Why Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg went to war over WordPress

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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic. The parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, and a whole host of other products like the new cross-platform messaging service Beeper. This is Matt's third time on Decoder. Back in 2022, we had him on twice. First to talk about Automattic and WordPress broadly, and then to talk about Tumblr and the future of social networking. He's back now because Automattic just turned 20, and I really wanted to talk about what the next 20 years of running one of the most dominant platforms on the web might look like as changes to search and AI threaten to change everything in their wake. And various lawsuits threaten to change the nature of WordPress itself. And make no mistake, WordPress is one of the most dominant platforms on the web, if not the most dominant. Something like 43% of websites run on WordPress in one of its many flavors. That includes The Verge. The backend of our website is WordPress hosted by WordPress VIP. This might be the first reverse disclosure on the show. Technically, I'm Matt's customer. And like any good customer, I made specific feature requests. A big reason for WordPress's dominance is that it's open source. And like so many open source projects, WordPress has a very complex structure. There's the nonprofit WordPress Foundation that owns the WordPress trademark. There's WordPress.org, from which the open source project is managed by Matt himself. And then there's Automattic, the for-profit company that offers its own site hosting and enterprise services on top of the core WordPress technology, and which contributes an enormous amount of code back to the open source WordPress project. That structure is complicated, but understanding it is really important because there's been a lot of drama in the world of WordPress recently. Last year, Matt essentially went to war publicly and in the courts against a hosting company that competes with Automattic called WP Engine. Matt said WP Engine wasn't operating in the spirit of open source because he felt it was contributing way too little back to the open source WordPress codebase. So Matt threatened the company with legal action and revoked its access to core WordPress technologies. A lot of people felt that this was incredibly out of bounds for Matt and a violation of his position as a central steward of the WordPress project. And there's been significant fallout at Automattic and in the broader WordPress community. It's been a long, drawn-out saga. WP Engine responded with a lawsuit, and Automattic was forced to reverse some of its retaliatory efforts against the company. But the legal battle is far from resolved. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of his thinking here, why he made some of the decisions he did, and also what he regrets about how some of this went down. Matt and I also talked about the future of the web and and how he's thinking about the changes we're seeing to search and website sustainability as the generative AI boom continues to upend how people use the internet. Matt is notably a lot more optimistic about this than many of the website owners we hear from regularly here at The Verge, and he's not convinced AI is going to wreck the web. We also talked about Beeper, the cross-platform messaging service Automattic acquired last year. Beeper got into some hot water with Apple last year when it tried and ultimately failed to bring iMessage to Android, but Matt is really excited about Beeper's core technology, and he's acquired a couple other startups and effectively combined them altogether to try and supercharge Beeper's growth in the coming months and years. There's a lot in this conversation, and Matt is as candid and sincere as ever. I think you're gonna like it. Okay, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, here we go. Matt Mullenweg, you're the co-founder and CEO of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress and many other things. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you so much. Uh, man, the world has changed. So much has been going on since I was last on. It's great to catch up.

Yeah, I feel like we had you on twice in one year and that was 3 years ago. And then we, I've been there, many things have happened and I've been dying to talk to you about updates to the stuff we talked about the last time you were on. And then a bunch of new things, including some very dramatic new things that have occurred. Since last—

some cool acquisitions and launches coming up. So, uh, yeah, a lot to cover.

Let's start there. Uh, people are obviously familiar with WordPress. I imagine people are familiar with Tumblr, which is another thing that you were technically the CEO of, I believe. But since then you've acquired things, you've acquired things like Beeper, some other stuff. What do you think of as Automattic today? What's the thesis of the company?

I know you love talking about org charts and organizational structures. So it's interesting because the WordPress side of the business we call ecosystem. It's like gardening and there's, you know, vast number of players and that's really kind of what we're best known for. I mean, been doing WordPress now for 22 years, started when I was 19 and that's wordpress.com. It's VIP, which we're very proud to have Vox as a customer.

Oh wait, I need to disclose this. This is our first ever reverse disclosure, I think, on The Verge or Decoder. Usually I disclose when there's a business relationship, but in this case, we are your client. The Verge runs on WordPress.

