You like to have freedom and control over all your software.
You don’t mind taking a bit more time to invest in tools that give you agency.
You like inserting little opportunities for joy in everyday interfaces.
You want future generations to grow up with a free and open web.
You like to tinker, hack, mod, customize, and share what you learn.
You are impeccable with your word.
You think software should have a little soul in it.
You love giving other people superpowers, teaching them not to need you anymore.
You appreciate a good plan but want to be able to color outside the lines, or completely reimagine the canvas altogether.
You think technology is best when it brings people together.
You get excited by updates.
You want your corner of the web to truly be yours, not generic or commoditized slop.
Your friends come to you to learn about new stuff.
You leave things better than you find them.
You fix things as you find them, it’s never someone else’s problem.
You know a single comment can light up someone’s day.
You’ve gotten out of the house to meet other people into WordPress.
There’s a Wapuu item or sticker somewhere in your life.
You “view source.”
You know the difference between owning your content and being a digital sharecropper.
You’ve drunkenly registered a domain, and have more domains than websites.
You’ve snuck an easter egg in a slug.
You have a Gravatar, and it’s also a museum of all your email identities over the years.
You think code can be poetry.
If you identified with two or more of these statements, I am afraid to inform you might be classified as a WordPresser. What did I miss?
The New Yorker is always good, but they’re having a bit of a victory lap as they celebrate their centennial. This article on the vaunted fact-checkers is such a delight, with so many in-jokes and back references it’s hard to keep track.
When I started WordPress, I wrote down five publications that I hoped someday we’d make software so good they’d adopt it. The New Yorker is one of them. If you enjoy words that make your brain tingle, make sure to also follow Automattic’s publications, Longreads and Atavist.
I’ve done this before — asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said “we don’t do that.” They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.
And in light of the news of Typepad shutting down, note that WordPress has a Typepad importer. A big advantage of putting your content into an open source platform like WordPress with an active community, vs just static pages or something custom, is that you’re getting constant upgrades “for free” as we maintain and iterate on the software, enabling new APIs or things like allowing your AI to talk to your site.
WordPress is built by a community of people deeply passionate about backwards and forward compatibility, radical openness so it’s easy to get things in and out of it, and relentless iteration building for the long term. Despite literally billions of dollars spent trying to kill or crush WordPress, and frequent proclamations of its death, we keep trucking along and doing our darndest to make the web a bit more open and free every day. It’s a life mission of many people, including myself.
Over the weekend, Automattic/Beeper had the pleasure of hosting and sponsoring the Build the Future MCP Hackathon in New York City organized by Adam Anzuoni, alongside Anthropic, Stainless, WorkOS, Smithery, and MongoDB. As someone deeply passionate about open-source technology and the potential of AI, I was thrilled to not only support this event but also to speak at it and serve as one of the judges. For those unfamiliar, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and enables AI models to interact with multiple tools in a more efficient and structured manner, allowing developers to create sophisticated agents that can handle complex tasks. And it’s only 8 months old! The energy in the room was electric—hackers collaborating, iterating, and demoing groundbreaking projects in just a few hours. (I would love to see the results of a longer overnight or all-weekend hackathon.)
For a wrap-up of the winners, check out this great X/Twitter thread by Alex Reibman. The first-place winner, Levels AI, orchestrates different AI/ML models to solve specific business requirements without needing heavy manual coding or specialized teams. Essentially, it’s models creating more models—a meta-approach to AI that could streamline operations for companies of all sizes. Yusuf Olokoba said the name was inspired by Pieter Levels, which is pretty cool. I wanted to note one team in particular: BeepResearch, which used our early access Beeper API and local MCP.
6/ BeepResearch (Bonus)
MCP server to chat with your messaging apps like iMessage, Whatsapp, FB, X, etc. over @beeper. And Ollama + gemma3 to query photos in natural language
Judging the entries was tough! People built so much cool stuff in a really short period of time. I always say technology is best when it brings people together, and this was a great example of that, and makes me very excited for Contributor Day at WordCamp US next week. (Which has such a stacked AI program as well.) Hopefully some people who enjoyed the office might consider getting 24/7 access.
I also just want to take a beat and say how amazing it is that I’m blogging this, on a United flight from Houston to San Francisco I’ve taken a million times, on a plane 36,000 feet in the air and technology is amazing. I can’t wait until United has Starlink!
