Tag: Automattic

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Automattic has announced that they are “realigning” their contributions to WordPress due to fending off “attacks” from the “community” and WP-Engine.

Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.

In the interest of, as you put it, “secur[ing] the future of WordPress for generations to come,” I trust you’ll be releasing the WordPress trademark, core project management and the infrastructure at WordPress.org, (the latter of which which CEO Matt Mullenweg has repeatedly pointed out that he owns personally) over to the community so you can “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic” without the distraction of the wider WordPress ecosystem.

Either that, or you’ve just told the entire WordPress community — excuse me, “community,” I forgot to include the scare quotes you so meticulously included throughout your article — that we should never trust you to have the community’s interests at heart, only your own.

I suppose this means I should start looking for alternatives to the handful of Automattic-built plugins I’m still using, as it sounds like I shouldn’t anticipate them continuing to be maintained.

Update January 10: It gets worse. Mullenweg just deactivated the accounts of several high-profile people at WordPress-adjacent companies who dared to question his leadership, in a post that goes increasingly off the rails.

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Back in 2002, I set up this blog on b2. A year later, b2 updates had stagnated, I migrated it to a fork of b2 called WordPress.

In the intervening 21 years, WordPress has gone on to power a huge fraction of the web. But in my opinion the project has lost its way, starting with the move to the Gutenberg block editor in 2018 and trying to become everything to everyone instead of just really good blogging software.

In response to the Block Editor merge, another project forked WordPress to create ClassicPress. Initially it was more or less WordPress Minus Gutenberg, but they’ve continued to do their own development as well, from cleaning up old complex code to improving the way media management works. I sorta kept up with it for a while, but finally decided to really evaluate it this month, and it’s actually really good! So I migrated a couple of test blogs, then Katie’s Feral Tomatoes.

Then I started looking at what it would take to migrate this 22-year-old, 3,255-post behemoth of a blog. (And that’s after moving a bunch of posts to other parts of my site, and deleting a bunch of no-longer-useful posts like ‘Migrated from 1.1 to 1.2. Let me know what’s broken.” or “Check out this weird link!” with no commentary (especially when the weird link is long-dead by now anyway).

Continue reading →

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I’ve been meaning to disconnect from Jetpack for a while now. This seems like a good time to do it, and to finally clear out the older Tumblr and WordPress.com blogs I don’t use anymore.

Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — 404 Media

It’s the kind of thing that you expect from Google or Facebook, or from any number of start-ups, but there’s been this sense that Automattic should know better — and with Tumblr being login-walled and ad-saturated, and the push to upsell in their WordPress plugins, and now this…it’s looking like they don’t.

I don’t think they’ve hit the “trust thermocline” yet, but selling user data is a pretty clear line.

As for AI access to the Firehose: My previous understanding of the firehose is that it’s basically an aggregation of what you’d see in a bunch of blogs’ public RSS feeds. Which, OK, fine. Analyze your heart out. Display my posts in your RSS reader. Just make sure private posts and comments don’t leak.

But LLM training isn’t the same as analytics, or showing a properly attributed post in a reader. And quietly changing the terms to allow more kinds of re-use on something most people using the service don’t know about? Not cool.

And not making it clear what is and isn’t included for which purposes? That breaks down trust.

Before this, I wasn’t worried about the Firehose. But now I’m not sure I can trust Akismet, never mind Jetpack, and I’m looking for a new spam filter.

Originally posted across several threads through my GoToSocial test site.

Update: Automattic did clarify that self-hosted blogs with Jetpack are not included in the training data. Only company-hosted blogs on Tumblr and WordPress.com. But I still uninstalled Jetpack from this site, just to be sure. Like I said, I’d been meaning to for a while.

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Huh. Verizon has sold what remains of Yahoo! and AOL.

For half of what they paid for them. 🤦‍♂️

To a private equity firm. 😬

Apparently the division formerly known as Oath and later as Verizon Media Group will be called Yahoo going forward, which is probably a good move.

I’ve got to say, though: Flickr and Tumblr really lucked out that Verizon sold them to companies that actually had something to do with their core service. Flickr went to SmugMug, a photo-sharing company, and Tumblr went to Automattic, a blogging company.

I’d like to think someone at Verizon put in the effort to find a good fit for each. It’s probably more likely that they just weren’t in a hurry at the time, since they still thought they could get something out of the rest of what they bought from Yahoo.

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Wow. Automattic bought Tumblr from Verizon for less than $3 million. Considering Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion back in the day…

Yahoo really squandered it. And Verizon, I think, just wanted to get rid of it.

