In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the loudest ones.
Category: Tech Culture
Automattic to WordPress Community: Don’t Trust Us
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.
The Other Name Was A Little Sus
Looks like IEEE has finally renamed their sustainable tech conference. Now it’s “IEEE SustainTech Expo.” Not only is it a bit clearer than the old name, but ever since Among Us came out, “SusTech” always made me giggle a bit. I doubt I was the only one.
Update: apparently I was mistaken, and SustainTech is entirely separate from SusTech, which is still going on. Looking at it a bit more, it seems that SustainTech is more of a marketing/trade show, while SusTech continues to be a technical conference.
Last Tweets Standing
Popped over to Twitter to delete the last handful of posts I left there when I deleted most of them back in December. Decided to leave two for now, though I might still delete them before the new TOS takes effect.
Oct 2008:
If only the super high-tech jet fighters had identified, clarified & classified, they’d have seen the attack for what it really was.
Nov 2022:
Weird, it’s almost like the needs of a “town square” for people to communicate and exchange ideas aren’t compatible with the incentives for a single for-profit entity to maintain it.
Privacy and Trust: Threads, Twitter and the Fediverse
I think there’s been a lot of talking past each other on privacy lately because there are so many layers to it.
Google or Dropbox keeping your cloud files from showing up on someone else’s drive or a public share is one layer. Keeping your data from leaking in a data breach is another. Protecting messages in transit from your device to their service. Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads) are good at those.
But then there’s ensuring that Google or Meta doesn’t misuse it themselves, or sell it to someone who will.
And, well, to put it mildly, they’re not so big on that aspect!
That Blue Checkmark
Twitter Blue is what happens when you start treating a tool as a status symbol, so you throw the tools away and start selling gold-plated hammers made out of thin plastic.
As anticipated, they’re getting rid of “legacy” verification in favor of charging people $8/month for the privilege of having a blue checkmark next to their name.
Not that verification was perfect before, but most of the complaints I heard prior to the enmuskification were “wait, that person got verified but this person didn’t?”…essentially treating it as a status symbol, indicating who’s worthy of being verified, rather than one tool in the toolbox to indicate that the account really does belong to who it says it does.
Detweeting (and More)
Not that I’ve been particularly active on Twitter for quite a while now, but the way things have gotten, especially under its new owner, I decided it was finally time to go. I haven’t deleted my main account (yet), but I’ve deleted most of my tweet history, and the accounts I used for side projects, and I don’t plan on returning.
Mastodon has filled Twitter’s niche for me over the last few years (obviously different people have different use cases, so it may not fit yours), and you can still find me there at @KelsonV@Wandering.shop.
As for the archive, I’m slowly going through and looking for threads (and occasional single posts) that I think are worth keeping, importing them where they seem to fit best on this website, whether on the blog or another section.
It may be time to do the same with Facebook and Instagram* too. I haven’t been active on either of them in ages, and I’d rather own my data IndieWeb style than wait for Meta to go the way of LiveJournal.
December 2024 Update: I’ve since deleted my Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts outright. I’m still on the Fediverse, mostly at @kelson@notes.kvibber.com these days.
*I’ve already trimmed a lot of my Instagram history.