Yep.

So the conflict is in the other way.

You got to keep me as a customer. Well, I'll do my best on this. And, um, no, that's actually the thrill of it too, is, um, seeing publications you follow and things like that use the software. It's very rewarding. Now the other side of, of Automatic we call Cosmos, and that's the apps. And, uh, that's been a very exciting place to work in the past few years. Now you mentioned Beeper, which is actually doing its big public launch in July in New York. So Hope to get you there. You know, we, we did two acquisitions, Text and Beeper. We combined them. Very excited. I was actually just with that team a little bit earlier today. And the other one just last week was Clay. So if you aren't familiar, Clay is this personal CRM that one of the top requests we heard from Beeper users is like, okay, got all my messaging apps. I should probably say what Beeper is. You have probably more than one messaging platform you use regularly, right?

Yeah.

So cool thing about Beeper is it can bring them all in one. So WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, all of that. The other cool thing it does is it can allow you to use multiple accounts of those. So you can have multiple Signal accounts, multiple WhatsApp accounts, all on one device. And you can have it on your desktop, mobile, everything. And it does it all securely. That's, that's the new stuff is we figured out how to make this all run locally to your device. And so it's just as secure as using one of these native apps. But what we heard is like, people are like, well, Now I got too much stuff going on. Like, who's important? What do I do? And so that's where the CRM comes in. CRM's like a customer relationship management, usually stuff like Salesforce, but this is a personal one that's like pretty slick.

When you say personal CRM, you know, it's interesting that the through line for a lot of what you are doing is that small businesses, businesses of all kind use WordPress. They're on the web. A lot of what the web is used for lately is a small business storefront or a business storefront or some commercial enterprise. Things like a CRM. A text messaging platform, all of that stuff. It connects very deeply to just e-commerce in general. But you're talking about personal CRM. What's the split for you between WordPress as an enterprise e-commerce company and WordPress, the purveyor of consumer products?

You know, I say we were very lucky to be part of the generation that was— they called the consumerization of IT, you know, led by folks like Slack that came in and said, hey, we're just going to make a great user experience and it's going to be quirky, it's going to be fun, it's not going to be boring, it's going to be colorful. And we're gonna build the business features so it scales and it does that sort of stuff. But we're gonna start from that great user experience. There's some enterprise software historically that didn't start there. You know, if you're on like an old SAP install or something like that, no one's waking up being like, yeah, I gotta get in there.

Slack notably now owned by Salesforce, which is fascinating, right? Like that's the two sides of that equation coming together.

Well, and I think these companies, including Salesforce, have been doing a lot to like reinvest in their interfaces and everything. So with Clay, and the URL is clay.earth. Unfortunately, there's another big company called Clay that does more like enterprise stuff. But so if you go to clay.earth, it'll be the personal one. Well, so what makes it personal versus enterprise? We start from things that are on your computer, like your address book. We hook in social networks, uh, so you can put in all your social networks. We'll kind of dedupe it. You know, we emphasize things like birthdays. It brings your calendar and iMessage and WhatsApp right now. That's kind of what Clay was doing before. And what we're gonna be building now is like, it'll just plug into Beeper and then whatever you have plugged into Beeper, however many networks, whatever you're doing there, it'll bring all those messages in and it can start to, for example, do fun stuff like sort of organize your contacts by how close your relationship is, which it can do clever things like not just look at how often you contact them, but is it who's sending more messages which way, or is it weekdays or weekends? There's a lot of, you can kind of infer by, uh, once you have communication and, uh, Yeah, very excited to see where that goes.

I would understand if you were saying this was an enterprise product, I would completely understand why you've invested in Beeper and Texts, why you've invested in something like Clay, right? You're, you're starting a website, you're going to do some e-commerce, you need an outbound messaging platform, you need a customer relationship management tool, you want to know who your best customers are. This is all just value adds to the commerce platform. What's the revenue model for these as consumer products? Are you in charge for them?