At least it’s going to an actual social media company not to another conglomerate. And one that’s more responsible than the big two! I was half expecting Verizon to try to monetize it into the ground and close it once everyone but the die-hard users had given up on it. But they found a blogging company for Tumblr, just like they found a photography company for Flickr. That’s encouraging. And Matt Mullenweg (who turns out to be a long-term Tumblr user as well!) understands that Tumblr and WordPress are different types of experiences, so they’re unlikely to try to merge them into a single service.

Though apparently they’d like to move the back-end to WordPress, while keeping the front-end experience of the Tumblr site and apps. I can sort of see the appeal: they’ve got over a decade of experience making WordPress scale, and they have to migrate Tumblr off of Verizon’s servers anyway. If they can run Tumblr on top of the WordPress infrastructure, it’s just a matter of adding capacity.

But it kind of runs the risk of creating a frankenblog. I guess it depends on how seamless the conversion is. If Tumblr looks and works the same from the user-facing perspective, it shouldn’t drive anyone away. If they try to turn it into a subset of WordPress.com…I’d expect another exodus.

Speaking of which, I doubt they’ll get anyone returning who left directly due to the adult content ban. Especially since they don’t plan on reversing it. But they might get back at least some people who left because they saw the ban as a sign of a dying platform. And they might be able to bring in new users, who knows? Having corporate overlords who actually understand and appreciate the space could be a big help.

Though frankly, even if all they do is keep it running in maintenance mode for those who are still there, that’s still better it would have been staying at Verizon!

As for me, I haven’t been active on Tumblr for a while. I took a final archive after cleaning up a bunch of old stuff, imported some posts here, and I’ve checked in to read maybe…once a month? I’m still in wait-and-see mode. We’ll see how the data migration goes, what they end up doing with the terms of service, whether they change the way ads and promoted posts appear.

But I am more confident that Tumblr will still exist next year than I was a few months ago!

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Since Gravatar was bought by Automattic, the service has been a lot more stable. I had already re-enabled them on this blog before WordPress 2.5 came out with built-in Gravatar* support.

Not everyone has a Gravatar, though, so many comment threads just show the default icon, over and over. Not only does this look boring, but it misses out on the whole point of using an avatar: providing an easy at-a-glance visual distinction between each author.

When I first used Gravatars on this site, I set it up to use a giant first initial as a fallback. Now, I’ve been trying out two plugins that will automatically generate avatars for people who don’t have their own:

  • Wavatars builds up cartoony faces using geometric shapes. Interestingly, it’s by Shamus Young, author of the screencap-based webcomic DM of the Rings and writer of Chainmail Bikini.
  • WP_Identicon sounds like a Transformers faction, but produces a geometric pattern as inspired by Don Park’s Identicon, which built a similar image based on a visitor’s IP address. The same author also has one that generates cartoon monsters, which appears to be one of the earliest implementations of this concept.

These plugins will use a Gravatar if available, or else generate an image based on the commenter’s email address (if supplied). That means each comment by the same person should use the same image. Other blogs using the same plugins at default settings will come up with the same avatar for each commenter, as well. The images are stored in a cache, so each only has to be generated once.

6 Wavatars to the left, 6 Identicons to the right

Once I made sure both plugins worked, I showed the results to Katie. We ended up settling on Wavatars, since faces are easier to recognize than patterns. (Though the patterns are really cool!)

You can try out the automatic avatar by leaving a (relevant, please!) comment on any post. Or you can run over to Gravatar and set up an icon of your choice!

*What’s a Gravatar? The intent is to be a Globally Recognized Avatar. You upload an image to Gravatar and associate it with your email address. Then any site with Gravatar support will be able to display your image next to your posts. Right now it’s mostly used in blog comments, but it could easily be worked into forums, wikis, etc. The Gravatar Blog mentions other uses they’ve seen people apply it to, such as plugins for Thunderbird and the Mac OS X Address Book

Note: I did notice one important drawback to the WP_Identicon plugin: it’s very inefficient at generating the images. When I first visited posts with long comment threads, like Another One Bites the Dust (174 comments) and Songs Not to Play at a Wedding (87 comments), WP_Identicon took over a minute to generate all the icons and maxed out the server’s CPU. Sure, the images are cached, so it’s only really an issue when you first install the plugin (unless you get a lot more people commenting at once than we do here), but to compare, Wavatar on an empty cache finished the same posts in just 4 seconds and 2 seconds, respectively.