The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.
Just got word that the court dismissed several of WP Engine and Silver Lake’s most serious claims — antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out! These were by far the most significant and far-reaching allegations in the case and with today’s decision the case is narrowed significantly. This is a win not just for us but for all open source maintainers and contributors. Huge thanks to the folks at Gibson and Automattic who have been working on this.
With respect to any remaining claims, we’re confident the facts will demonstrate that our actions were lawful and in the best interests of the WordPress community.
This ruling is a significant milestone, but our focus remains the same: building a free, open, and thriving WordPress ecosystem and supporting the millions of people who use it every day.
It’s been a busy (and tragic) week but one of the more interesting things to launch was the Really Simple Licensing standard. I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web 2.0 people, as TechCrunch writes about.
When I studied economics, one of the concepts that struck me the most was the concept of externalities. This International Monetary Fund post explains it well. In short, externalities are costs or benefits of an economic activity that affect third parties who did not choose to incur them, leading to a divergence between private and social costs or benefits. They’re spillover effects—positive or negative—that the market price fails to reflect. A classic example is air pollution from a factory, where nearby residents bear health and environmental costs not included in the price of the factory’s products.
Open source is full of externalities. On the positive side, adoption creates ecosystems of developers and provides many paths of distribution. On the negative side, there’s often underinvestment in the very projects that sustain the ecosystem. I have a lot of empathy for why, when open source meets finance and private equity, things can go sideways. You can look at a business built on open source and see seemingly amazing margins—efficient R&D that compounds in a DCF model. A percent here or there over many years really adds up.
My plea to investors in open-source businesses is this: when a business is built on top of open source, incorporate a restorative investment percentage back into the projects critical to the end-user experience of what you’re offering customers. In WordPress, we call this Five for the Future, but it doesn’t have to be five percent; it could be 0.1%. Plan for it when modeling your expected IRR hurdle from an investment. Then, a few years down the line, when the small percentages start to add up, you won’t face a big catch-up or gap.
This underinvestment is itself an externality. It doesn’t appear on the balance sheet, but it can manifest in black swan events, such as security breaches or remote code exploits. Technical debt is one of the largest unaccounted-for externalities in the world today. Engineering, in the long run, is primarily a craft of maintenance rather than creation. The bulk of the cost of something comes from its upkeep over time.
It’s always fun to see someone pushing the limits of the web experience, as I reminisced about Flash and Dreamweaver the other day. The new website for Posthog is a delightful rabbit hole to explore, akin to a Meow Wolf, with meticulous care and craft applied to every corner of the product in a way that is both fun and playful. They even have their own version of pineapple on pizza.
What I want to enable with WordPress is the ability with thousands of plugins and themes for people to have unique, funky experiences like this on their website, while still providing a content structure that’s legible for interoperability and hacking. Major kudos to Cory Watilo and James Hawkins for coming up with this.
It’s New Apple Stuff day, so the headlines are being dominated by that, but it’s worth taking a step back and paying homage to the site that has been the front page of tech news for two decades now, Techmeme. I’ve been a daily visitor since it started, and I appreciate how they pair the algorithm with a light human touch to provide a wide overview. (WordPress-powered!) Fred Vogelstein at Crazy Stupid Tech has a great review of how Techmeme started and evolved.
Chris Young, who is otherwise famous for being a co-author of the 2,438-page cookbook Modernist Cuisine or centrifuging steaks and drinking them, is one of the friends who, over the years, has told me I have to watch Breaking Bad, the TV show. When I was in Marrakech for a few weeks earlier this year, and it was a million degrees outside, I cracked and started watching, and I see why people say it’s one of the best shows ever. I’m only up to S2E4, and I see why everyone loves it, including that it is sometimes unintentionally hilarious, but I had to stop because it was getting a bit too dark and bumming me out before I went to bed.
However, I’m glad I made it through that season and a half of Breaking Bad, because it has given me the ability to appreciate this homage Chris has done, attempting to use science and chemistry to cook ribs in an apartment oven just as well as you could with a smoker. If you live at the intersection of Breaking Bad, BBQ, science, chemistry, and cooking, this is the video for you. And now, this makes me want to order some Pit Room in Houston. (WordPress-powered!)
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’m still buzzing from an incredible WordCamp US this week, from contributor day to the closing party the vibes were right and it was amazing to connect with fellow travelers in the journey towards creating a more free and open source internet.
Before our open town hall Q&A I was able to make some fun announcements:
Traffic to WordPress.org is up, and we’ve brought the plugin queue from months to basically a few days.
Previewed Block Comments and the upcoming Command Palette feature in 6.9.
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.
