Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't even a fork—looking at the text on this site, I think it's just this guy Vinny deliberately trolling Matt by registering a bunch of WP domains and flaunting them. If so, he succeeded at the goal of provoking an asinine response from WordPress.org (aka Matt).

From the author [0]:

> I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.

See the FAQ for more evidence that this is mostly just Vinny trolling so far [1]:

> Well, what does ‘wp’ mean?

> We found some notes referencing “word processing” and “web publishing,” and there’s even a mention of Wendell Pierce, who played Detective William ‘Bunk’ Moreland in the popular HBO series The Wire. It seems to be related to one of those topics.

> It’s also rumored the singsongy vibes really sealed the deal.

[0] https://x.com/vinnysgreen/status/1844488053060141233

[1] https://freewp.com/faq/

I am not sure who is trolling who here. Maybe they both are trying to troll each other, but both don't really look great.

FreeWP seems like a completely meritless attempt at a fork / initiative. Potentially even just an attempt by "Vinny" to move himself into the spotlight. And the WordPress community, for a big part, looks still very novice and in-experienced and a decent junk of community members might fall for this and put at least some (and more than they should) eggs into that basket.

Matt just seems to troll and knows that "FreeWP" is no competition at all. And continues on his path of eccentric and very weird behavior.

It's not a fork. I'm "Vinny," and I've been a part of other communities outside of WordPress. Matt seems to be very concerned about it because while the site is just a placeholder, the real work is organizing the community, which I know he knows I am doing.

> FreeWP seems like a completely meritless attempt at a fork / initiative. Potentially even just an attempt by "Vinny" to move himself into the spotlight.

This is why I think it's a troll—it's so completely devoid of substance that I think it must be deliberately void, and getting Matt to respond was the only point. The OP specifically says they don't intend to fork, and they have a goofy FAQ with an intentionally-absent mission statement.

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