Yeah. So we'll definitely cross-promote this stuff, but like what you just said, like who are your best customers, that sort of reporting, that's just all built into WooCommerce and WordPress. So you don't need to go between apps. The revenue models we're imagining, so Clay already has a Clay for Teams. So your entire team can share contacts, share updates, so you can use it in a team-like fashion and they've got a pricing model there and they're making revenue. So it was nice to acquire a company that already had a revenue model. With Beeper, we're still figuring out, but what I suspect is there'll be two things. Like it'll be free up to a certain number of accounts. And if you want to, if you're a superpower user, you want to connect more, there could be a monthly charge. The other thing is there might be certain connections that are always paid. So let's say you want to connect to Bloomberg Terminal chat. You're, we're probably gonna charge you for that. So you're, you're more of a business user. Also, a lot of the messaging platforms, uh, support business features now. WhatsApp for Business is even iMessage for Business. I don't know if you've ever seen this.

Yeah.

But famously iMessage, which previously previously was like, no APIs, anything, we're gonna crush Beeper in a previous iteration, now has a whole integration system for it. So as we support more and more of these bridges to different networks, I think there's a lot of opportunities there.

Is the Beeper architecture still, we're running an instance of your messaging apps in the cloud on your behalf and relaying them to you, or are you, are you more integrated now?

There's still two cloud bridges, but part of what we're relaunching is we've re-architected the whole thing with a text technology. So it all goes local now.

So iMessage is coming locally to your phone through Beeper.

iMessage is the one that we do not support on mobile. It is supported on desktop, just like texted through this sort of way that Apple said or indicated they were okay with. Um, but yeah, we're not going to fight that fight again. Way, way, way, way away from it. No, not touching that with a 100-foot pole.

And so is the, is the goal here that these should be revenue-generating consumer products or is it they're good additions to the enterprise stack that also might have consumer elements?

I'm thinking of 100% by creating something consumer first, actually, that then has sort of paths if you're a power user to do more team-like collaborative or business-like things on it. But first and foremost is, you know, I want to get this to 100 million users. I feel it's actually sort of the first product from Automattic that has the potential to actually be really, really large because its usage is kind of a superset of every messaging network. The power users are most frequent users on each of those.

You know, right now it's relatively small. No one feels that threatened. If you get to 100 million users and the primary interface to WhatsApp and Signal and iMessage is actually Beeper, they will feel threatened, right? There's nothing keeping them from saying, you've taken our customer away. We're shutting you down. Have you had those conversations yet?

Well, I think the difference is we're not trying to take the customer away. We're trying to give them an interface where they can use the network even more, connect with more people. Use the business features. If they have any way to monetize, we're just going to link to it. We're not trying to— we're not trying to avoid that. So we want to support each of these networks, which by the way are investing huge amounts to run everything. So we're trying to be complementary.

Because they want to— they want to be the app on your phone through which you do many, many other things.

The model that we see people use Beeper as is they don't get rid of the native app, they keep it, um, because there's always going to be something there that's like a, uh, a functionality or something that you're going to want the app for. And Beeper is for more like, like managing lots of messages, getting the local LLMs, giving you intelligence across networks. Like the things that, yeah, it is a power user feature, but I think there's a lot of power users. A strange thing is happening where Beeper is now, France is the number one country. And there's just been, it started to go viral in certain ways. And, uh, some of that is people wanna be able to check their messages without necessarily getting too distracted. So they call it like friends without feeds, but they still go back to the feeds. Don't worry, they're doing just fine. It just sometimes like if you're in a meeting or something, like you I just want to take a quick look, that sort of distraction-free mode is really nice.

That's really interesting. One of the reasons I'm pushing on this is as we're speaking, I think you're days away from Automattic turning 20 as a company and Automattic, WordPress, these other apps, they're all part of the fabric of the web, right? Broadly speaking, you know, it's 43% of the web runs on WordPress. Some of these fights that Beeper has had in the past is like, how do we build open architectures out of services that are fundamentally closed? And use, use web technologies to pass that stuff to people. And what kind of fights will we have there? There's the open source fight in WordPress that I want to talk about in depth, but it feels like here at Twenty, the web is changing in meaningful ways and the web as an enterprise platform might be headed towards ever higher heights. And as a consumer media platform might be headed towards ever lower lows. And I'm wondering, as you think about these investments in these tools, and the, you know, the apps versus the ecosystem, whether you feel that tension playing out.