WordPress.com offers two modes of WP: WordPress and WordPress MS. For free and lower-priced accounts it runs a version of WordPress called WordPress MS, or WordPress Multisite, which is designed for super-efficient multi-tenant usage, which is what has allowed it to introduce hundreds of millions of people to WordPress and run at a huge scale. (It was initially called MU, for multi-user, but we had to change it because someone squatted the name WPMU and built a business on top that was confusing users with commercial products. Such is my curse.) It revolutionized the hosting industry in a number of ways, including acclimating customers to per-site pricing instead of unlimited domains and raising the bar for what a host would manage for users so they didn’t have to worry. It has also provided a highly secure base login, which allows us to offer popular SaaS services, such as statistics and anti-spam, to all WordPress users, regardless of where they’re hosted.
At higher-priced plans you’d get access to not just a curated set of plugins and themes but the ability to install anything you like from the ecosystem, which invisibly switches your account to WP.cloud in the backend that supports unlimited plugins and themes and custom code, in a way that’s still multi-datacenter and maintenance-free. This has been very successful and works great for a ton of customers, but it still puts an asterisk when you recommend WordPress.com to someone because they’d need to be on one of the higher-priced plans to get an experience of WordPress with custom plugins and themes.
For the first time ever we’re running a summer special where every single paid account gets that full WP.cloud experience with full customization and control. It’s a test we’re running until August 25th. It’s WordPress, without the asterisk, without limits, implemented in a way that’s intuitive and safe for novice users, while also being extremely powerful for developers. If you haven’t checked out WP.com in a while, it’s a great deal starting at just $4 per month. I’m curious to see the results of how this goes. We also have a number of more radical things I’m eager to try out! It’s a great time to reimagine what you’re doing from the ground up and question your longest-held beliefs, as AI has really put people in a more experimental and open mindset.
One of the projects that has been going very well within Automattic is Newspack, a vertical WordPress distribution tailored for publishers. Here’s the story of the Haitian Times:
Speaking of Beeper, we’re going to do a fun event for the next-gen version that’s launching on July 16 in New York City in NoHo. I’ll be there along with Beeper CEO Kishan Bagaria and some of the best and brightest in New York’s tech and creative class. If you’re a Beeper early adopter (or would like to be) and want to attend, leave a comment! We’ve held back some invites for cool folks like readers of ma.tt. 🙂 It’s like getting on board with WordPress in 2004.
I’ve been testing the developer previews of all the new Apple 26 operating systems, which I don’t recommend this early in the cycle, but I like to live dangerously. I’ve quickly become accustomed to Liquid Glass. The iPad windowing enhancements do make it feel more like a real computer, but I usually run things in full-screen mode. My favorite thing to play with so far has been the new Spotlight (what pops up when you press Command + Space) and related shortcuts.
I loved Alfred, I tried Raycast, but a general life goal this year is to simplify wherever I can, so I’ve been exploring the enhancements in the new Spotlight.
What I’ve found the most useful in the past is Alfred’s Open URL Action, which basically lets you type something like “gm united reservation” and it translates that into opening a Gmail search in your browser, with “united reservation” put in the URL in the right place to run a search.
The Shortcuts app in MacOS and iOS is amazing, which I’ve always known, but I haven’t played with it much. This was my chance! After a bit of tinkering, I got it to pop up an input form and then run the search. I Googled a lot to see if it could take input from the Spotlight search bar and every place said no, I’m not sure if this is new in MacOS 26 or not but I found the button that makes it work. It’s not as smooth as Alfred, but it’s pretty decent. I’m going to share a screenshot that shows my Gmail search shortcut that takes input from Spotlight — the key breakthrough was clicking the (i) menu on the right and finding the checkbox for “Receive Input from Search.”
I gave it a “gm” hotkey, pressed enter, and you get this in Spotlight.
Tada! Not as nice as Alfred but it gets the job done. My other shortcuts that people might find useful are LI for LinkedIn search, PY is Perplexity, YT for searching the history of YouTube videos I’ve watched, and AM for searching my Amazon order history. (Because I’m usually trying to find a link for something I’m recommending, or re-order an item.) Here are the search URLs for everything I’ve mentioned:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/ (If you have multiple Google accounts, change the number in the URL to go to the one you want, and then login in that same order every time.)
Happy to announce that the amazing Clay.earth product and team is joining Automattic. If you haven’t tried the app out yet, here’s a quick video to give you a taste.
TechCrunch has covered the broader strategy pretty well: One of the top requests we’ve heard from Beeper beta testers is they want to tie in more context, like a personal CRM, and some even requested Clay by name. We’ll keep the apps separate, as Clay also has some interesting team uses, but they will complement and integrate with each other as part of our all-in-one messaging strategy.
