a very successful Wordpress host that had not only extended the platform through their own extensions, but had also stripped back default functionality - monetising it’s re-inclusion to no doubt cover hosting costs.
This is where it gets interesting.
Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic) had taken issue with WP Engine for some time - with their reluctance to financially support the development of the core platform, and their alleged willingness to allow their customers to think of “WP Engine” as “Wordpress”. There’s pretty good precedent around protection of trademarks - so this wasn’t really a surprise.
What Automattic did next was a surprise.
First, WP Engine were blocked from the Wordpress plugin repository - the central nervous system that allows millions of websites all over the world to ensure that each part of their installation is up-to-date.
Next, Automattic forked the most popular extension developed by WP Engine for Wordpress - used by millions of websites (remember at this point Wordpress in one shape or another hosts something like 40% of the web). They cited security concerns as their primary motivation.
I think this is where the story turns. Everything up until this point was pretty predictable. The next part wasn’t.
Automattic didn’t just fork the WP Engine developed extension - they removed any integrations with other WP Engine offerings, re-named it, and re-directed every website using it to their version. They didn’t test it properly either. Thousands of websites went down, all over the world.
I’m hoping you’re keeping up with this.
The fallout across the web development community has been colossal - I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s being likened to Elon Musk’s wilful destruction of Twitter by some. It doesn’t really appear to be about what Automattic did or didn’t do - it’s more about loss of trust.
Automattic and Wordpress were the example by which other organisations and projects were often judged. Automattic created a foundation to protect the development of Wordpress going forwards. They were famed for supporting both their own staff, and the development community as a whole. They were doing everything right. Until they weren’t.
I can’t think Wordpress will disappear overnight. It’s too big. There are too many players involved. Worried hosting and development companies have already started putting out press-releases to re-assure their customers - reminding them that Wordpress is open source - and while it’s original stewards may have taken the wrong path, the community as a whole will persist no matter what.
Anyway.
There it is.
That’s why I’m moving my blog. All I ever wanted was somewhere to write, and to allow others to easily read. In a way the events of the last few weeks have been a wonderful reminder of how the web once was - before the walled gardens grew so large nobody realised they were within them.
Yes, Substack is a walled garden too - but they play nicely with others.
Head to jonathanwrotethis.substack.com and have a read. You might like to subscribe too - it’s free :)