No. So I'm actually going to ask you to expand a little on what you see as these lower lows, because it feels like, you know, as we get more compute at the edge, as the devices become more powerful, broadband becomes ever more ubiquitous. You can't escape it anywhere now with Starlink.

Yeah.

Yeah. That there's a bit of a sort of swinging back towards these apps and sort of user-centric things that Yeah, even the regulatory environment is, uh, is very friendly.

Yeah. And that's what I would pull apart as an application platform. The web is, I think, at its peak and maybe with higher highs to come, right? Web apps are the most interesting they've ever been. Uh, every powerful AI application is mostly expressed as a web app, especially on desktop. Uh, Google is literally demonstrating like V03 is a web app. Sundar Pichai is like, I'm drawing people to desktop web to use these applications on, in Chrome on the web. Figma exists, right? It's like one of the most powerful design tools and it's a web app. As an application platform, the highest it's ever been. Some of the regulatory changes, the Fortnite lawsuit. As a transaction platform, the web is hitting, going to hit higher highs because we're going to see more transactions pushed to the web. Something else I want to talk to you about. I'm saying as a media platform, as a document viewer, right? My, the question I've been asking sort of every web CEO is why would I start a website today? Like I would start a TikTok channel. I would start a YouTube channel. That's how you go reach consumers with media. The web as a media platform seems to be at its most perilous moment. And that, that's really the split I'm talking about. Applications, transactions, the web very clearly at a peak and with potentially higher highs to come. Media platform, you know, media companies are going out of business on the web basically every day.

There's a lot in there, right? Because you kind of hit like the creator thing. We hit social networks. I'll start with your, your question. Why, you know, if I'm popular on TikTok, why would I start a website? Well, one, so you're not a one-hit wonder. And I think we've seen even some of the biggest creators on a certain platform often have trouble getting as popular on another one. So you need to develop a direct relationship with your audience because as long as your audience is fully mediated by this thing, you don't control YouTube, TikTok, Reels, whatever it is, you'll have a run, but these things change, right? Generationally sometimes.

Yeah.

People move from one to the other. The business models change, what they emphasize change. You know, if you were a creator that was just all in on Facebook 10 years ago, because who— nothing's ever gonna replace Facebook. You might be facing some of the same things that these media companies are facing that haven't adapted and really embraced their users. I think that the media thing is also kind of complex because we had a real degradation of the user experience and sort of the speed of sites, the way advertising would work and slow down your, your browser and everything. Present company excluded, but some other media sites, like you'd load it and you're almost like it's having trouble. It's hard to read the article because it keeps moving around, right? As the ads load. And so it was, um, I felt like that was a death spiral for some of these sites that might have over-monetized.

And then at the, I'm going to go all the way now to like, wait, can I actually just, can I just like push on over-monetized for one second?

Yeah.

Over-monetized, you can read that in several ways. I'm, I think what you mean is they put too much shit on the page. And then the user experience was degraded and nobody ever wants to go to a local news site again. The other way to read it is they had no distribution except for Google or maybe Twitter, and every page view was so scarce that they needed to eke out every single penny they possibly could because that visitor was never coming back. And that's the distribution that's going away. And that's why I'm saying that as a media platform, the web is at a low because all of the audience is on somebody else's distribution. Which are by and large closed platforms.