Gravatar has always been about giving people control over their identity online. One avatar, one profile, synced across the web, verified connections, with a fully open API.
Gravatar is a true open identity layer for the internet, and now for AI.
For developers, we’ve rolled out mobile SDKs and a revamped REST API that lets you fetch avatars and profile data with just an email hash. Whether you’re building a blog, a community, or an AI agent that needs to understand who it’s talking to, Gravatar provides the infrastructure to make identity seamless and user-centric.
It’s free, open, and built with developers in mind. We believe identity should belong to the individual, not be locked behind proprietary platforms. Gravatar is our contribution to that vision.
If you haven’t checked it out lately, now’s a great time to explore what Gravatar can do for your app or your online presence. And think about how your apps can drive more Gravatar signups.
One thing you’ll see on every host that offers WordPress is claims about how secure they are, however they don’t put their money where their mouth is. When you dig deeper, if your site actually gets hacked they’ll hit you with remediation fees that can go from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
When a host is powered by WP.cloud, it doesn’t need to do this because hacks are so incredibly rare. (That’s why it may appear more expensive, but the total cost of ownership or being a WP.cloud-powered host is much lower when you factor in human time.)
One problem we’ve had on WordPress.com is we do all these amazing things and don’t tell anyone about it, something we’re trying to change with our focus this year on developers and developer tooling. One great example is we’re so confident about our security, if your site gets hacked we’ll fix it for free! We’ve actually been doing this for the better part of a decade, just never mentioned it anywhere.
WordPress has done a ton over the years to move the hosting industry around upgrading PHP and MySQL, PHP extensions, free SSL, and in general using our clout to advocate for user rights and freedoms from even the largest hosting companies, and I’m proud to say there are a good number, for example the ones you see at WordCamps, that have not just embraced these values but actually been more commercially successful as they’ve done so. I hope security and auto-upgrades not just for core but for plugins and themes becomes the next standard. (Jetpack does this for free, some hosts charge $100/yr per site.)
At Automattic, we believe that Open Source is more than a license—it’s a philosophy that drives innovation and makes publishing accessible to all, and we want to support fellow open source communities. Our team is at DrupalCon to share some of the tools we’ve built, including Akismet (check out the Drupal extension here), The Atavist Magazine, Beeper, Day One, Longreads, and Pocket Casts. These products, much like the web itself, thrive on connection and collaboration. (Basically all our non-WP stuff.)
I’ve loved hearing about how people are engaging with our booth—whether exploring our tools, grabbing a local snack, or taking a moment to recharge. For those of you at the event, I encourage you to swing by the Automattic booth, meet our team, and share your thoughts. Together, we can continue to create an open web that’s full of possibilities.
There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend.
On Thursday, a prominent developer, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled This might be the end of WordPress. It was very harsh. In that video you’ll hear him say about me, “he’s a chronic hater” (7:55), “seems like he’s been a pretty petty bastard for a long time now” (10:22), “I hate this shit, I hate when people are assholes and they get away with it because I’m doing it for the greater good, the fake nice guy shit. I’ll take an asshole over a fake nice guy any day, people whose whole aesthetic is being nice, I hated it.” (11:25), “Honestly I’d rather the license just be explicit about it than this weird reality of ‘If you get popular enough you can still use it but the guy who made WordPress is going to be an asshole to you.’ That seems much worse than most open source models.” (14:39)… it goes on.
Ouch!
However, one of my colleagues Batuhan is a follower of Theo’s and suggested I engage with him. It turns out we were both in San Francisco, and he was game for a livestreamed, no-conditions interview at his studio. I believe discussion is the best way to resolve conflict, that’s why my door is open to Lee Wittlinger, Heather Brunner, Brian Gardner, or any WP Engine or Silver Lake representative who wants to talk to resolve things.
Saturday afternoon I went to Theo’s studio, we had a vigorous two hour debate and discussion with some real-time chat polling that also changed my mind on a few things, and his, too. I left feeling like I had a new friend. ️And met some awesome cats. Check out the video.
(This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed.)
