#Automattic Jetpack

[adamharkus]

WordPress plugins: A revaluation

With the advent of Google’s March update and chargeable stats for Jetpack, how can you re-optimise your WordPress plugins? Google’s March update was a kick in the teeth for many bloggers, and to add insult to injury, along came a chargeable model for Jetpack stats. My initial reaction was to bin Jetpack altogether, it’s bloatware after all, but after I calmed down, I had a re-think. Maybe it…

[netscapenavigator-official]

Not Automattic promoting ads about how their product can fix a dysfunctionally slow website.

[illyaking]

Social Notes by Jetpack

Social Notes from Jetpack increased my desire to blog.

Jetpack, a performance and growth tool for WordPress, has introduced a new feature called Social Notes. These are a type of post that allows users to express their thoughts without worrying about format or titles, essentially enabling microblogging within a blogging platform. The micro posts can be shared across a user’s connected social networking accounts. This helps to keep people engaged with…

[darnellclayton]

Automattic Keeps Trying To Make Me Switch To The JetPack App

Automattic (the company behind WordPress & Tumblr’s new overlord) keeps trying to make me ditch the WordPress iOS/iPadOS app for JetPack (which I loathe). Annoying JetPack alert in the WordPress iOS/iPadOS App Switching over to the JetPack app brings up this warning. Another annoying JetPack warning when using the app Just for fun I tried installing the plugin from the app & unsurprisingly it…

[thejaymo]

Row It Back | Weeknotes

The other week in my review of Day One app I said that I was a bit of an Automattic fan boy. This week I’m going to row that back. 

[warumichradfahre]

Die Jetpack KI

Seit einiger Zeit gibt es in meiner Blog Software einen Baustein, der künstliche Intelligenz zur Anwendung bringt. Es ist die Jetpack KI. Jetzt wollte ich der Sache einmal auf den Grund gehen und hab die Jetpack KI zu Jetpack KI befragt, und das ist dabei herausgekommen. Der folgende Text ist vollständig von der Jetpack KI geschrieben: Einblick in Jetpack, Künstliche Intelligenz und das System…

[sociedadnoticias]

Twitter cierra acceso de Jetpack Social y a Wordpress

Twitter cierra acceso de Jetpack Social y a Wordpress #PeriodismoParaTi #SociedadNoticias #Twitter #Wordpress #JetpackSocial @ESET @ESETLA @ESET_ES #Instagram

Twitter cierra acceso de Jetpack Social y a WordPress Por Deyanira Vázquez | Reportera                                      La empresa Twitter, propiedad de Elon Musk, finalmente cerró el acceso a Jetpack Social y a su apicalción, “lo que significa que el servicio ya no podrá compartir automáticamente las publicaciones de los blogs de Worpress“. “Esto se debe a los cambios drásticos en los…

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[shortformblog]

More on the Automattic mess from my pals at 404 Media:

We still do not know the answers to all of these questions, because Automattic has repeatedly ignored our detailed questions, will not get on the phone with us, and has instead chosen to frame a new opt-out feature as “protecting user choice.” We are at the point where individual Automattic employees are posting clarifications on their personal Mastodon accounts about what data is and is not included.  The truth is that Automattic has been selling access to this “firehose” of posts for years, for a variety of purposes. This includes selling access to self-hosted blogs and websites that use a popular plugin called Jetpack; Automattic edited its original “protecting user choice” statement this week to say it will exclude Jetpack from its deals with “select AI companies.” These posts have been directly available via a data partner called SocialGist, which markets its services to “social listening” companies, marketing insights firms, and, increasingly, AI companies. Tumblr has its own Firehose, and Tumblr posts are available via SocialGist as well.  Almost every platform has some sort of post “firehose,” API, or way of accessing huge amounts of user posts. Famously, Twitter and Reddit used to give these away for free. Now they do not, and charging access for these posts has become big business for those companies. This is just to say that the existence of Automattic’s firehose is not anomalous in an internet ecosystem that trades on data. But this firehose also means that the average user doesn’t and can’t know what companies are getting direct access to their posts, and what they’re being used for.

