Why Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg went to war over WordPress

22:29I think what we're seeing aggregate across everything is there is a lot more traffic being driven by the open AIs and the perplexes of the world. This also feels in early days of that. I don't know, maybe if LLM's never hallucinate again, people will stop visiting links. But for now, I actually find myself sometimes clicking on three or four things, even from the Google summaries that they put at the top of. So I'm probably clicking on more things than I used to. When I just had the 10 blue links of the old Google, I would kind of pick one of them and then spend time on that webpage. And now, you know, there's a summary.

23:01It links to three different things. I find myself exploring a little bit more. And what we're seeing aggregate in traffic is that what happened in 2020 to 2022 was actually worse than what's happening now. So things are actually starting to come back a bit. I don't know. Have you seen that with your traffic? I think broadly what we see is the same thing as everyone else, which is the shape of Google traffic is changing. And some Google surfaces are sending more traffic and some are sending less. And they only just started saying what traffic comes from AI mode and Search Console. So I can't actually tell you that this is like, as we're speaking, I believe this happened yesterday, that they started breaking out AI mode in Search Console, so it's too early to say.

23:39But we have reported on website after website that has just disappeared. The Daily Dot, it went from millions of Google referrals to thousands, and then the business was over, and that's the end of the Daily Dot, and it doesn't exist anymore. Well, if you remember back in the day, Jason Kalkin has had Mahalo, right? So Google has always been mercurial, especially if you optimized your business around that. So imagine that, like one of these creators who was only on one network. You want to have many paths to the ocean. And so that's what I'd recommend for any business, really, right? You don't want to stake everything on just one partner.

24:11I think the question I'm asking you is there are very vanishingly few paths left to the web. There are lots of paths to the web as applications. I think there's going to be an increasing number of paths to the web from iOS apps looking to escape transaction fees by doing commerce on the web. The paths to the web as media are obviously changing. And it sounds like you're saying you are actually seeing more traffic from the AI search engines than people expect. It goes to different people. In aggregate, I am optimistic. In the short term, I think there'll be a changing of the guard, perhaps, or maybe it'll reward different sites.

24:45And I think particularly, again, one of the things that I think hurt some of these media sites that we talked about before with the too many ads, Google started taking in site performance as part of its ranking. So if you had a pop-up there or something like that, they would start to de-rank you a little bit. So when you think of the incentive of these engines, they want the user to have the best possible experience. I mean, WordPress is 43 % of the websites out there. I'm assuming that you can see a lot. You can see a lot. Are you seeing more or less traffic from Google than a year ago? I don't know off the top of my head, but it's not.

25:16I think it was like flattish to some and then up for others. But you haven't seen these dramatic declines that are wiping some publishers? Not in the past year, no. We saw some like four years ago. Interesting. And so you think it's the same amount of traffic, which is expressed differently across your network? That's right. Yeah. And more starting to be driven by the LLMs. That's really interesting because Google will happily tell you the same thing. And then we get website owners in our inbox saying they took all our traffic away. I believe them. You hear that across the board. Like Business Insider just had layoffs because their Google traffic went away.

25:48And that seems like the dynamic where maybe there are going to be a bunch of new media websites that have a bunch of traffic driven to them by engines. But to your point, what's going to be the backstop against that? There's only one referral source left of huge value, and it's Google. Maybe these new LLM companies or these search engines will drive some traffic over time. But there isn't another user behavior that drives a lot of traffic to the web in that way. There's search and search-like things and chatbot-like search. But there isn't – there used to be a Twitter, which would drive a lot of traffic to some websites.

26:24Facebook used to drive a lot of traffic to some websites. Those other things have faded away. Do you see something else coming up that might balance out the incredible search dependency? You know what people sleep on is the Google articles. I don't know what they call it. It's not Google News, but it's that thing that if you scroll to the left on an Android or you open the Google app. Discover. I know entire media companies whose business is Google Discover. Like just programming Google Discover, which to me feels the most brittle of all because it's a total box. I actually dream of a day when Twitter doesn't de-emphasize links again.

26:55So who knows? There's a lot more sort of niche social networks. So, for example, if you're an engineer, like Hacker News was always big for my combinator. There's like one called Lobsters, which can have like cool little spikes. And honestly, I think like the video stuff actually can drive really great web traffic still. You know, people allow links now in them. They talk or they just say something and people click on it. It's like this thing we saw for Beeper. The French usage surpassed English just off this one viral reel. So that was people going to a website. Fair enough. I want to get to the decoder questions because I want to talk about the other side of the web, which is the open web and the open source nature of a lot of the stuff you work on at Automatic and WordPress.

