We posted a new episode of Core Intuition, this time talking all about the controversy in the WordPress community over WP Engine. Still very fascinated by this story and following as much of the news as I can, including a new interview with Matt Mullenweg over the weekend.
Ghost fediverse pricing
Interesting note in the latest fediverse blog post update for Ghost:
Will members who use ActivityPub (rather than email) count toward Ghost(Pro) billing? And so far the answer is yes, because ActivityPub is (quite significantly) more expensive to support than email. But, this is all very early days, and hopefully we'll figure out ways to get some of the costs and complexity down.
If I'm reading this correctly and the pricing holds, that effectively means you will pay more for hosting if you have lots of followers on the fediverse. This would be a first; I've never heard of a social network charging for followers before.
So if you're using the $11/month Ghost hosting that allows 500 members, you could have (for example) 100 email subscribers and 400 followers in the fediverse. As soon as you had more subscribers or followers, you would need to bump up to the $19/month plan. If you got up to 10k and more followers, you would be paying hundreds of dollars a month.
Of course this is all beta and as Ghost further optimizes it, the pricing could change. It comes from Ghost's early testing that showed how resource-intensive ActivityPub is. I can definitely attest to that with Micro.blog as well.
Relay has raised $1 million for St. Jude this year. Incredible.
Decided a few weeks back to stop Wordle at 1200. It's fitting that I did terribly on this last one.
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Happy birthday to Jimmy Carter. 100 years! Amazing. Hope he gets his wish to vote for Kamala Harris. Early voting is soon. 🇺🇸
Croissant is getting some great press. Just a few I've noticed: Six Colors, MacStories, TechCrunch. I don't need it because Micro.blog cross-posts to everything from my blog, but would be cool if the app could post to blogs in the future too.
There was a trailer for Flow before The Wild Robot. It looks fantastic. The release is coming in December according to Cartoon Brew.
Spent a bunch of time in encryption land, debugging an issue with the next Strata update. Almost shocked that I eventually solved it. I was starting to lose my mind watching scrambled bytes of data go back and forth between platforms.
If I could give advice to Tim Walz for tonight’s debate: just be yourself. Don’t stress about scoring points. Don’t debate as if you went to Yale Law School. Remind people how unhinged Trump has become, and show that you’re competent, empathetic, and ready. 🇺🇸
Just in case folks missed the other notices about this, I’m running a big server upgrade in 30 minutes. Wish I could keep Micro.blog fully up during the upgrade but it’s going to be smoother and hopefully faster to just rip the bandaid off. Seeya on the other side.
Thinking about the difference between companies who use AI to make existing features better and companies who try to rethink everything. I've been using the iOS 18.1 beta for a while. I don't think Apple really believes in AI the way OpenAI, Anthropic, or Microsoft do. See Microsoft's memo from Mustafa Suleyman:
This is a new era of technology that doesn’t just “solve problems”, it’s there to support you, teach you, help you. In this sense, Copilots really are different to that last wave of the web and mobile. This is the beginning of a fundamental shift in what’s possible for all of us.
We just shipped an update to Strata for iOS, our private notes app for Micro.blog, with Android to follow later in the week. This adds a QR code scanning option to get your secret key moved over from another platform. For Apple folks, it also syncs the key via iCloud, but nice to have options.
Think I figured out my high bounce and complaint rate for email sending. Spammers are trying to (probably accidentally) sign up to customer's newsletters with fake email addresses. Working on making it harder for bots to navigate this.
Here's what the new prompt for email newsletter subscriptions looks like for your blog. The extra step lets us generate some random values hidden from real users, inspired by this post from Jeremy Keith, to make it a tiny bit harder for bots. Could do more later now that this is in place.
I don't like captchas and will never force them on my customers. With AI, captchas will become increasingly useless anyway. See also, John Mulaney: "I've devised a question no robot could ever answer…Which of these pictures does not have a stop sign in it?"
Overall the iPhone 16 Pro Max is amazing. A couple minor gripes:
- Camera button is a little hard to get used to because it's not raised. Too easy to accidentally change the zoom.
- Apps will randomly crash to a black screen and spinner. I've never seen this on iOS before. Maybe 18.1 beta eating RAM?
John Gruber on the news that Starlink will offer free service to Hurricane Helene disaster areas:
It’s hard to overstate how differently Elon Musk would be perceived if he weren’t a whackjob on political and cultural issues.