I think there's also an aspect that you're competing to be the best in the world. And so as audiences become more discerning, as, you know, there's sort of this global competition to raise the discourse and have the best analysis or whatever. I mean, in some ways we see like single person newsletters killing it in some places, right? And as well as media organizations that read that, but many others have struggled. That's why I was going to say local, because it's a great example of where we had like thousands of local newspapers historically in the US. It's sort of geographic monopoly type of thing. Many of them have gone. I'm gonna go back to the ecosystem side of, of Automattic. One of our, our most exciting sort of mini companies inside is called Newspack. We have, uh, this, uh, fantastic leader, Kinsey Wilson, who used to be chief digital at New York Times, who's sort of taking everything he learned there and is bringing that to these small newspapers with this product called Newspack, which is, think of like a distribution for WordPress. So it's WordPress plus hosting, plus a bundle of plugins that sort of enable the things that these small town papers need— classifieds, all that sort of stuff. And the fun thing about it is they're learning from all of them and sort of sharing the business best practices. So sort of porous paywalls, or, or, you know, I mentioned classifieds already, but like people really love local news. It's just the, it couldn't support some of the old business models. Now the sad thing is some publications that switched to Newspack actually save hundreds of thousands of dollars. So there were some of these legacy software companies that were just charging way too much. And it has a whole print component and everything like that. So you can still print it out and distribute it at the local coffee shop and everything. But I'm far more excited about actually growing their revenue through, you know, new things that are allowed, paid newsletters, you know, sports scores, like all this sort of things that you can, uh, when you go ultra local, you can support, you know, 3, 5, 10 journalists to cover a small area, which I think is important for democracy.

We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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We're back with Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg. Before the break, Matt and I were discussing the application side of Automatic's business and his ambitions for the products he's acquired, like Beeper. We also started to dive in the state of the open web and why it feels like the web as a media platform is in decline, even though it's at an all-time high as an application platform. But now I wanted to talk about the really big disruptive force in the web right now, AI, and specifically the ways that Google, as the dominant search engine on the internet, is deploying AI in ways that could affect the hundreds of millions of websites powered by WordPress. How are you thinking about the distribution of that? If I was to compare you to, I don't know, Ghost or Beehive or Substack, You know, fundamentally what Substack is selling to a large number of its top newsletter authors is growing their audience, right? If you're, you're Heather Cox Richardson, you're the most popular Substacker out there. It is crazy that she is paying 10% of her revenue to send emails, right? Like mathematically, she could get a better deal to send emails than what Substack is offering her based on that cut. But, you know, I think what Substack would say, what I've heard them say to others is We will generate you new subscribers. Our network will provide distribution that will get you new customers. This is a cheaper way to get new customers than if you move to some other standard email service and you have to do your own marketing, your own customer acquisition. That's the distribution puzzle that they're solving that, you know, appears to be worth it for some people. As Google goes away and other places stop linking, how are you thinking about solving that problem for like the NewsPack customer? Are you going to move people around an ecosystem? Are you going to build other distribution?

You said it like it was a set thing that Google's going away and no one's going to link to websites anymore. I think what we're seeing aggregate across everything is there is a lot more traffic being driven by the OpenAIs and the Perplexities of the world. Uh, this also feels in early days of that. I don't know, maybe if LLMs never hallucinate again, people will stop visiting links. But for now, um, I actually find myself sometimes clicking on 3 or 4 things, even from like 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, it does a summary, it links to 3 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 services are sending more traffic and some are sending less. And they only just started saying what traffic comes from AI mode in 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, but 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 Calacanis 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.

I 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. And 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 you to, 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. Yes, 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— I 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 out?

Not in the past year, no. We saw some like 4 years ago.

Interesting. And so you think it's the same amount of traffic, which is expressed differently across your network?

That's my— 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 I— we get website owners in our inbox saying, they took all our traffic away.

And you—

I believe you hear that across the board. Like Business Insider just had layoffs because their Google traffic went away. And 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? Right. There's only one referral source left of huge value, and it's Google. Maybe these new LLM companies and 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, right? There's search and search-like things and chatbot-like search, but there isn't, you know, there used to be a Twitter, which would drive a lot of traffic to some websites. Facebook 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 that's that thing that if you scroll to the left on a, 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 lockbox.

Um, I actually dream of a day when Twitter doesn't deemphasize links again. So who knows? There's a lot more sort of niche social networks. So for example, if you're an engineer, uh, like Hacker News was always big for Y Combinator, but 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, you know, 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 Automattic and WordPress. You describe the org chart as ecosystem and cosmos. Cosmos is the app. Ecosystem is 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, 2021 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? Anything about the org chart change? Or is it still the two main groups?

