photomatt

Howdy fellow hackers! If you want to see what's new, check out https://spacefast.com/

I came back not just because of the proxy, but because hundreds of top Automatticians messaged me about resigning or joining my next thing. I want what's best for all Automattic shareholders, which includes >80% of our employees. (We have a great internal stock system.)

More than ever, the web needs an independent player making major investments in Open Source and technology that promotes freedom, liberty, and privacy.

The week of all the drama, Automattic served 25 petabytes of traffic, had zero seconds of downtime, improved CSAT across all products, helped ~450k new websites be created, 20M new posts, 16M messages through Beeper, 1.1M journal entries in Day One, thousands of Open Source commits, blocked a ridiculous amount of spam and hacking, and did it with people working together across 83 countries! I could go on.

FWIW, I think Theo is great.

If you win (like Jobs against Flash/Adobe) you're a hero, if you lose people trash your name.

A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell "technical" YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through...

I really encourage people to go through his writing, there's a lot of wisdom in there.

The viral memetics of different terms are so fascinating to watch, and I love that this might give trademark lawyers conniptions in the future.

In the WordPress ecosystem, there was a lot of variation around "press."

Arguable that I started WordPress and both personally funded or through Automattic contributed more to it than any other entity in the world? Others of course can say they're WordPress makers, but you can't deny Automattic from being called that.

The GPL is a license for the source code to be open and free. No one has ever implied it defines anything else about how the software is used or interacts wit the world.

So what that they allegedly lied by saying and marketing they were giving back while not actually doing it? That's like saying you're cleaning a river while secretly dumping toxic sludge in it.

So what on degrading the experience? Imagine WordPress was a car, say a BMW Mini, and you're a dealer that buys Minis but then resell them without air-conditioning, safety features like airbags, or a dozen other things a reasonable person would expect from a Mini. But then you spend tens of millions of dollars marketing it as a Mini, actually charging more than most other dealers, but people get in and say this seems a bit odd, basic things don't work. Does that degrade the Mini brand and trademark? Quite a bit. (Again, trademarks have nothing to do with the GPL.) What you call something and how you market it matters, that's why we have large government agencies and laws to protect against this.

I've heard you say before "Change anything in WordPress, there's nothing you can do that I can't undo." Guess what gets broken when revisions are completely turned off: undo. If you want it back on you have to contact customer support for permission. For something you paid 20+/mo for and maybe even thought it was the official WordPress Engine thing.

This is a pretty huge win for all iOS developers around the world.

It's actually the beauty of open source that we can align on a few primitives that are reusable in several different contexts to build radically different product experiences and world views. If you think of the phylogenetic tree of software this is exactly what you want to happen.

That might be a bug, thank you for purchasing back in 2016, we acquired it in 2018 and open sourced it in 2022. Send me your account info and I'll get it tagged properly.

The product has had several different owners over the years. I can't speak for all of them, but we're trying to do right by people now. If you send me your account info, I'm happy to upgrade it.

BTW, for builders, I think having some of these "golden ticket" accounts of your earliest adopters and promoters is a good strategy. The best marketing is word of mouth and seeing people love and use a product. We have some across Automattic where you can get a lifetime Jetpack or WP.com subscription for free for doing something awesome.

I'm a big fan of Marco! We link to Overcast in our web feeds and such.

We don't disclose Pocket Casts revenue directly, but we invest $millions a year in its development and hosting. It gets very broad usage and has over ten million of listening hours a week. There are clients maintained and new features developed for iPhone, iPad, MacOS, Apple Watch, Android Phones and Tablets, and an open web version.

Anyone who paid shouldn't see ads.

Howdy! There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.

Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the years.

We want every product to be self-sustaining, so it doesn't rely on my benevolence, but instead has an engine of value creation and capture that can be something we continue to maintain and support for decades to come. We really do think long-term, as evidenced by our 100-year plan on WP.com.