27:41You've described the org chart as ecosystem and Cosmos. Cosmos is the app ecosystem. The core technologies you're building. You've had a bunch of buyouts and layoffs this year. How big is WordPress today? We're about 1 ,500 people. And is that substantially smaller than it was at the top of the year? Yeah, like most tech companies, we hired a lot in kind of the 2020-21 range. And like most tech companies, we found we can be more efficient and move a little bit faster with smaller teams. I don't love that, but it is a business reality. Did anything about your leadership structure change? Did anything about the Orchart change?

28:20Or is it still the two main groups? Well, internally, we actually just did a big switch where we have traditionally been sort of like independent product silos with their own engineering, marketing, everything. And we just did a huge centralization effort. So product, engineering, design, all centralized. And some new leaders there as well. A new colleague named Pajam, who was at Apple for 15 years at the App Store, Airbnb. be. So he's helped us really reimagine sort of how we think about products, which I'd say historically, we've really, because my proclivity is very much on the engineering side.

28:55So that's been really nice and really exciting. So yeah, it is actually a very different organizational structure. I think I said this last time, but I feel like all org structures are just a series of trade-offs. And sometimes you just need to make the other trade-off for a while. So if you've been in one place for too long or doing things one way, you kind of need to do the opposite to break out of whatever rut you found yourself in. And it could just be like how you're thinking. Yeah, there's a real pendulum between centralization and decentralization at most companies, especially 20-year-old companies.

29:25Was this really the decision? We just, we've been doing it this way for a while. We're just gonna swing the pendulum the other way and see what happens. Yeah. I mean, that wasn't just it. It's not like, oh, let's just swing the other way. It was really like, hey, what are some of our issues here? We're not having some global quality. Like we're getting some local maximums in certain areas. Performance management across all of this can be inconsistent. We need like, let's try one roadmap for the whole company and see what that looks like. Should we try this every six months thing that a lot of companies are doing?

29:54We kind of examined all of that and then looked at how that fit with what we're hearing from the customers, what's happening with the business and the environment, what we're really excited about. And yeah, this is what we ended up with. We're only like two months into it. So there's a lot of changes the first kind of three, four months of the year. and it's kind of been baking the last two months. And to be honest, I won't be able to tell you if it worked until probably towards the end of the year. What are you hoping to get out of it? All the things that business wants. So I want to have your colleagues.

30:25I want better business results. I want better retention and acquisition. I want deeper to 100 million users. We have all our ambitions. Ultimately, I want to solve open source for publishing commerce. This is my life goal. And everything in between is a means to an end. And so I try not to be overly attached to almost anything to see what happens. So much so, I'll tell you something a little wild, which is that we are famously like the most remote distributed company, whatever. There's many others, but like we were pretty early and pretty and I advocate for it quite heavily. I've actually been exploring whether we should bring a team entirely to like New York for six months to do like a sprint.

31:04So essentially, I co-locate, do the opposite of the remote to see what would happen. I'm actually, I love the idea of co-working weeks. Maybe not co-working six months, but co-working weeks. We're pretty remote. And I always think, well, we can get together for an offsite. But then the offsite is its own process. But actually, I just need everyone to work in the same room for a while and be in the office together. The show The Office, not The Office, The Office. Goof around and tell jokes and just watch each other doing the actual job, not the job of making decisions at an offsite. Let me know how that goes.

31:40I'm very curious. We haven't done it yet, but I've been thinking about it a lot. And that, to me, is like a lot of, I think, what's happening at WordPress in the community is kind of a reflection of, boy, like being virtual all the time kind of breaks some trust, right? Like that, it feels like there's some trust issues with WordPress and the larger WordPress community that you might have to work through. Do you think any of this restructure or any working together will help you through that? It was tough during COVID because, you know, the secret ingredient for Automatic has always been our meetups.

32:12And the secret ingredient for WordPress was these WordCamps and also meetups with meetup.com or the traditional meetup.com thing. And when that sort of went to zero and the pandemic, we all know about it. But I think that there's still echoes of that period of time, which stay with us today. I'm so excited it's back. Like I just was at a part of the reason I'm on the side of the world is that I was at WordCamp Europe. You know, it's a couple thousand folks. We had a lot of new folks coming. It really energizes everything. Our contributor day had like 600, 700 people at it. Those things are really sort of the gateway drug, if you will, to open source participation.