We share a vision to integrate Clay’s technology, which manages over 140 million relationships, as a layer across many of our products and experiences at Automattic. I’m excited to work with the founders, Matt and Zach, to bring this vision to life. I’ve always felt the missing primitive in WordPress’ content management data architecture was a scalable concept of a Person and Relationships outside of our user table.
I’ve been thinking a lot about mimetic formation, how a thought becomes an idea, and how that idea gestates and evolves as it’s progressively shared in wider and wider circles.
During a recent product review of Day One, I was struck by how central the app is to my perspective on humans, relationships, and what we share. There are several layers to it, ranging from your innermost thoughts to what you share with the world. Each layer has its own context, challenges, and possibilities, and Automattic offers technology and products tailored to each.
1. Layer one is your internal thoughts. Your consciousness, what exists only in your mind, or what I like to call meatspace. This space is yours and yours alone. This generative space is at the core of human creativity and existence.
2. Layer two is triggered as soon as you put something into a medium, like writing it down. It’s everything that leaves your head, but is just reserved for you. In the past, we only had physical journals. Today, we have Day One as our strongest product in this space, but many people also have a private WordPress installation just for themselves. There are so many tools out there that help you create! Colors, brushes, canvases. Harper, for example, helps you write better — think of it as an open-source Grammarly, right now just in a few limited contexts, but in the future everywhere you write.
3. Layer three is you and someone else. This is everything you share with one other person, which is an incredibly sacred act. Shared journals on Day One, messaging on Beeper, DMs, private blogs with your best friend. A shared Google doc. This is its own special space. It has an intimacy and privacy that is core to the human experience. This is also phase 3 of Gutenberg, which is all about real-time co-editing and collaboration. This layer is the one I’m most excited about expanding in 2025 and 2026.
4. Layer four is sharing within a finite group. N+1. It’s a space of collaboration and brainstorming with families, tribes, and teams. P2, Linear, Github, group chats, and cozy communities. You lose some of the intimacy of layer three but gain more group intelligence.
5. Finally, we have the fifth layer. This is the public layer, where I have spent a lot of my time at Automattic. It is an extremely competitive space of social media and blogs: WordPress, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. Once you publish publicly, you open yourself up to the beauty and chaos of the wider world. The best reason to blog is comments, the people who find you and add to your thoughts, who you never would have imagined. This is a crucible, but makes your own writing and thinking so much better, it’s worth the mishegoss. 🙂
This has been kicking around in my head and at layer four for a while. Thanks to Kelly Hoffman for helping me get this to layer five.
I’ve checked off a bucket list item: I’m attending a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. It’s really an event! Thousands flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for the legendary Q&A sessions with Warren Buffett and shareholder deals. They’ve made it quite the circus, with every Berkshire Hathaway company having a booth of some sort, and typically selling their goods at a discount or with exclusive items you can only buy there, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Squishmallows (which of course I got, to complement my bronze busts).
It’s strange to have a Dairy Queen booth selling $1 ice cream (cash only!) next to NetJets, but those juxtapositions are part of the Berkshire vibe—it’s very high/low, like Costco (a big Berkshire holding). There’s also an element of WordCamps or a Salesforce Trailblazer event in that you can tell there’s a “type” of person that’s easy to spot who’s a Berkshire enthusiast. A lot of Berkshire brands are also WordPress users: Duracell, GEICO, Acme Brick, Berxi, MiTek. I think there is a lot of mimetic overlap between the values of open source and the values of building a Berkshire company.
As with any big gathering, the side events are also great, and I was honored to have a fireside chat with a friend and Buffett protégé, Tracy Britt Cool. To an audience of about 60+ CEOs in the Kanbrick community, we talked about Automattic’s history and some of the latest happenings in tech; AI was definitely on people’s minds in the Q&A. They had questions for me, but I also feel like I have a ton to learn from this group that has built founder or family-owned businesses with an average of 80-100M of revenue, the kind of thing that is the engine of the American economy.
It makes me pine for the day when we can have more shareholders in Automattic; I think it would be an amazing cohort of folks that believe in open source and the open web, invested together and learning from each other, and I could imagine an event very much like these shareholder meetings. It’s so much more powerful when you build a business where your customers are also a community.
Update: I knew this would be a special one because it was Warren’s 60th, but he really went above and beyond by announcing his intention for Greg Abel to take over as CEO at the end of the year. The standing ovation was a special moment, 60 years of 19.9% compounding returns! I think the future of Berkshire is very bright because he’s shared so much of his worldview that there are others that have made it their own.
