Moving shop soon

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken.

I think I migrate this blog as much, if not more, than I post anything on it. It’s been at a number of domains and across a few different kinds of platforms. It’s been self hosted, it’s been on one service or another, flat site, a micro-blog, etc. About a year or so ago that I planted it inside WordPress.com to mess with some of it’s more commercial bits and pieces, but it’s kind of been underwhelming and I think the recent weirdness that’s emerged in the Matt Mullenweg vs. WP Engine fight — combined with Matt’s loyalty test of Automattic employees — has kind of made me more interested in supporting a FOSS project that actually values the FOSS ethos, and also their staff and users.

Not to say that I called this particular drama, but a little while ago I more generally called it with WP’s general trend toward enshitification with the over-abundance of generative AI prompts shoved in every nook and cranny of the CMS with no way to disable that nonsense. None of these tools are aimed at creating easier methods for people to be creative with words.

At the start of this year, I was kind of optimistic about WordPress and Automattic. I thought it might do something cool with Tumblr once acquiring it and really move into the federation space more fully with Matt’s enthusiasm over ActivityPub. But really very little has happened on those fronts and Wordrpress incorporation of federated services is still kind of half-there, and Tumblr is still just a has-been when it could have been something pretty cool in federated blogging by now. Instead, it’s all gone a bit… Elon.

Blocks aside (I hate blocks functionality, it makes editing annoying with that stupid floating wysiwyg covering the the preceding few lines of everything), WordPress is still a powerful and, maybe more importantly, dominating open source content management system, and one I’ve been playing with for fun and professionally for almost 20 years, and run a project that keeps a good number of WP sites up and running, that’s not changing any time soon.

WP’s been around since 2003. That’s a long run for any software maker to not jump the shark. It’s bound to happen sooner or later. It’s still got a lot of innovation in it that have become the norm across web content systems. But it’s also getting a lot of bloat, and is more aimed at driving people toward Jetpack and other walled garden type features. If I wanted that I’d just be on Medium.

The web is made up of sand mandalas, though. This one is about to be wiped and raked again.

Watch this space.