Contributor day just wrapped up for Portland for WordCamp US. If you ever have a chance to visit a WordCamp, I recommend it. It’s an amazing group of people brought together by this crazy idea that by working together regardless of our differences or where we came from or what school we went to we can be united by a simple yet groundbreaking idea: that software can give you more Freedom. Freedom to hack, freedom to charge, freedom to break it, freedom to do things I disagree with, freedom to experiment, freedom to be yourself, freedom expressed across the entire range of the human condition.
Open Source, once ridiculed and attacked by the professional classes, has taken over as an intellectual and moral movement. Its followers are legion within every major tech company. Yet, even now, false prophets like Meta are trying to co-opt it. Llama, its “open source” AI model, is free to use—at least until “monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month.” Seriously.
Excuse me? Is that registered users? Visitors to WordPress-powered sites? (Which number in the billions.) That’s like if the US Government said you had freedom of speech until you made over 50 grand in the preceding calendar year, at which point your First Amendment rights were revoked. No! That’s not Open Source. That’s not freedom.
I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom. It’s a proprietary license, issued at Meta’s discretion and whim. If you use it, you’re effectively a vassal state of Meta.
When corporations disingenuously claim to be “open source” for marketing purposes, it’s a clear sign that Open Source is winning.
Actual Open Source licenses are the law that guarantees freedom, the bulwark against authoritarianism. But what makes Open Source work isn’t the law, it’s the ethos. It’s the social mores. It’s what I’m now calling Ecosystem Thinking: the mindset that separates any old software with an open source license from the software that’s alive, that’s humming with activity and contributions from a thousand places.
Ecosystem Thinking has four parts:
Learn
Evolve
Teach
Nourish
Learn is about keeping ourselves in a beginner’s mind, the curiosity to always engage with new ideas and approaches.
Evolve is where we apply those learnings to our next iteration, our next version. We see how things work in the real world: it’s the natural selection of actual usage.
Teach is actually where we learn even more, because you don’t really know something until you teach it. We open source our knowledge by sharing what we’ve learned, so others can follow on the same path.
Nourish is the trickiest, and most important part: it’s where we water the garden. If you’ve done the previous three steps, you’ve been very successful; now your responsibility is to spread the fruits of your labors around the ecosystem so that everyone can succeed together. This is the philosophy behind Five For the Future, which you’re going to see us emphasize a lot more now.
That’s the ecosystem. But if it’s the yin, what’s the yang? This openness and generosity will attract parasitic entities that just want to feed off the host without giving anything back. There are companies that participate in the Learn/Evolve/Teach/Nourish loop like a FernGully rainforest, and there are those who treat Open Source simply as a resource to extract from its natural surroundings, like oil from the ground.
Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.
So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers? Newfold, especially since its acquisition of Yoast and Yith, gives back. (I’ve asked them to consolidate their Five for the Future pages to better represent the breadth of their contributions.) So does Awesome Motive, 10up, Godaddy, Hostinger, even Google. Think about that next time it comes up to renew your hosting or domain, weigh your dollars towards companies that give back more, because you’ll get back more, too. Freedom isn’t free.
Those of us who are makers, who create the source, need to be wary of those who would take our creations and squeeze out the juice. They’re grifters who will hop onto the next fad, but we’re trying to build something big here, something long term—something that lasts for generations.
I may screw up along the way, or my health may falter, but these principles and beliefs will stand strong, because they represent the core tenet of our community: the idea that what we create together is bigger than any one person.
I’m always trying out new things. First, something fun: my friend Jesse gifted me a very cool Gameboy-like device called the Anbernic RG35XX, at ~$46. It has almost every game you remember, like if you got all the cartridges at Toys R Us or checked them out at Blockbuster. Having something without Wi-Fi, notifications, etc., is nice to relax. Very fun. I’m also keeping my eye on Palmer Luckey’s new ModRetro.
Second, I give to you the Sol E-reader, $399, basically glasses with a Kindle built-in, and a remote you hold in your hand for turning pages. The website is slick, even the packaging and design was nice, but the product is not. Do not buy this. It’s really not pleasant to use. The resolution was so low and the typography so bad it felt like reading on a TI-89 calculator.
