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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team" was, so I clicked the link to the linked website in this story. I was surprised that it was in fact an initiative to do things like "have a dashboard that shows the climate impact of publishing" and "promote static publishing over..." I assume because serving this content (under someone's model) uses less electricity?

Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.

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> Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.

This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.

The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.

So then nothing was actually cut and these weird people who are super passionate about the climate impact of WordPress of all things can continue to do.. whatever it was they were doing, for free as they were before? If the issue is having a slack channel in the WordPress org, they can just make their own discord server. No big deal.

Mullenweg was the one who requested the creation of the Slack channel.

If he can make the channel, he can delete the channel. If the people in that channel want a new place to chat, they can make one. So what's the problem?

Its purpose was to be a greenwash figleaf. These activities are supposed to be toothless and accomplish nothing because that isn't why they exist.

> This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.

These were salaried employees working on the sustainability team, correct? If not, how could Mullenweg shut it down?

My sweet summer child. Matt has unilateral control over every aspect of Wordpress, including the open-source project and community. He exerts that control, whether that's closing Slack channels or banning members.

https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

He cannot control how people choose to spend their own free time. If these people want to have a chatroom about WordPress sustainability which isn't hosted by Matt, there's nothing Matt can do to stop them. They can easily do this for free.

This is a huge drama about nothing. Matt is being a baby and so is everybody else who's crying about it. There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for any of the involved parties to not simply walk away and stop associating with each other.

>There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for (...)

I assume volunteers working in the sustainability team for free primarily care about non-monetary things.

There is literally nothing stopping them from continuing in another chatroom, not administered by Matt.

You can't force folks to contribute stuff, but you very much can prevent them from contributing things.

That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable.

And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc.

Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content.

So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.

They can publish their "how much carbon did this WordPress instance burn" plugin without any approval from Matt, under the name of their own organization. Since they weren't being paid to do this in the first place, the only thing Matt was giving them was a chatroom which they can replace for free.

If they were actually being paid for this, which is contrary to numerous other comments in this discussion, then it actually does make sense for Matt to cancel that work. But I have been assured they weren't being paid, so they didn't have any money on the line and can just walk away from Matt's org while simultaneously continuing the work they are supposedly super passionate about.

In one level,yeah you're right- a) I don't know if it's really super important work and b) the physical payout is probably the same for those folks doing that work regardless of if it's done in the context of WP or not.

You might consider, though, that the context of a bit of work does matter. And to other folks working in that context might take that capricious dismissal as a mark of how their own contributions might be seen.

Like yeah, they weren't getting paid, but that also means it wasn't a big cost to keep them volunteering- there are people up and down the WP ecosystem doing a lot of work for the exact same reasons. It's why- to my original point- I never tried to participate in the larger development efforts: the thing is locked up by one person so ultimately those folks are working on someone else's toy.

He can't stop them from doing stuff on their own as they like. That is true.

However once the publish: He has the trademark, and unless this group of people was very careful in their wording, to only state technical facts and not opinions, he can sue them for perceived damages and based on recent action he seems to have chosen the aggressive approach, despites potential trouble for his company and product.

No, they were all community members working for free.

Check out the bios of the team reps here: https://make.wordpress.org/sustainability/2024/12/13/proposa...

Here are all the contributors on the GitHub repo, also all volunteers: https://github.com/WordPress/sustainability/graphs/contribut...

Mullenweg can shut down the team because he has complete control over all the WordPress.org infrastructure.

> The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.

The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.

I found it kinda silly at first, like how would WP actually contribute to a reduction in climate change. But I think at the scale that WP is deployed at (millions upon millions of sites), changing something like static output by default could contribute to a non-negligable reduction in electricity spent on hosting.

I agree in principle. It's the childish way in which it was done that's the issue for me.

I disagree in principle. You can call it a pro-environment initiative or you can call it just... promoting good engineering. Making code more efficient benefits literally everyone from the people making it to the people using it to the planet upon which it is used, and who's resources it is dependent on. I wish efficiency was a more prioritized thing in basically every facet of the modern tech industry which, at present, is addicted to an absolutely stressful number of libraries that cause nearly every prominent tech product to be ludicrously bloated.

Like, it's incredibly irritating to me that mobile browsers are practically unusable, not because mobile design isn't ubiquitous, but because every website now makes my phone hot because it's running 800 MB of fucking JavaScript to render text.

Perhaps we're talking about different principles. I believe very much in good engineering and more efficient code / websites to reduce resource use. I just don't think it should be in core WordPress code.

You believe core WordPress code should be poorly engineered and less efficient to increase resource use?

Have to admit, I'm kind of amazed by this question.

LLMs use about 1000X the resources of the most poorly designed WP site. The best thing that the WP Sustainability Team can do is retask itself to higher impact problems.

... like raising public awareness about the broad issue?

whatabout: retasking yourself on that issue instead of just commenting?

I am raising awareness around the energy wastefulness of LLMs.

For every one LLM user, there are hundreds if not thousands of people visiting WordPress sites. WordPress is unimaginably ubiquitous. When you're that popular, making your software more energy efficient has an actual, real life impact (even if other things are using lots of energy). In aggregate it's still a massive amount of energy.

you can say that, but are big tech building new data centers and contracting with nuclear energy producers to support WP websites?

There are no nuclear energy producers being contracted, just upstarts that promise to deliver energy later, in exchange for a promise to buy that energy.

Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power Microsoft data centers

> Three Mile Island, the power plant near Middletown, Pa., that was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, will reopen to power Microsoft's data centers

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...

Worth noting that they'll be using a different reactor than the one that melted down, and that "the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history" remarkably, thankfully, didn't result in any direct casualties. Our track record is pretty solid.

I'll eat my hat if that bears fruit but it's like I said, a power purchase agreement for a source that is slated to come online at a future date. (I should have been more specific in my assertion: no nuclear companies currently producing energy are being contracted)

Where are there data centers running WordPress exclusively? It runs everywhere. It's smeared across probably every shared data center in the world.

If WordPress was released today and had the sort of growth that AI has has, yeah, there would probably be considerations to spin up new power sources.

Saving 5% electricity per WordPress http request is a massive amount of electricity in aggregate.

Did they do that though? I mean, there's a lot of code to improve in WP where you can eek out more performance (the default jquery with all the ie6 compatibility nonsense? really?). Seems like this team wasn't for that though.

"Sustainability" is a garbage buzzword that at best means money being wasted on people writing pointless reports and usually means pushing a far left agenda.

> I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team"

You still don't.

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