32:52The last time you were on the show, you told me, I asked you about your decision-making frameworks for trying to ask everybody. And you said your goal was to push as many decisions down as fast as you could and that you documented everything across WordPress. There was an internal blog system that you guys use. Is that still the case? Is that still your style of decision making? Yeah, I would say the main thing that's changed is we started doing, you know, some of these product reviews. So on a periodic basis, I'll go to basically every product in the company. And yeah, we do presentations, the feedback sort of, again, not something new.

33:24It's only many other companies have done for a long time. But, you know, the thing that actually maybe know we really needed to change is, you know, last year I took a sabbatical for three months, which is a benefit automatic offers. Every five years, you get three months off. I had never done it. So I was setting a bad example. So I'm like, I'm finally going to do this. And that was interesting also just to get a little space. But then when I came back, I was like, okay, what can I do different to sort of come back? And I did 100 days of support. So with all of our different products, like shadowing people, talking to customers, and came out of it with a real sense for where we had accumulated technical debt, where we'd accumulated cultural debts, where we had golden handcuffs in our business model, which I think is one of the most dangerous things because it's not the business going down, but you can kind of like, oh, if we just stay in this forever, you know, it's not a good look five years from now, 10 years from now.

34:20So that was part of why I started recruiting some of the new executives we brought in and thinking about more drastic changes to how we worked. Well, what are some of the golden handcuffs you had in the business? Well, just to give an example that you mentioned, like our enterprise business is incredibly strong with media. And media is, in some ways, we're almost reaching a saturation point. There's not that many great publications left that we could bring on. And some of those publications are feeling a squeeze. So just industrially, from an industry point of view, there is currently, although I think this will come back, secular headwinds to that business.

34:57So if we were all media, that would be trouble. But of course, we have other things, finance, a lot of startups, Facebook uses it, all these other things. But the product is well suited. So that's something we have to think about. We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

35:22We're back with Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg. Before the break, we were diving into the decoder questions with Matt and also exploring some of the tough decisions he's had to make these past few years, including making Automatic smaller through layoffs and buyouts. But now I really wanted to get to the heart of the conversation, the big controversy that's loomed large over Automatic and the broader WordPress community for the past year, the WP Engine lawsuit, and the fallout that's happened since. All right, let me ask you about the big decision. You decided that WP Engine, which is a rival WordPress host, was free writing and open source.

35:52You decided that you were going to cut them off. Many, many things happened. I just want to start at the very beginning of this. Your decision-making process is it's all team decisions. Everything is pushed down. Everything is documented. Was the decision to take the fight to WP Engine, was that a team decision or a Matt decision? That was team and a lot of community feedback. Walk me through that specific decision. We're going to go put a lot of pressure on this rival hosting company. I don't know if I can right now. I think there's a period in the future when we can dive a lot more deeply into this.

36:25But, well, you're a lawyer, right? Yeah, my job is to get you to talk. I was a horrible lawyer. And I think something I've learned in this process is to not talk as much while it's going on. So we're very much deep. where both sides are spending millions of dollars a month on lawyers. And I think that there will be things that play out, but the legal system moves a lot slower than I would like. So we're a little bit in the middle of it right now. But you did put a lot of pressure on this company, right? You cut off some of their access. You changed some code in different ways to further cut off their access.

37:02A lot of people saw you making unilateral decisions in a way that didn't feel compatible with open source. Were those just Matt decisions or were those also team decisions? You know, I take full responsibility for it all. So ultimately, yes, if people are unhappy with it, they should hold me to account. One of the ways people held you account inside of Automatic was you said, if you don't like it, you can leave. And a bunch of people took buyouts and left. Yeah, we did a very generous six months and a nine month buyout offer. We got an alignment offer. So at that point, we were at our very peak, around 2 ,100 people.

37:37And actually, we'd already started coming down. But, yeah, it was clear that there were some folks who just didn't more in line with where the business was going. Or we had some folks who were like already had another job. They just wanted to, you know, it was a sort of mix of everything in there. So the way I read it from the outside was Automatic is a very idealistic company. You are a very idealistic person after all the times we've talked. That's my impression of you is that you are a very idealistic company. WordPress Automatic, very idealistic projects, particularly ecosystem side, the open source side of WordPress.

38:09and here is Matt, the benevolent dictator for life of WordPress, saying, I'm going to squeeze this player out of the ecosystem in a way that read against the ideals of open source itself. And some people at your company were so incensed about this that you said, you can walk, I'll pay you to leave. That's not how fully characterized it. So first and foremost, I will say that it is true that my bias is towards optimism and radical openness. That's my whole career. The downside of that, and this is not the first time this has happened in WordPress's history, is that that can be taken advantage of.

