This isn’t unexpected; I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker as well. I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.
Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...
(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)
> To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
He seems to be justifying the deactivation by claiming it will 'help them', somehow?
Huh, the injunction against "blocking, disabling, or interfering with WPEngine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ (hereinafter “WPEngine and Related Entities”) access to wordpress.org;" [0] is still in effect right? There's nothing on the docket saying otherwise...
These contributors are "partners" under the common meaning of the word right? After all the tweet [1] that Matt links to from his own blog post [2] says
> We are committed to working with Joost, Karim, and other respected voices in the community to ensure WordPress’s future is stronger than ever.
This is - without question - the best thing that could happen for their fork. It’s generating 100x the amount of attention they would’ve gotten otherwise.
I’ve known about Joost for many years and have a ton of respect for his work. Best of luck making this happen!
Mullenweg needs to be more careful doing this. The moment Mullenweg realises exactly what Mullenweg’s doing to WordPress, Mullenweg will deactivate Mullenweg’s account.
In case anyone is looking for some background on this, I wrote this post before seeing the news today. Stuff's not been great in the WordPress community leading up to this point, and Mullenweg deciding to deactivate the accounts of folks who might start new forks certainly isn't helping matters.
I know assholes like this exist everywhere, but it's the constant need to re-affirm that he's the "nice guy" while brazenly punching you in the face that unsettles me somehow. At least I know what I'm getting with certain politicians or tech moguls when they speak heh.
Joost clarified on Twitter he never asked for a fork. He was asking for reform of the current structures. Which is plain to see from his original post. Matt was the only to one to claim there was a fork forthcoming. He literally made it up.
In case there was any question about the utter pettiness of Mr Mullenweg, here's something he JUST posted in response to Joost's clarification.
I feel like Matt is one step away from hosting a telethon showing his "evidence".
He's clearly a fan of the idea that the vast majority of the public does not care about anything other than what the loudest voice in the room is saying. Say it loud, say it often. Even if what is being said is contrary to evidence, most people are not going to look at it any further.
Oh man. This isn't just "some contributors". Joost is basically one of the founding fathers of the Wordpress ecosystem. Him getting deactivated is like Stalin assassinating Trotsky.
2. Others in the community say they'll pick up the torch in leading the next releases within the current WordPress project
3. Matt says "nuh-uh, I'm busy self-sabotaging my own project here in an attempt to prove how none of you can live without me, stop interfering and go become irrelevant in a fork somewhere instead" https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
Many here complain about Mullenweg's boundary-crossing, counterproductive, acting out. Yet many are following Mullenweg's lead - the comments here seem like the worst HN behavior I've seen.
Seriously, perhaps people can empathize with how Mullenweg came to behave this way. When people around you are doing it, it affects you; it subconsciously sets new norms, resets the boundaries in your mind. It impacts your emotions - you are drawn into their emotional state. And then you start acting like them.
Many, many people I know and in the public eye professed extreme dislike for Trump's behavior, but my impression is that over the years, many of the same people act more and more like him.
The trick is that when someone violates your values, you don't want to do the human thing and follow them - we're social creatures, we instinctively follow the crowd. You want to consciously be a leader, consciously remember your values and reset them, and lead the herd to a better place. That's why calm under fire, grace under pressure, dignity and composure are so important.
I've been following the whole story and from what it looks Matt thinks that WordPress is his own property.
When something goes open source even the creator needs to be wise enough to understand that it's not his property anymore. I've seen this in many "hybrid" startups that plan to solve the marketing/distribution/ecosystem problem with "partial open source". But the history shows where these frequently end up.
You can't have full ownership of something that you've released to the world, but it takes balls to admit it to yourself.
It’s like Mullenweg has been taking lessons from the Trump school of media relations.
“Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better… he was not effective at leading the marketing team or doing the work himself… Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people… In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on…”
It’s as if he’s saying “these little people are barely worthy of my attention and have achieved nothing, compare them to me I’m powerful, I’m important, you should respect my power and importance…”
total piece of work this dude, I abandon any and ALL things that even mention wordpress and will never touch again. Who knows what this guy will do next.
> This post was updated to clarify that de Valk and Marucchi haven’t specifically said they have planned a fork, and that they were hoping to create mirrors for the plugins and themes repositories, while also offering to lead on the next release of WordPress.
The plan was to scrape the site and set up an alternative, not to fork Wordpress. The headline was deliberately written to deceive.
-----
edit: that being said, a distributed model would be best for all situations like this. I still can't get over the fact that Rust has a github dependency. And I'm sure they're not the only one.
- Woman broaches the topic of changing the nature of her relationship with a man.
- Man attacks woman for it.
- Man cuts woman off from everything and slanders woman to all her colleagues.
- Man says his abuse of woman is for her own good, and he's actually helping her.
- Man has a track record of doing this to people who question him or who he otherwise doesn't like.