Third, I’ve been really enjoying the DC-1 Daylight Computer, $729, which is like if a Kindle mixed with an iPad in the best possible way. This feels like an actually new platform, in that I find myself imagining new ways and places (like outdoors) I’d want to spend time with it. It runs Android, so you can have any app on it, even code on it. This video gives a good sense of the device and its founder Anjan Katta:
I could see Daylight being fantastic for kids as well; it just feels less “toxic” than the hyper-display world in which smartphones have us trapped. Audrey invested back in 2022 and it’s awesome to see how this turned out, it’s so rare that hardware makes it to this stage. I’ve shifted a lot of my nighttime consumption and play over to the Daylight; it’s so fun to play chess or read an article. It has surpassed the Kindle as my favorite reading device. And it looks good everywhere:
I used the Daylight a lot on the recent Sydney to Hamilton Island ~1,000 mile transport I did with the Drumfire crew and my friend Herman/John, which was part of my “learning to sail” goal for this year.
As further proof for why 2018 is going to be the year of blogging, two of the comments are from people who actually know about the old disks!
"I designed chips at PARC as a summer intern. You have a couple of disks from Doug Fairbairn, who was also in Lynn Conway's group."
and
I'm flabbergasted. That's my Alto disk you broke into!
The APL stuff is surely related to some work I did with Leo Guibas, showing why lazy evaluation would be a really good idea for implementing APL: see Compilation and delayed evaluation in APL, published January 1978. (That paper gives me an enviable Erdős number of 3, since Leo is a 2.) I'm sure it's not a complete APL implementation, just a proof of concept. It happens that my very first part-time job at PARC, in 1973, involved writing decision analysis software in APL — on a timesharing system!
Given the AATFDAFD hint, I'd guess the real password is ADDATADFAD. This derives from a project I did with Jef Raskin at UCSD in 1974. (He mentioned it in this interview.) The Data General Nova we were working with produced some garbled message with ADDATADFAD where it should have said ADDITIONAL, and it was a running joke ever after. Strange, the things that occupy some brain cells for over 40 years.
The shift is particularly surprising since the Armonk, N.Y., company has been among the business world’s staunchest boosters of remote work, both for itself and its customers. IBM markets software and services for what it calls “the anytime, anywhere workforce,” and its researchers have published numerous studies on the merits of remote work.
If “IBM has boasted that more than 40% of employees worked outside traditional company offices” and they currently have 380,000 employees (wow), then that’s 152k people on the market.
As I said when Yahoo did the same, it’s hard to judge this from the outside. A company that was happy about how they’re doing wouldn’t make a shift this big or this suddenly. It’s very possible the way distributed folks were interacting with their in-office teams wasn’t satisfactory, especially if they were forced to use subpar in-house tools like SameTime instead of Zoom or Skype. Yahoo didn’t have the best trajectory after they made a similar move, and hopefully IBM isn’t going to follow the same path.
In the meantime, Automattic and many other companies are hiring. If you aren’t going to work in a company’s headquarters, it is probably safest to work at a company that is fully distributed (no second tier for people not at HQ) rather than be one of a few “remote” people at a centralized company.
I’m really excited about the new Google Docs integration that just launched — basically it builds a beautiful bridge between what is probably the best collaborative document editor on the planet right now, Google’s, and let’s you one-click bring a document there into a WordPress draft with all the formatting, links, and everything brought over. There’s even a clever feature that if you are copying and pasting from Docs it’ll tell you about the integration.
I think this is highly complementary to the work we’re doing with the new Editor in core WordPress. Why? Google Docs represents the web pinnacle of the WordPerfect / Word legacy of editing “pages”, what I’ll call a document editor. It runs on the web, but it’s not native to the web in that its fundamental paradigm is still about the document itself. With the new WordPress Editor the blocks will be all about bringing together building blocks from all over — maps, videos, galleries, forms, images — and making them like Legos you can use to build a rich, web-native post or page.
We’re going to look into some collaborative features, but Google’s annotations, comments, and real-time co-editing are years ahead there. So if you’re drafting something that looks closer to something in the 90s you could print out, Docs will be the best place to start and collaborate (and better than Medium). If you want to built a richer experience, something that really only makes sense on an interactive screen, that’s what the new WordPress editor will be for.
One final note, the Docs web store makes it tricky to use different Google accounts to add integrations like this one. To make it easy, open up a Google Doc under the account you want to use, then go to Add-ons -> Get add-ons… -> search for “Automattic” and you’ll be all set.