38:47And this is probably the fourth big time there's been a controversy like this in WordPress. It's the first time in this sort of media landscape or when we're this big, but there have been similar things in the past where, as a community, we had to say, by the way, not all the community, but a good portion of it to say, hey, there's something that's not okay here. And if we don't stand up to it, it could threaten the future of us existing at all. So that is, I believe this was one of those decisions, or one of those situations rather. I'm sure with the benefit of hindsight, there could be things that were done differently, probably on all sides.

39:27And there's a lot that we're doing to make sure this particular thing doesn't happen again. So we'll only make new mistakes. And I will say that nothing like this has quite happened in the past, and I hope it never happens again in the future. Now, a lot of these folks... Wait, can you be specific about what you think happened that you need to prevent from ever happening again? Let me think about how to put this. I think where WordPress has had the greatest success is when we can get everyone around the table. You know, the commercial folks, the agencies, the developers, the geeks, the anarchists, and get us all around the table and say, well, what are our shared goals and how will we achieve them?

40:08Even the most rampant capitalist knows that you can over-squeeze that limit. And you don't have to look far at other open source projects where the commercial interests suck the life out of the project. And that could be talent. It could even be as simple as, I'll give one example of, something people have criticized us for. And we get a lot of pushback on it. It's like, how come the WordPress.org directory, the app store, if you will, doesn't allow you to buy stuff? We allow commercial things, but you have to go buy it from the developer directly. We don't have sort of the one-click type thing.

40:43And it's actually a very complex sort of incentives answer, which is, as we saw other open source projects do that, and some of them did it kind of early, what it shifted in that community was sort of a collaborative nature, both for the core software and for add-ons to sort of every person for themselves. So imagine you and I were both plugin developers and I created a better widget and you had another widget. Now, often what happens in WordPress is I say, hey, what you have is cool. Let's combine that and we'll just combine the plugin. Or say, hey, this should be in core. Let's build it. Let's submit it.

41:20Let's get this so everyone has it. Now, if you and I are both selling that, We might each be making 20K a year or something off this. And so there's a local incentive for us not to open source it to the core or to work with each other. And if you play that out over years, what happens is probably what happened in Joomla, where users felt nickel and dimes with every single feature. The core software can atrophied because all the sort of like best development went into these extensions and hollowed out a bit. That's my view from the outside. You said we when you talk about WordPress.org. I think one of the things that a lot of people realize throughout this entire saga with WP Engine is a quote from you, is that you control WordPress.org.

42:02This is a quote that you gave to us. WordPress.org just belongs to me personally, said Matt Mullenweg in an interview with The Verge. So that's been taken out of context so many times. I regret ever saying that. It's the worst thing ever. So you're saying that's not true. You were asking about specific ownership. Like, okay, what entity? I think you even said, like, what entity is it that owns this? Which is very different from how the site runs and how decisions are made and how the code works and everything like that. So why doesn't automatic own WordPress.org? Why doesn't automatic own WordPress.org?

42:39Because I wanted to keep it separate, especially in the early days of automatic. It was, you know, controlled by investors. And so I wanted this balance of power. WordPress predates automatic, by the way, that there was sort of a thing which was not just the C Corp working for the fiduciary responsibility of shareholders. But there's something that, yes, I kept separate and technically just, you know, I support. But I'm one of many, many people that support it. And if you look at it, how WordPress.org is run, where just how everything works, it is the result and the sort of fruits of clearly tens of thousands of people and hundreds that work on it daily.

43:20And so I was very sad that it got mischaracterized as just like me making all the decisions, me making, you know, just being the thing that belongs to me. So I do regret that a lot. I will say that. I appreciate that you regret it. I'm going to push back on the fact that we're mischaracterizing you saying the following. I didn't say you mischaracterized it. Sure. I said a lot of other people now sort of take it out of context and be like, ah, we can't have this thing rely on someone's personal website. But that is an outgrowth of this quote and this fight, right? It is, I've seen others say there's a supply chain weakness if you have a WordPress dependency where Matt Mullenweg owns.org, which is the plugin repository and the update repository.

44:09And if he gets mad at you, he can cut you off, which is what happened to WP Engine. And it was reversed. Well, sure. So my ability to do it in the long term is apparently not that big. But you had a commercial dispute, and because you are just in control of this, you were able to cut off their access. And I think a lot of people— actually. That didn't turn, yeah, it's a moral dispute as well as a commercial dispute. If they had paid the money, I don't think you would have had a moral dispute, right? If they had said, we commit this many engineers to the open source project, would you have still had a moral dispute?