The Pocket Casts business model is similar to that of many other products, featuring a free version with ads and a paid upgrade with additional features and no ads, much like Spotify, YouTube, and others.

As a matter of engineering ethics, I don't believe in "lifetime" purchases, and we don't create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal. There are only a few thousand of these folks, so it seemed better to try and make it more of a gift than attempt to migrate people to what is actually a sustainable business model, which is a recurring subscription.

We open-sourced Pocket Casts after acquiring it because I believe that in the podcasting world, it's vital to have an open-source alternative to proprietary distribution networks.

Some people choose to attend other camps because they are concerned about the US border issues. If you zoom out, we're also trying to spend time on various events, such as Campus Connect, which don't show up in those numbers. However, indeed, we haven't yet reached our pre-COVID in-person attendance levels, which peaked around 40k/yr across all camps, and we're now around half that. COVID hit us pretty hard, and we haven't yet figured out the right formula for everything, but it's showing positive momentum in meetups, camps, and the new educational events.

One challenging thing about WordCamps is you get people coming who are completely non-technical and just want to blog, all the way to hardcore devs who want interesting technical content. There were some great talks at WordCamp US, if you check it out you'll see how we tried to balance that.

I’d describe my personality as curious, open-minded, and calm under pressure — I like exploring ideas deeply and listening before I speak. But I do get worked up when fighting for open source principles.

We do! Would like to activate it more.

This data is all transparent. I think what you're looking for is this, which shows about 1,2000 ticktets: https://central.wordcamp.org/reports/ticket-revenue-report/?...

You can look at reviews of the event, people had a good time. International visitors have been down due to political and immigration issues outside of our control.

Being there on the ground, it did feel a little spread out, lots of pockets of people connecting, but the venue was pretty huge. We'll try to keep things tighter in Phoenix next year. The upcoming WordCamp in India looks like it will be double the size of any previous ones.

Today I learned!

As the lead of the software I do have an opinion about which functionality is core to the user experience and which isn't. The WP.com paid plans offered a ton, including unlimited traffic, 24/7 support, stats, multi-datacenter replication, and dozens of more features above what most paid WP hosting plans offer, but we reserved custom code at the higher-priced plans. Due to getting more efficient over the years, we can now offer it on all paid plans, but that wasn't economically feasible before. There are dozens of other WordPress Multi-site hosts like Edublogs that offer the same trade-off we used to, it's built into the core code. I'm sorry that wasn't a good fit for your needs, but it has worked well for millions of people over two decades.

Maybe you think Coca-cola should taste a certain way, and want to sell that to consumers, but without commercial rights to the trademark you can't do that under the Coca-cola brand, you have to call it something else.

Please tell me where you can run arbitrary PHP code in the cloud for free, I'm curious to see how they manage that and what limits they put before they start charging.

We've invested a ton in products like WordPress Studio, which let you run unlimited local copies of WordPress with however many plugins, themes, etc you want.

The problem we have isn't that they have some amazing code they aren't sharing with the rest of the world.

It depends on your goals, your customer needs. All technology is just a means to an end. Languages and frameworks are easy to switch between once you understand programming fundamentals. We run production Erlang code at Automattic. Use the right tool for the job. Don't start with a language; start with a problem to be solved.

I'm maintaining and developing two other CMS systems, in Tumblr and Day One, and I hope one day there can just be one.

I suspect WordPress will be GPL forever; it's a lovely license, and I enjoy publishing work under it.

Static site generators? Not sure what you mean. A static site is appropriate in some situations. I love sites that are alive, dynamic, reactive.

Differently.

There was an excellent magistrate judge and a settlement proceeding, which I showed up to in good faith, but the other CEO did not.

It was pretty different in a way that brought millions of people into WordPress, but it has evolved in a way that makes a lot of sense to people, clarifying what WordPress is, what the host is, and what the application layers on top of it are. And the new AI / Telex / Studio stuff is super cool.