If Elon had never bought Twitter, never tweeted even, he'd still be considered a visionary leader comparable to Steve Jobs, maybe over time even greater. Instead he destroyed his reputation for nothing.
Multiple confirmations from folks that the black screen crashes (reboots?) are an 18.1 beta problem. Without evidence, my gut says this is Apple Intelligence hitting the 8 GB RAM ceiling for local models. It again makes me question Apple not moving more AI to the cloud.
Experimenting with OpenAI's new canvas feature. Pretty incredible what it can do. There are a lot of nice UI touches too to help show progress, like how it highlights and rewrites text.
Automattic, WP Engine, and 37signals
The controversy with WordPress continues. In fact, it's escalating as WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic, and even some employees inside Automattic are frustrated with Matt Mullenweg's leadership. Matt blogged about offering Automattic employees a chance to leave if they disagreed with his actions against WP Engine:
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.
This is indeed very generous. It's not often you get a chance to leave a job and walk away with six months of salary. For many people that might be a down payment on a new house, or enough money to pay off debt, or time to travel before figuring out what to do next.
Ultimately 8% of employees took the offer. For the rest, I expect what Jeffrey Zeldman blogged about will resonate:
…when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come.
A few years ago, when there was drama at 37signals over the policy to no longer discuss politics at work, the founders offered a similar incentive to leave the company. Jason Fried originally announced the decision about politics in a blog post this way:
Today's social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It's not healthy, it hasn't served us well.
After the issues spiraled inside the company, David Heinemeier Hansson blogged about the severance offer to employees:
Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we'll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else.
At the time, some folks thought this was the end of Basecamp / 37signals. More people would surely resign, the founders' reputation wouldn't recover, and they'd have trouble hiring. Three years later, it's clear that hasn't happened. The company is larger than it was before, and the founders have said in hindsight it was one of the best decisions they've made.
Nevertheless, for many people the event has left a bad taste in their mouth. I still hear from Micro.blog customers who don't like when I link to Jason Fried's blog, or when I mention that we use Basecamp internally. As Jane Austen fans will know: "My good opinion once lost is lost forever." This is understandable. I feel the same way about some companies.
Why do I bring all this old 37signals news up? I think there are parallels with Matt Mullenweg today. For many people in the WordPress community, they won't quickly forget how he blew everything up, wrecking what seemed to be a friendly competitive spirit inside the WordPress ecosystem, with bloggers, developers, volunteers, and hosting companies all working toward furthering WordPress's mission to democratize publishing.
How it plays out from here may largely hinge on whether Automattic or WP Engine is successful in the lawsuit. Automattic has brought on a big-time lawyer: Neal Katyal, who was Acting Solicitor General during the Obama administration, and who admittedly I mostly know from his guest appearances on MSNBC. In a post from Automattic, Neal is quoted:
I stayed up last night reading WP Engine’s Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court’s consideration of their lawsuit.
I think trademark law may be on Matt's side. The private texts from Matt to WP Engine look quite damning, though. I also wonder how the case will be influenced by Automattic letting most companies freely use the WordPress mark with few restrictions for years.
If Automattic wins, or they can settle the lawsuit, the community will recover. Calls for Matt to resign are unwarranted. WordPress exists at its current level of success in large part because of him. His vision has also provided a good home for Tumblr and Day One. I'm not going to toss all that aside because he picked a fight with a private equity firm that charges a lot for hosting.
As I discussed with Daniel on Core Intuition last week, one good thing to come out of this is that it clarifies how Automattic, the WordPress Foundation, and the wordpress.org website all fit together. Perhaps in the future the WordPress Foundation will have more direct control over all the non-profit pieces of the ecosystem.
Get out the popcorn as we watch this drama unfold! But also let's remember there are real people here, trying to do what they think is right. Matt has been blogging more than ever. He's been sitting for interviews. While I'm sure the lawyers discourage it, I'd like to see the same human face on the WP Engine side. I don't think we've had that since Jason Cohen handed over his company to new owners.
Finished Rings of Power season 2. I enjoyed it as long as I don’t hold it to the high standard of how a perfect adaptation looks in my mind. Hobbits and dwarves were the strongest this season for me. Elves dialogue is always overly dramatic. Still all the money on screen, some stunning sequences. 📺
We saw Megalopolis yesterday and I'm still trying to make sense of it. Feels like there were some interesting ideas, and a couple beautiful scenes, but it didn't come together as a coherent movie for me. Glad I saw it just because it's different. 🍿