44:41I don't know if I can comment there. Well, I'm just, I'm asking because to me, the dispute read as this is the classic open source free writer problem. There's a big, vibrant open source ecosystem. Someone's just going to take it, run the software, sell the hosting. Maybe they provide a better level of customer support. They're not going to pay into the project. Now they're free riding on what should be the margin that funds the project as a whole. That in the abstract has happened all the time throughout the open source community. And usually the answer is, well, that's just the price you pay for open source.

45:13Like that's, this is a thing that happens. This is a thing the licenses enable, but the point of open source is eventually the free rider will get far enough away from the thing that they will feel required to pay back into it to do what their customers want, right? This is a self-correcting mechanism. And it sounds like you just didn't see that happening or you felt that was never going to happen. I think there's definitely, by the way, there's probably$10 billion of hosting companies that I don't feel like are a threat or harm to the future of WordPress. And so I think that, you know, you can say I'm crazy or off my rocker or whatever, but I would like to point to a long career with very few things like this happening.

46:00And so know that not everything is public. And if I really felt like it was that much of a threat to the community, yes, I'm going to stand up. But we try to run things in a way that that happens very rarely or not at all. Do you think that a good solution here is for you to cede more control of WordPress.org back to some sort of central body? Because that feels like one of the main criticisms of this entire situation is that you personally have control of what feels like a very centralized dependency for the WordPress ecosystem. Yeah, and I can see why people see that because I'm really the spokesperson for a lot of these things.

46:37Well, again, I know you feel this quote is mischaracterized. I'm just saying I'm looking at a quote from you to us that says, in my role as owning WordPress.org, I don't want to promote a company which is legally threatening me and using WordPress trademark. That's why we cut off access from the servers. To me, I don't – we quoted it. I don't feel like we're mischaracterizing it. But that's you saying I have an enormous amount of power here and I will use it. I feel like I have an enormous responsibility to the tens of thousands of people who contribute to WordPress.org and WordPress on a regular basis.

47:10I feel like I have a responsibility to be the focal point for the arrows and the hate. to, so, you know, developers that are actually writing all the code for WordPress and people who might not feel comfortable being the face of some of these objections don't have to be. And so, I'm happy to do that for them. You're 20 years into it. Open source projects rely on characters like you a lot. Linus Torvalds, I think, is the most famous example of literally, they call it benevolent dictators for life, right? Like at the end of the day, you can have all the hippie ideals you want, and then you need one person to take the arrows, right?

47:53That's what you're describing. One person to make some decisions and hold the value. Again, this is a pattern that repeats in many, many, many open source projects. And sometimes that might be representing a minority. In many of these fights, it might not be the most popular thing to do. You really have to believe it's the right thing to do, though. And history will show whether you're on the right side of it. How long do you think until this dispute is resolved? Is it just going to happen in the courts? Are you going to settle? That's a good question. I wish I could answer that. I really, really want to get back to the most collaborative version of WordPress possible.

48:29And I think, you know, the compliment WP Engine. They have an incredible set of talent. They have a lot of customers that are happy. And I think they have a lot they can give back to and sort of to do to grow WordPress and their use of it. So I, yeah, I'm optimistic. I'm generally pretty optimistic. There have been times I wasn't though. And I will say that, you know, that the legal system and the whole law thing is incredibly challenging. If you're an entrepreneur listening to this, I would say avoid it as much as possible. And, you know, we're lucky to work with incredible, incredible lawyers.

49:03But I think my disposition is much more on the product and engineering side. And so I remember Steve Jobs quotes where he said, like, look at how you're spending your day and how you feel at the end of the day and everything. That's definitely I want to get back to where that's where I'm spending the vast majority of my time. I just want to go through some of the moves here. And then I promise I want to talk about Tumblr to wrap this up. Like mostly I just want to talk about Tumblr with you. But I just want to go through some of the moves here. Right. You cut off their access to.org. You rewrote some plug-ins in a way that I think people felt was way over the line.

49:34You called them a cancer. or you automatic stopped contributing to WordPress core. You ramped it down. You've ramped it back up. Do you think that you were too aggressive? Do you think you went over the line? A lot of those moves, you've walked back. I don't know yet. We'll see. Why'd you walk them back? Like, for example, not contributing to WordPress anymore. You walked that back. Why'd you walk that back? So remember I said you sometimes have to try the opposite? I mean, you know, then 20 years of automatic, there's basically not a day, including weekends, that we haven't done some work on core WordPress or other open source projects.

