Technology

WordPress is built on decades of hacky code, probably more so than Tumblr. I would be shocked if this is an improvement.

Wordpress supports activitypub tho, so that could be cool if they want it to be.

Like, two owners ago. Wordpress took Tumblr off Verizon's hands for $3 million USD, ~six years after Yahoo! bought it for $1.1 billion.

if they’re constantly growing their user numbers

All social media needs to constantly grow because attrition. Social media requires basic levels of user ship to be functional, even lemmy. Its a network effect where you need to have certain levels of users for some emergent properties to exist. For example, I speculate that defederation early between .ml and .world was the trigger that will eventually kill lemmy, principally because this results in fragmentation and a reduction in the properties we would get from "more users". Having more users begets more users, more content, more memes, etc. And I don't necesssarily see the defederation as something unneccessary, but what I'm describing is an inherent property of networks. Its not something that can really be argued with because this behavior is consistent across physical, biological, social networks. It just "is" as a property.

So foundationally, you can't sit still on a train moving backwords (which it always is). An organism needs to be constantly recruiting and growing new cells into its network because its also always dying. Growth is "holding still" for any networked system.

I see no mention of ActivityPub in the article, but I'm wondering if this is part of their plan to eventually integrate Tumblr into the fediverse as well.

However I agree with others that this will likely result in hella janky hackable websites first...hopefully it smoothes out.

Funny how all these social media corporations were run as ponzi schemes...

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

Hopefully they're planning on using that to integrate with the Fediverse.

...and the WordPress codebase is utterly horrible. I don't envy them at all.

My guess is it scales a lot more efficiently the more you add. Still probably costs a lot though.

Most of them probably get 0 visits or close to it.

They're not actually going to change anything you can notice. I guess they're just changing the back end for... Reasons

Yeah it was a nice tool for making sites fast. I loved using it but haven't in a very long time. I hope it's still nice to work with like it was before. Even with PHP it wasn't that bad of an experience lol.

It makes sense that they'd want to move it to a single codebase rather than have both Wordpress code and Tumblr code in the same organization.

Anyone else old enough to remember when Wordpress was called b2? Good times.

The open-source software from WordPress.org is great for blogs. It becomes the worst when you try it make it do more than that. Even worse is WordPress.com which is very different and uses a very locked-down and restricted proprietary version of the WordPress software. They charge $25/mo for the tier that lets you add custom CSS.

Additionally, Automattic gets a free pass of violating the WordPress terms of use for the WordPress name and logo to intentionally trick people into thinking the paid platform at WordPress.com is the same as the free and open-source software from WordPress.org. They get to leverage the non-profit's name and likeness and gets preferential treatment to funnel business to their for-profit company.

Or use a shitload of insecure plugins for wp to do what it wasn't made for.