This story goes deeper than the current situation.

[twitter-today]

WordPress.com (and jetpack, the biggest plugin used to share posts from WordPress to other social networks) is removing the capability of sharing your posts to Twitter, after Twitter, suddenly and unilaterally, decided to massively increase the price of the API access in this particular case (over what they started charging a couple of months ago).

With this, after Tumblr sunsetted the Twitter sharing option when they started to share for the API access, no Automattic product is integrated with Twitter at all.

[thewramblingwebcomicreview]

Automattic Thoughts

I've gone ahead and turned off sharing data with third party companies here. I've also done the same for what's left on my WordPress.com accounts. That said, I've decided I'm going to go ahead and sever the connection between my three self-hosted WordPress sites/blogs and WordPress.com. That means getting rid of Jetpack, Gravatar, and allowing people with WordPress.com accounts to leave comments and likes. (They can still comment with email verification.) As some developers have revealed on Mastodon/the greater Fediverse, installing Jetpack on a self-hosted WordPress site does send database information back to WordPress.com.

From what I've learned, WordPress.org (which provides the open source WordPress software) isn't affiliated with WordPress.com. They just have the rights to use the WordPress name in order to provide managed hosting. However, the questionable CEO of Automattic is a co-founder of WordPress.org. So it might be worth keeping an eye on future WordPress software updates, and looking into software forks depending on how much influence he holds.

And yes, ClassicPress is one software fork that was created in response to the Gutenberg editor update that most people hated.

[wordpressvip]

What is WordPress VIP?

We've had some recent misconceptions about what WordPress VIP is, and how we differ from WordPress.

We are part of Automattic, which includes WordPress.com, Tumblr, Jetpack, and many other brands you know and love.

But we're not just WordPress, we're WordPress built for business.

What does that mean? Well, simply put, we are an enterprise-grade web hosting platform using WordPress, the world's #1 CMS. The WordPress VIP platform offers: -Top-level security protections trusted by some of the biggest websites in the world (we're even FedRAMP authorized!)

-Agile content management, easy enough that anyone on your team can publish quickly

-Industry-leading support teams that provide WordPress expertise found nowhere else

-In-depth and real-time content analytics powered by Parse.ly

-Built-in localization and personalization tools to better connect with your audience

-And so much more!

Want to see it for yourself? We put together this short video just for that purpose. 😎

[cheekedupwhiteboy]

obsessed with matthew mullenweg @photomatt claiming that because a plugin automattic made (jetpack for wordpress, which is not tumblr) for a different service (wordpress, which is still not tumblr) had polls at one point before twitter did.... because they had that, that means twitter copied polls from tumblr ???

tumblr, which automattic acquired four years after twitter had already launched their poll feature ????????????????????????

[feliksvg]

Very scared automattic sees tumblr as some sort of customer-base-to-be to be absorbed and use as fodder for experimental things only to redirect to other services like wordpress or jetpack. Like yea its technically ur platform but maybe dont piss off the enormous pile of bugs underneath if u dont want an infestation

[bryanharryrombough]

TL/DR: Automattic does seem to be planning to provide WordPress.com and Tumblr posts to generative “A.I” companies for model training. (And I’m still not happy about that!) But an Automattic executive has said that they did not provide WordPress posts via Jetpack’s Firehose to generative “A.I” companies for model training.

[macmanx]

Twitter recently notified Automattic that it was dramatically changing the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. The cost increase is prohibitive for us to absorb without passing a significant price increase along to you, and we don’t see that as an option. We have attempted to negotiate a path forward, but haven’t been able to reach an agreement in time for Twitter’s May 1 cutoff. 

Given that, we have decided to discontinue using the Twitter API.

For WordPress.com and Jetpack users, Twitter will no longer be part of Jetpack Social. However, we’re adding Instagram and Mastodon very soon. In the meantime, auto-sharing to [tumblr], Facebook, and LinkedIn still works as expected.