50:08And again, not just me. When you've devoted so much of your life to giving back to something and it's a very, very small group, but there's some of that that's just attacking you, everything you do, you sometimes need a little break. So think of that almost like automatic sabbatical, just like a person might need a sabbatical. What I was really hearing internally is that people want to regroup. It was also a good opportunity because we're making some of these other big changes to, you know, bring some, for example, core WordPress engineers over to WordPress.com and say like, hey, what can we do?

50:43What could make this a better sort of WordPress experience? So it was also an opportunity to reboot some of our development efforts that I'm glad we did, actually. But we missed it. You missed it. We can't quit it. Like, honestly, like, I think I'm going to have to do open source the rest of my life. I just can't. It was torture for me. And like, there was like, you know, cause we're like, okay, now I guess we need to like, not do any more relief. We don't have enough stuff for a release. And so we're gonna have to push that. That broke my heart. And then I just couldn't stop thinking about like, because we kept developing technology.

51:14And one thing we do is like automatic, like we'll develop it sometimes on the automatic side and then we bring it to the open source. So we had all this stuff developing and there's like real-time co-editing and like really exciting stuff. I'm like, I gotta get this out there. I'm going to tell you right now, the entire Verge team just heard you say real-time co-editing. when are you shipping simultaneous editing? As you know, when Vox Media moved to WordPress, this is the only thing I asked you for. You told me it was coming. When is it coming? I'm excited about it. Is it this year? That's a this year thing.

51:43It's this year. Murphy willing. Yeah. All right. And we're going to hold you to that. By the way, you mentioned automatic sabbatical. I connected your sabbatical to this fight, right? There was a lot of hostility, a lot of back and forth, a lot of just pent up anger, whatever it was. and then you took a sabbatical. No, that was like eight months away or something. Wasn't that close? All right. Let's talk about Tumblr. You bought Tumblr ages ago from Verizon for some reason. I actually just ran into Hans at an event we talked about. I don't mean you bought it for some reason. What I meant is Verizon owned it for some reason.

52:20And the idea that you bought it from Verizon is still very funny to me. Because why do they ever own Tumblr? You migrated the entire backend of Tumblr to WordPress. Press, you and I have talked about things like the Fed. No, no, we have not. We put that project on hold. I swear I read a press release. We announced that we were starting work on it. Is that still not going to happen? Or why did you stop it? What we decided is we want to focus in as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users than the users are asking for. This was more like an infrastructure thing, kind of like any big re-architecture.

52:54I still want to do it. It's just cleaner. But right now, not working on it. One of the reasons that you wanted to do that back then, or at least when we first talked about the very idea of doing this, was you saw some opportunity for ActivityPub. And there's an ActivityPub plugin in WordPress. You bought the plugin from the developer and hired the developer. I've met him. He's lovely. You can see, oh, that would really work for Tumblr. You move Tumblr to this backend. You have this plugin. Now you've got Fediverse Tumblr. Do you still see that as an opportunity? Yeah. So that would have been a for-free way to get it.

53:25And so that was one of the arguments for migrating everything to WordPress. Still going to do it someday. But in the meantime, I think if there was a big push to implement Fediverse, we would just do it on the Tumblr code base. Is Tumblr growing? What are the user numbers there right now? I'd say Tumblr has a passionate, never going to give you up cohort of users. And it still acquires users at the young end. And I'll also say that elements of how it works, I think, are very confusing if you're new to it. And so one thing we're thinking about is how we can make it a bit more accessible. And also, the constant thing you deal with at any social network is how do you keep it friendly?

54:09So, we want to be someplace you can go on the internet and leave refreshed, interact with art and artists or friends. and these networks, you have to do a lot, a lot of work to keep out the spam and the bullies. You've personally waded into some Tumblr content moderation controversies. Oh my goodness. Trans people, it's a very bad time for trans people in America right now. Is that something you still want to be the face of? There's a lot of pressure in that community and that community is very, very focused on Tumblr. Yeah, and so what I learned from that is that I jumped in because it's a community I care about deeply and want to show support for.

54:53But everything I did to try to show that this wasn't like target, then got kind of twisted or turned around or a lot of misinformation. And so the learning is, and by the way, many other people would have told you this, it's just don't comment on content moderation decisions. you know just point all that to the to the terms of service and the team and everything like that more explanation does not make it better so again probably one other lesson from 2024 is particularly an open source like often we talk through it we post through it and we have these vigorous debates and you come out the other side often with a consensus or at least a shared view of reality.