Is this the archetypical spousal abuser? Someone showing all 3 of the dark triad (narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy)? Yes on both counts, and also business as usual for matt, CEO of a multimillion dollar company and head of the wordpress foundation. I guess money can't buy being a decent human.
Seriously though, this kind of person who thinks their personal ends justify any means, is dangerous. I would not want to associate with or be physically near such an unstable, abusive person.
Why hasn't the whole community moved to a Matt-free fork and host?
Someone should just take the leadership in this and get everyone together. Come on, nobody wants to keep dealing with Matt, it's a useless fight, sooner or later the fork has to come anyway.
I'm not into WordPress, but if I was one of the main contributers I would not wait any longer.
I haven’t followed this whole controversy closely but I don’t see a problem with this personally. It’s aggressive but this person spent most of their life building Wordpress to what it is, giving it dedicated focus for a couple decades. Why should WPEngine or others get to suck up the money from that?
Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork
(techcrunch.com)463 points by impish9208 11 January 2025 | 221 comments
Comments
Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...
(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)
The current top comment and discussion on this Reddit thread provide good context:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hylx50/matt_tro...
> To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
He seems to be justifying the deactivation by claiming it will 'help them', somehow?
These contributors are "partners" under the common meaning of the word right? After all the tweet [1] that Matt links to from his own blog post [2] says
> We are committed to working with Joost, Karim, and other respected voices in the community to ensure WordPress’s future is stronger than ever.
That sounds like a partnership to me.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
[1] https://x.com/wpengine/status/1870242287218790849
[2] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
I’ve known about Joost for many years and have a ton of respect for his work. Best of luck making this happen!
https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble
In case there was any question about the utter pettiness of Mr Mullenweg, here's something he JUST posted in response to Joost's clarification.
https://x.com/photomatt/status/1878227222927933815
Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138
WordPress: Joost/Karim Fork
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42662801
He's clearly a fan of the idea that the vast majority of the public does not care about anything other than what the loudest voice in the room is saying. Say it loud, say it often. Even if what is being said is contrary to evidence, most people are not going to look at it any further.
Forking is essential.
1. Matt announces that he's going to effectively stop contributing to WordPress for now https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...
2. Others in the community say they'll pick up the torch in leading the next releases within the current WordPress project
3. Matt says "nuh-uh, I'm busy self-sabotaging my own project here in an attempt to prove how none of you can live without me, stop interfering and go become irrelevant in a fork somewhere instead" https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
Seriously, perhaps people can empathize with how Mullenweg came to behave this way. When people around you are doing it, it affects you; it subconsciously sets new norms, resets the boundaries in your mind. It impacts your emotions - you are drawn into their emotional state. And then you start acting like them.
Many, many people I know and in the public eye professed extreme dislike for Trump's behavior, but my impression is that over the years, many of the same people act more and more like him.
The trick is that when someone violates your values, you don't want to do the human thing and follow them - we're social creatures, we instinctively follow the crowd. You want to consciously be a leader, consciously remember your values and reset them, and lead the herd to a better place. That's why calm under fire, grace under pressure, dignity and composure are so important.
You can't have full ownership of something that you've released to the world, but it takes balls to admit it to yourself.
The problem is how does someone who owns a plugin on .org validate their ownership on the new repository?
It’s like Mullenweg has been taking lessons from the Trump school of media relations.
“Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better… he was not effective at leading the marketing team or doing the work himself… Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people… In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on…”
It’s as if he’s saying “these little people are barely worthy of my attention and have achieved nothing, compare them to me I’m powerful, I’m important, you should respect my power and importance…”
The plan was to scrape the site and set up an alternative, not to fork Wordpress. The headline was deliberately written to deceive.
-----
edit: that being said, a distributed model would be best for all situations like this. I still can't get over the fact that Rust has a github dependency. And I'm sure they're not the only one.
https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326
This is getting to comical proportions.
This insanity is entirely unrecoverable on current trajectory
- Woman broaches the topic of changing the nature of her relationship with a man.
- Man attacks woman for it.
- Man cuts woman off from everything and slanders woman to all her colleagues.
- Man says his abuse of woman is for her own good, and he's actually helping her.
- Man has a track record of doing this to people who question him or who he otherwise doesn't like.
Is this the archetypical spousal abuser? Someone showing all 3 of the dark triad (narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy)? Yes on both counts, and also business as usual for matt, CEO of a multimillion dollar company and head of the wordpress foundation. I guess money can't buy being a decent human.
Seriously though, this kind of person who thinks their personal ends justify any means, is dangerous. I would not want to associate with or be physically near such an unstable, abusive person.
Someone should just take the leadership in this and get everyone together. Come on, nobody wants to keep dealing with Matt, it's a useless fight, sooner or later the fork has to come anyway.
I'm not into WordPress, but if I was one of the main contributers I would not wait any longer.
(Sorry I’ll see myself out)
Is that all it takes these days?