I have been losing trust in Automattic and especially Matt Mullenweg for a while now. Matt has shown his true colors by being a mob boss and trying to bully and extort WP Engine, a managed WordPress host, and WordPress theme and plugin developers.
This feud that started with a disagreement between the two parties eventually evolved into Matt sending threatening texts to WP Engine demanding money over using “WP,” for which WordPress Foundation does not own a trademark. Matt eventually shut down WP Engine’s access to the WordPress.org updates and repository.
His actions violated my trust in WordPress, which led me to cancel my Jetpack Anti-Spam subscription, which I will not renew until he reverses this decision. Matt needs to resign from the WordPress foundation immediately. His actions and behavior hurt the users, the community, and people whose livelihood depends on WordPress.
While you can read the whole story from this post, this is not the focus of this post. I want to focus on one of the things Matt accuses WP Engine of, which is not WordPress, which is entirely laughable. Matt Mullenweg argues in the post, “WP Engine is not WordPress”:
WP Engine turns (post revisions) off. They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to get your content back, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is manage and protect your content.
[…]
What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
Yes, WP Engine disabled post revisions by default, which you can have enabled with support. That is just a ridiculous and weak argument. That is because WordPress dot com, unless you pay for the more expensive plans, is a cheap knock-off, and Automattic charges more.
While I have never used WP Engine since I have the technical knowledge to manage a server and a WordPress install. The funny thing is Matt is very hypocritical since WordPress dot com turns off many more features unless you pay a large amount of money for the business plan at $300 a year. The features that are removed and under a paywall include namely:
- Installing and using any plugins
- Installing and using third-party themes that WordPress dot com doesn’t provide.
- Ability to use SSH into your WordPress to use WP-CLI and SFTP
- Removal of WordPress branding
- Theme customizations, including custom CSS outside what it’s provided
- Non-default WordPress dashboard experience compared to the, but a butchered one.
Don’t tell me WP Engine is not WordPress, as they don’t have these restrictions. For WordPress dot com, unless you get the Business plan for much more money, you are getting a sub-par experience that is not WordPress. I think it’s hypocritical to accuse WP Engine of not being WordPress for disabling revisions when Matt and Automattic turn off more features with WordPress dot com unless you pay more for an expensive plan. Even then, you are not getting the real WordPress experience you will get from a self-hosted WordPress.
In addition, WordPress dot com is taking away features, especially in the free tier. A few years back, Automattic made the free service even worse by putting an obnoxious banner you can’t remove on top and reducing the free space to 500 MB before increasing it to 1 GB after a lot of backlash. In addition, WordPress has been taking away features that used to be free, such as unlimited automated social sharing and stats.
Free social sharing now has a limit of 30 shares per month, and stats are free only for non-commercial sites. However, the latter may not be accurate as they have been forcing non-commercial sites to pay earlier this year while taking away access, which got many users angry, including myself.
Matt Mullenweg is no better than Elon Musk by holding users hostage like some mafia boss because WP Engine won’t give in to their demands. We all know that Matt is no saint, and he engages in the same enshittification and butchering of the WordPress experience with WordPress dot com. Maybe they are going after WP Engine because it’s a better product than the butchered WordPress dot com, which I can argue is not WordPress.
Furthermore, Matt accuses WP Engine that Silver Lake funds them. Guess what? Blackrock, a venture capitalist firm, funds WordPress and Automattic. Don’t accuse WP Engine of this when you are supported by Venture Capitalist money. VC funding is concerning as venture capitalists aim to have their firms make a more significant return on investment rather than creating a good product.
If you use WordPress dot com, I highly recommend moving to a self-hosted or managed WordPress host. Don’t give Automattic any more money until Matt resigns from the WordPress Foundation and Automattic. Matt’s behavior shows that he cannot be trusted. You can always contact me if you need help moving to a self-hosted solution. Most managed WordPress hosts provide help in migration, which is an option.
That said, Matt Mullenweg needs to resign from the WordPress Foundation. He is destroying WordPress and harming the community, people’s livelihoods, and its users irreparably. We can discuss open-source funding and getting organizations to contribute, but threatening and slandering an organization like a mob boss is not how you do it. His behavior of restricting repo access to WP Engine is already eroding trust in WordPress. WordPress will be destroyed if nothing is done, and it will be a shame. WP Engine must win to save the WordPress community and its users and prove this behavior is unacceptable. I think they have a good chance of winning, given that Matt did behaviors that can hurt his case.
@chikorita157@amausaan.tokyo
This whole thing started brewing a long bit ago. Every CEO who admires Musk or is in user-generated content were “reminded” by Musk that the business models they had chosen allowed (gasp!) other people to make money too, and through Olympic mental gymnastics, that somehow that is some kind of inherent theft. How dare you let all that “value” escape?
That is part where Mullenweg’s brazen, rage fueled tactics are coming from, I think. I do believe his brainworms are telling him on some level he’s in the right, and that he believes is entitled to the ‘value’ generated by wordpress and its users, even though a lot the value of the brand has been generated by the networking effects of those other businesses.