55:32And in the media landscape of today, that doesn't happen sometimes ever. And so it's just better to not try to engage with everything. And as an early internet person, this drives me crazy sometimes, but I think I've learned that lesson. One of the reasons I'm asking about this, again, this is just a bad time for a lot of marginalized communities in America. I think of Tumblr. I think of young people. I think of queer people, I think of people of color. A lot of the culture begins on Tumblr from those communities. It is not clear to me that the big platforms are committed at all to making those communities feel safe any longer.

56:11They might have been. There was a time when performatively, these platforms wanted these communities to feel safe. I think Instagram is deeply aware that Instagram is not the same without gay people and black people on it. Like, they know, they just know, but they are playing a different game with the Trump administration. Tumblr is sort of out of the limelight. Are you going to do anything to try to make those communities feel safer there? Because it feels like an opportunity, right, to take people from the big platforms and put them in a place where creativity and free expression is more valued in that specific way.

56:42I know there's a narrative that these bigger platforms have sort of changed their mind there. I would challenge that. They might be doing things performatively there, but I bet if you went to, you know, the on-the-ground person that does the very, very tough job of looking at the worst stuff on the internet to protect the rest of us, that's someone like a firefighter or police officer. I think we will appreciate that job so much more in the future because they're essentially sacrificing some of their mental health to protect the rest of us. And I would, with very, very few outliers who get weeded out and fired immediately, they are for all the communities you spoke about and driven by a sense of that trying to protect and help safety.

57:29On Tumblr, it's the work we do every day. And I want us to be, again, judged by the results and the actions. It doesn't mean that there will never be a mistake. And in fact, we've actually had to let someone go before because they weren't operating in line with the values that we have as a company or that we, you know, in our terms of service and everything like that. But yeah, that is the exception that proves the rule, I believe. It's hard to see that from the outside, though, because you don't see the hundreds of thousands or millions of things that are moderated every day. You see the one time it messes up.

58:03Yeah, I understand broadly, I think, across the industry. And I certainly understand that content moderators, no matter where they work, have horrible jobs. I'm just saying I look at meta, which is saying very publicly, we're shutting some of this moderation down and we're going to do community notes and Mark Zuckerberg is going to be in the White House. And I think, well, there's a whole community there that feels under attack by just the gestalt of that. Just the way that feels is bad. And Tumblr exists. And Tumblr has always been the place for those communities to go. It is what makes Tumblr Tumblr.

58:36And I'm just wondering if you see it as an opportunity to call back some share from the billionaire-owned big platform companies that feel like they're playing a vastly more political game. Yes, and we do see waves of people come over when these incidents happen in various places. I think what we have to do now is retain those folks because the app needs to be super fast and performing. The ads need to be good. By the way, some of the criticism I made of media things, you can make about some of the advertising we have in the Tumblr app today. It's not all the ads are to the standard that I think we should be held to.

59:15And the app needs to just be more intuitive than I think it currently is. There's certain, I think what happened is that Tumblr invented so much stuff. It was like the pioneer that had images on post, things like this, before any other social network did. that we got kind of attached as a team to some of the different ways we did things. Now, in the meantime, across every social media platform, there's almost like a set of primitives that are universal, like the platonic ideal of certain interaction modes or how things should work. You know, replying, commenting, liking, you know, liking something versus viewing the likes.

59:52Like there's sort of affordances in the interface for so many of these things. And when you drift too far from that, it just creates a lot of mental friction when you use it. So what we have to navigate is maintaining the character of Tumblr and everything that people love about it, while also not frustrating when you go between different apps or different experiences. Everything is turning into a TikTok. Do you think Tumblr needs to turn into a TikTok? No, I don't think so. And there's definitely ways I want to evolve the business model. You know, we've invested a lot in subscriptions and things like that.

1:00:26Self-serve, you know, first-party advertising, which we've kind of gamified. You can advertise someone else's thing. So I think those models at scale could be a non-TikTok incentive, like smaller than TikTok forever. But it could create sort of different incentives in the business model that I feel pretty good about. Is Tumblr sustainable today? It is still not profitable. So we're still supporting it and subsidizing it with our other products at Automatic. How much runway do you want to give it? Everything. Like, obviously, we've invested a ton in Tumblr. I'm a believer in its future. And so that's part of why I want to make it sustainable, because that means it doesn't have to go off the benevolence of myself or anyone else.

1:01:10It can stand on its own. There was a report last year from Virgil's Friends at 404 Media that part of the revenue model would be to sell Tumblr data to MidJourney and OpenAI for training purposes. Is that true? Is that going to be part of the revenue mix? Gosh, where are content licensing things? so Automatic has done content licensing deals in the past. Often it's things that people already had because it was on the web, so it was already part of indexes and other stuff like that. I don't think that's going to be a big part of the very new model going forward. And the whole AI content thing, fair use, everything, is like the question that will work itself out in the legal system over the next five to 10 years.