Well, internally we actually did just did a big switch where we have traditionally been sort of like independent product silos, um, 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. Uh, new colleague named Bichong who was at Apple for 15 years at the App Store, Airbnb. So he's helped us really reimagine sort of how we think about product, which I'd say historically we've really— because my proclivity is very much on the engineering side, so that's been really nice and really exciting. Uh, 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. Was this really the decision? We just, we've been doing it this way for a while. We're just going to swing the pendulum the other way and see what happens.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, that wasn't just it. It's not like, oh, let's just swing the other way. It was, uh, it was really like, hey, what are, what are some of our issues here? Ah, 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 6 months thing that a lot of companies are doing? We kind of examined all of that and then looked at how that fit with our, what we're hearing from the customers, what sort of our, what's happening with the business and the environment, what we're really excited about. And, uh, yeah, this is what we ended up with where all the, like, 2 months into it. So there's a lot of changes the first kind of 3, 4 months of the year, and it's kind of been baking the last 2 months. And to be honest, I, 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 the business wants. So I want, uh, happier colleagues. I want better business results. I want, you know, better retention and acquisition. I want Beeper to 100 million users. Like we, we have all our ambitions ultimately, you know, I want to, solve open source for publishing, commerce, like, this is my life goal. And all, everything in the 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, you know, 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 6 months to do like a, a sprint. So essentially like co-locate. Do the opposite of the remote to see what would happen.

I'm actually, I love the idea of coworking weeks, maybe not coworking 6 months, but coworking weeks. You know, 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 like, do like be in the office together, like the show The Office, not the office, The Office, like goof around and and like tell jokes and like just watch each other doing the actual job, not the job of like making decisions at an offsite. Let me know how that goes. I'm very curious. We haven't done yet, but I've been thinking about 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, there's some trust issues with WordPress. In the larger WordPress community that you might have to work through? Do you think any of that, 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 Automattic has always been our meetups. And the secret ingredient for WordPress was these WordCamps and also meetups, you know, with meetup.com or the traditional meetup.com thing. And, uh, when that sort of went to zero and the pandemic, like, 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 this side of the world is that I was at WordCamp Europe. You know, it's a couple thousand folks. It's, uh, we had a lot of new folks coming. There's, uh, 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.

The last time you were on the show, you told me, I asked you about your decision-making frameworks, which I 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, uh, 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, something many other companies have done for a long time. But you know, the thing that actually made me know we really needed a change is, you know, last year I took a sabbatical for 3 months, which is a benefit Automatic offers. Every 5 years you get 3 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, uh, 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, uh, with all of our different products, like shadowing people, talking to customers, and, uh, 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 you're— 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, it's not a good look 5 years from now or 10 years from now. So, um, that was part of why, you know, started recruiting some of these 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, um, like our enterprise business is, uh, incredibly strong with media. And media is, uh, 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. So 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 is the product as well suited? So that's something we have to think about.

We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

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We're back with Automattic 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 Automattic 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 Automattic 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 freeriding on open source. You 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. But, well, you're a lawyer, right?

Yeah. My job is to get you to talk. I saw I was a horrible lawyer.

And, um, 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, you know, where both sides are spending millions of dollars a month on lawyers. And I think that there's a— 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, you cut off some of their access, you changed some code in different ways to you further cut off their access. A lot of people saw you making unilateral decisions in a, 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 that people held you to account inside of Automattic 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, a very generous 6 months and a 9-month buyout offer. Uh, we call it an alignment offer. So at that point we were at our very peak, uh, around 2,100 people. It actually, we'd already started coming down, but, um, yeah, it was clear that there were some folks who just didn't, weren't aligned with where the business was going. Or, you know, 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 Automattic 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, Automattic, very idealistic projects, particularly ecosystem side, the open source side of WordPress. And 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 I fully characterize it. So first and foremost, I will say that it is true that my bias is towards optimism and radical openness, right? 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. And 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, um, it could threaten the future of us existing at all. So that is— I believe this was one of those decisions, uh, 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. And 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—

Wait, can you, 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. Um, 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 that? Even the most rampant capitalist knows that there's— you can oversqueeze that limit. And you don't have to look far at other open source projects. That's where the commercial interest sucked the life out of the project. And that could be talent. Could even be as simple as— now I'll give one example of, you know, something people have criticized us for and we get a lot of pushback on. 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. And 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, uh, every person for themselves. So imagine you and I were both plugin developers and I created a better, you know, 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. Let'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 dimed with every single feature, the core software kind of atrophied because all of the sort of like best development went into these extensions and hollowed out a bit. It'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. This 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—

this is a point of—

so many times I regret ever saying that. It's the worst thing ever.

