Every human has an intrinsic right to put their creative work into the commons. Once freed, work can never be withdrawn, and it has the opportunity—but not the obligation!—for everyone to improve upon it.

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Texts is a fun application (desktop only for now) that brings all of your messages into one inbox. It currently supports iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, X/Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord DMs, with more on the way soon. It runs entirely on the desktop so it’s super fast and secure. It’s founded and led by Kishan Bagaria, a really unique entrepreneur and technical talent, and has a slate of amazing investors including Lachy Groom, Guillermo Rauch (former Automattician!), Sahil Lavingia, and many others—and I’m excited to announce that it’s now part of Automattic!

This was announced today on the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway (my part starts 48:50 in), and also covered in The Verge, TechCrunch, MacStories, and a few others.

Today is also my 18th anniversary at Automattic! So, an exciting day all around.

Using an all-in-one messaging app is a real game-changer for productivity and keeping up with things. Texts is a paid app, with discounted student pricing, and I think a lot of people will find value in it. It’s quickly become one of the top three apps I spend time using.

This is obviously a tricky area to navigate, as in the past the networks have blocked third-party clients, but I think with the current anti-trust and regulatory environments this is actually something the big networks will appreciate: it maintains the same security as their clients, opens them up in a way consumers will love and is very user-centric, and because we’re committed to supporting all their features it can actually increase engagement and usage of their platforms.

We’re still working out everything for mobile, so if you’re looking for the all-in-one experience on iOS or Android in the meantime, I recommend checking out Beeper. It really is great to have everything together.

If you’re a reverse engineer hacker that is interested in working with a super-small elite team in this space with the fun of a startup and the air cover of Automattic, get in touch with Kishan on Twitter DM or email (kb at texts). Here’s a fun video for Texts. 😄

Okay, I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, but this has me fairly floored. I was at an EcoAmerica board meeting dinner and afterward instead of calling an Uber like I usually would, I tried a self-driving car, a Waymo. (The name inspired by my friend, Jaime Waydo.) As I got home I was so excited to tell my Mom what just happened.

I feel like every cell in my body is charged, it’s like the first time I got a script to run, or committed code into b2/cafelog, this is definitely a before and after moment. Here’s a video as the car arrived and I got out. I’m really at a loss for words. The “wow” you hear me say in one of my most genuine in my life. The thing is I know these self-driving cars exist, I’ve seen them around San Francisco forever, but the experience of being picked up and dropped off by a robot navigating the tricky SF hills and streets just hits different.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

William Gibson

One thing that always brings me back to San Francisco is you feel like you’re living in the future. Tonight was no exception.

Twitter/X is testing charging users $1/year with the idea that will keep out bots and spam. It’s an appealing idea, and charging definitely does introduce a “proof of work” that wasn’t there before, but the history of the web shows this is not really a big deterrent. Domains cost money, usually a lot more than a dollar a year, and millions are used for spam or nefarious purposes. The spammers obviously thought their benefit would be more than the cost of the domain, or they use stolen credit cards and identities. Charging may cause a short-term drop in bots while the bad guys update their scripts, but the value of manipulating X/Twitter is so high I imagine there is already millions of dollars being spent on it.

Long term to keep a platform healthy you really have to take a nuanced look at behavior and content, like Automattic does with Akismet, and have a fairly sophisticated trust and safety operation with great engineers. T&S is really important, not an enemy of progress, which would have been my chief edit to the otherwise exciting The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen. (If you missed Marc’s Why AI Will Save the World, that’s also an excellent read with dozens of references you can go down a rabbit hole with.)

There’s a way to run a company like managing a government, with reports, surveys, and abstractions.

There’s a way to run a company like building a ship, where every board and seam has to be understood and checked.

Both can be successful, but you need to decide which you want to do.

This month, Automattic had the privilege of working with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) to migrate their early 2000s blogging platform over to our Pressable infrastructure. (Pressable is a small host Automattic runs to develop our WP.cloud infrastructure, it gets you all the performance and security of our high-end WP.com plans, but with a more plain-vanilla WP interface.)

The Harvard Blogs network that the Center launched back in 2003 was an important milestone in internet history. It provided a platform for over 1,500 high-impact bloggers—including Harvard students, faculty, fellows, staff, and alumni—to publish and engage in discussion.

We were alerted to BKC’s plans to decommission blogs.harvard.edu by none other than Dave Winer, the pioneering developer behind blogging, RSS, and podcasting, and a Berkman Center fellow from 2003-2004. As BKC shared in their announcement, the network played a formative role for many now-influential bloggers and internet figures. It also contributed to the rise of podcasting and projects like Ushahidi.

When we learned BKC planned to retire the Harvard Blogs platform, we wanted to ensure this valuable archive of early internet culture was preserved. We offered to host the network’s blogs indefinitely so they can remain publicly accessible for years to come.

The Harvard Blogs multisite consisted of around 1,500 blogs. To move it over, we systematically migrated the archive to our servers and then upgraded the network to the latest version of WordPress (we also updated a handful of plugins and themes and tested the updated versions against the original sites hosted by Harvard).

Much like our recent unveiling of the 100 Year Plan for WordPress.com, the preservation of the Harvard Blogs archive demonstrates Automattic’s commitment to protect vital pieces of internet history and culture for generations to come. By preserving these blogs, we hope to inspire future generations of online voices.

There was something really nice about the neighborhood of blogs the Harvard blog network provided that I hope they or another university tries again sometime. Harvard is now 387 years old, I hope these blogs last at least that much longer (that would be 2,410 AD!).

The new NASA.gov website has launched on WordPress powered by WPVIP. (Also their science site.)