1:01:50So wait, do you have a licensing deal for OpenAI to train on Tumblr data? I don't think I can comment on like which deals we have or which we don't, but I will speak more generally to just like the AI content licensing thing feels very much up in the air. Do you want to have those deals? I want creators to get paid for their creative work. Absolutely. So if you had that deal, you would pass the revenue through to Tumblr creators? Well, passing revenue through, you have to have a certain threshold of revenue. you have to know your customer you have to get tax information so there's there's thresholds at which i think we need to get to where this can become part of what contributes to creatives i don't see a path for that right now but it's definitely something i know at least some people at the ai companies are thinking about and that's um i'm hopeful for something there but i don't know what it'll be i don't think it's going to be micro payments i don't think it's going to be crypto.

1:02:47We'll see. I want to end by just talking about kind of the future of the web and really just about the open protocols. ActivityPub, App Protocol, and Blue Sky. The last time we spoke, ActivityPub felt like it was going to be the winner, just sort of by default. You know, Threads had adopted it. Everyone was talking about it. There were a lot of services being built on it. You were really high on it. And then Blue Sky showed up and all the people are sort of on that protocol, right? Like Threads is obviously a big player and they've launched a bunch of Fediverse features of ActivityPub, but it's not driving adoption maybe the way that Blue Skies community might drive a bunch of adoption of RAP protocol.

1:03:24There's stuff that bridges them together, but we're having a protocol fight. Like here we are having an open interoperable protocol fight. This is some Matt Mullenweg stuff. How do you think that's going to play out? Oh, that's a good question. I think the failure mode of internet idealist is that protocol-first thinking. So what I would love to do, actually, maybe I should host this, is like a summit where we get together and don't argue about how the servers are talking to each other, but what our current and potential audience, the customers, the users, wants the most. And how are they not being served by the competition.

1:04:06Because that's the other thing we do is we say, ah, we just make this network, the people will come and miss all the network effects and the lock-in effects of these social networks with billions of people in them. So it's tricky. Even email, sort of the most famously open thing that's still running, is effectively closed down for most people. Like if you run your own email server, most of your email is going to go to spam to whoever you send it to on Gmail and stuff like that. So we've had sort of a re-centralization of a decentralized protocol. This is the kind of thing that can happen if you don't have the right incentive structures in place for something that is very, very open.

1:04:47This is kind of like a version of the problem that I'm trying to avoid in the WordPress community and in the open source projects that we support. So I wish I had an easy answer for you. I think the best way that we'll get there is with sort of a relentless focus on the design, the user interface, and iterating as fast as possible and not getting sort of locked in these local maximums of what your existing user base might be. Sometimes you have to do something incredibly unpopular with the existing user base to get to that next level, to unlock the order of magnitude growth that's the billions of people who don't use it yet.

1:05:23Another mistake we make in open source is like, we talk about the community wants this or the users want this. But we have to account for the voices of the 7.9 billion people that don't use WordPress yet. And that's tricky. I was really high on interoperable social networking, interoperable sites using a 2.5 RAP protocol. It doesn't matter to me, actually. At the end of the day, I just want to see more interoperability of these networks. Do you still think that's going to happen? Yeah, if I had a bet on mine. Actually, you know what I would bet on? I would bet on Matrix. The dark horse in the corner.

1:05:57A third one out of nowhere. Just briefly explain what that is and why. Matrix is taking more of a messaging-first approach. So think of it kind of like an open source Slack, but that can also... It's what Beeper actually used as a backend in its sort of cloud version. There's also cool extensions to it that can do things like peer-to-peer. That feels like a disruptive technology that if I had to just put a bet for five bucks on it, a long-term call option or something, I would maybe put it on that one. All right, Matt, this has been great. You're going to have to come back again sooner than three years.

1:06:32I feel like I have a million more questions for you, but this is so great. Thank you for all the time. Well, maybe we'll celebrate the co-editing. The day you launch it, I'll give you a full day, a 24-hour live stream decoder the day you launch co-editing. Awesome. Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking. Thank you so much for what you do and also advocating for the open web, the open protocols. Really appreciate it. We run the last website on Earth, Matt. You know how it goes.

1:06:59I'd like to thank Matt Molenwijk for taking the time to join Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderatheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. You can check them out. They're at decoderpod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe where we get podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:07:22Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.