So is that—

you're saying that you were asking about like specific ownership, like, okay, what entity? I think you even said like, what entity is it that owns this? Um, 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 Automattic own WordPress.org?

Why doesn't Automattic own WordPress.org? Um, because I wanted to keep it separate, especially in the early days of Automattic. It was controlled by investors. And so I wanted this balance of power. WordPress predates Automattic, by the way, that there was sort of a, 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, 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 literally tens of thousands of people and hundreds that work on it daily. And 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, but I do regret that a lot. I will say that.

I appreciate that you regret it. I just, I'm going to push back on the fact that we're mischaracterizing you saying the following. In my role owning—

I didn't say you mischaracterized it.

Sure.

I said a lot of other people now like sort of take it out of context and be like, ah, we can't have, you know, this thing rely on someone's personal website.

And, but that is, that is an outgrowth of this quote in this fight, right? Is I've seen others say there's a supply chain weakness. If you are a WordPress dependency where Matt Mullenweg owns .org, which is the plugin repository and the update repository. And if he gets mad at you, he can cut you off, which is what happened to WP Engine, right?

And 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 had a moral dispute actually that in 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?

Uh, I 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 rider 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. Like 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, 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's, 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. And 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.

Well, again, I, 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 the WordPress trademark. That's why we cut off access from the servers. To me, I don't, I just, we quoted it. That's, 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, you know, tens of thousands of people who contribute to wordpress.org and WordPress on a regular basis, feel like I have a responsibility and, uh, 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, 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? That's, that's what you're describing. One person to make some decisions and hold the value. You, again, this is a pattern that repeats in many, many, many open source projects. Are you going to—

sometimes that might be representing a minority, you know, 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, 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? You're 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. And I think, you know, to 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 can, 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, um, I will say that. You know, 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. But I think my disposition is much more on the product and engineering side. And so I remember a Steve Jobs quote where he said, like, look at how you're spending your day and like 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, some of the moves here, right? You cut off their access to .org, you rewrote some plugins in a way that I think people felt was way over the line. You called them a cancer. You— Automattic 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, 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 Automattic, there's basically not a day including weekends that we haven't done some work on core WordPress or our other open source projects. And 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's 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? What, what could make this a better sort of WordPress experience? So it was also an opportunity to, to reboot some of our development efforts that, um, 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 gonna have to do open source the rest of my life. I just can't. It was, it was torture for me. And like, there was like, you know, cuz we're like, okay, now I guess we need to like not do any more release. 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. And 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 out, I gotta get this out.

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. And you told me it was coming. When is it coming?

I'm excited about it. And, um, yeah, is it this year? That's a this year thing. It's this Murphy willing. Yeah.

All right, and we're gonna hold you to that. Um, 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. Was it— no, that was like push you and like 8 months away or something.

Yeah. Wasn't that good.

All right. Let's talk about Tumblr. You bought Tumblr ages ago from Verizon for some reason.

Uh, I actually just ran into Hans at a, at a, at an event. We talked about it.

I don't mean you bought it for some reason. What I meant is Verizon owned it for some reason. And the idea that you bought it from Verizon is still very funny to me because why, why did they ever own Tumblr? You migrated the entire backend of Tumblr to WordPress. You and I have talked about things like the Fed.

No, no. Uh, 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 and that users are asking for. This was more like an infrastructure thing, kind of like any big, uh, rearchitecture. I still want to do it. Uh, 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, I've met him. He's lovely. You can see it. 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. And so that was one of the arguments for migrating everything to WordPress. Still gonna do it someday, but in the meantime, I think if we— if there was a big push to implement Fediverse, we would just do it on the Tumblr codebase.

Is there— is Tumblr growing? What are the user numbers there right now?

