People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years.
Fascinating to imagine what the web would look like if WordPress didn’t exist. What would fill the void, and would it be as open?
@manton Yes but... I'm really tired of the trope of the lone (usually male) saviour story about tech. And especially when said saviour turns out to be an ass about it. 😆
@manton Same could be said for Tesla and the EV industry
Obviously, Mullenweg is not even remotely close to a comparable level of problematic as Musk, but there was a good decade where Tesla was the only widely known name in the space
@iChris I generally think the recent criticism of Matt has been more negative than is justified, but I agree with you about the lone savior. It's not actually a good thing that a single platform has 60% share of the web. Much better to be split across smaller players.
@manton There were (and are) a ton of CMS out there. Hard to fight WordPress when it exists, but something would be in its place regardless. Drupal, Joomla, another PHP Nuke fork.
@alexcartaz.bsky.social Not from the Bluesky app, but it does from the API. I post to my blog and Micro.blog translates inline links to Bluesky posts for me.
@Eggfreckles iWeb is actually a product that should still exist! A shame about that "WWW your life" tagline, though. 🤪
@manton I was mainly writing that for Matt, but I'm glad you picked up on it Manton. You make a huge mostly unappreciated contribution to the open web. Matt does too, and even he doesn't see it that way. I think his product is going to become central to the rebirth of the open web for the simple reason that much of the open web is also the product. How did we miss that? As Yogi used to say "You can observe a lot by just watching."
@CarolynStirling It was great for a long, long time. Then suddenly it veered off in a different direction and became an ordeal.
@philsplace There was a short-lived fork of Movable Type called Open Melody that I had high hopes for. Ah, well.
I'm amused, as a Movable Type user back in the day, that static site generators are all the rage again… It was one of the big criticisms of MT in the late 2000s.
@philsplace There was a short-lived fork of Movable Type called Open Melody that I had high hopes for. Ah, well.
I'm amused, as a Movable Type user back in the day, that static site generators are all the rage again… It was one of the big criticisms of MT in the late 2000s.
I loved MT and have dabbled with the idea of getting it running in a docker container and using it again.
FWIW, before MT came along I was using Greymatter… which was also using Perl and created static sites.
I really think that static site generators are the best of both worlds… easy generation and top performance.
@philsplace Oh, I remember looking at Greymatter before settling on MT. My journey was Livejournal -> Blogger -> MT -> WordPress -> Ghost
@philsplace Oh, I remember looking at Greymatter before settling on MT. My journey was Livejournal -> Blogger -> MT -> WordPress -> Ghost