I would say Tumblr has like a passionate, never gonna give you up cohort of users, and it still acquires users at the young end. I'll also say that elements of the 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, you know, the constant thing you deal with at any social network is how do you keep it friendly. So, uh, we want to be someplace you can go on the internet and leave refreshed, interact with art and artists, your friends. And the, uh, 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, particularly 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, or are you— there's a lot of pressure on 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. But everything I did to try to show that this wasn't like targeting, then got kind of twisted or turned around or misinformation. And so the learning is— and by the way, many other people would have told you this— is 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 in 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. And, uh, in the media landscape of today, that doesn't happen, uh, sometimes ever. And so it's just better to not try to engage with everything. And as an early internet person, this, this drives me crazy sometimes, but I, 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 They might have— 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 gonna do anything to try to make those communities feel safer there? 'Cause 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 more valued in that specific way.

I know there's a narrative that these bigger platforms are— 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, um, with very, very few outliers who get weeded out and fired immediately, they are, you know, for all the communities you spoke about and driven by a sense of that, trying to protect and, you know, help safety. On Tumblr, uh, 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.

Yeah, I, I, 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, we're, we're shutting some of this moderation down and we're gonna do community notes and Mark Zuckerberg is gonna 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. And I'm just wondering if you see it as an opportunity to claw back some share from the, you know, the billionaire-owned, like, 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, is retain those folks because, uh, the app needs to be super fast and performant. 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— not some— not all the ads are to the standard that I think we should be held to. And the app needs to, uh, 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, you know, had images on posts, 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 like this. Sort of affordances in the interface for so many of these things. And when you drift too far from that, it, um, 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 you 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. Self-serve, you know, first-party advertising, which we've kind of gamified. You can like advertise someone else's thing. So I think those models at scale could be a non-TikTok incentive. Like, it'll be smaller than TikTok forever, but it, it could create sort of different incentives in the business model that I 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 Automattic.

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, or anyone else.

It can stand on its There was a report last year from, uh, we're just 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, is that going to be part of the revenue mix?

Gosh, we're a content licensing things. Um, so Automattic has done content licensing deals in the past. Often it's things that people already had because, you know, 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 revenue. Model going forward. And the whole AI content thing, fair use, everything, is, um, feels like the question that will work itself out in the legal system over the next 5 to 10 years.

So 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, 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, uh, 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, I'm hopeful for something there, but I don't know what it'll be. I don't think it's going to be micropayments. I don't think it's going to be crypto. We'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 Bluesky. 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 Bluesky 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 with ActivityPub, but it's not driving adoption maybe the way that Bluesky's community might drive a bunch of adoption of RAT protocol. There'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?

Ah, that's a good question. I think the failure mode of internet idealists is that protocol-first thinking. So what I would love, sort of what I'd 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, like, audience, the customers, the users, wants the most, and how are they not being served by the competition. Because that's the other thing we do is we say, ah, we just make this network, the people will come, um, and miss all the network effects and the lock-in effects of these social networks with billions of people on them. So it's, it's tricky. Even email, sort of the most famously open thing that's still running, is effectively closed down for like 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, we've had sort of a recentralization 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. This is kind of like a version of the problem that I'm trying to avoid in the WordPress community and, and the open source projects that we support. So I, I wish I had an easy answer for you. I think the best way that we'll get there is with sort of 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 your existing user base to get to that next level, to unlock, you know, the, the order of magnitude growth that's the billions of people who don't use it yet. Another mistake we make in open source is like, you know, we talk about, you know, the community wants this or, you know, the users want this. And 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 ActivityPub or any 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 gonna happen?

Yeah, if I had to bet on one, actually, you know what I would bet on is I'd bet on Matrix. The, the dark horse in the corner.

A third one outta nowhere. What, what tell, just briefly explain what that is and why.

Matrix is taking more of a messaging-first approach. So think of it kinda like an open source Slack, but that can also, it was 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 pure peer-to-peer. That feels like a disruptive technology that if I had to just like, you know, put $5 on a bet for $5 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 gonna have to come back again sooner than 3 years. I 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 livestream to Coder the day you launch co-editing.

Awesome. Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking and 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, man. You know how it goes. I'd like to thank Matt Mullenweg 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 decoder@verge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Bluesky. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram, you can check them out, they're @decoderpod, they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our 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.