As Matt Mullenweg continues to destroy WordPress in his pointless fight against WP Engine, it only pushes people more to proprietary solutions, making the web less open.
With normal users seeing this drama, and people companies are looking for other solutions, often proprietary solutions like SquareSpace, Wix, Shopify, etc and not things like Hugo, Jekyll, and the likes, which takes more effort and technical knowledge to set up. Ghost is not easy to set up since it doesn’t use PHP, and most shared hosts don’t support node, you need to use a VPS for that, which requires technical knowledge. Also, Markdown is not really a replacement for WYSIWYG.
Users just want something easy to use and just create content. WordPress is like that, especially with plugins like Elementor (Gutenberg is never that great, only good at some, but not post creation). The other solutions are just too hard, requires a terminal, or needing a desktop computer to run the software (like with Rapidweaver or Sparkle, which are website builder apps on Mac).
This shift to proprietary solutions is bad as they are giving ownership of the user’s data to these companies, which can enshittify their services, keeping your website or your hard work hold hostage.
While most people are not paying attention to WordPress drama, you should since WordPress controls like 40% of the internet. Matt’s actions are affecting that 40%, which can negatively effect it or change it for the worse, unless he gets kicked out of leadership or everyone in the community switches to a hard fork.
Or maybe, we should just go back to creating websites in DreamWeaver or something.
@chikorita157@sakurajima.moe I don't think the situation is so grim, though its not great. A lot of the big customers who are going to be scared away from Wordpress were not rolling their own solutions anyways. For the most part, they were contracting out that work to dev shops, or just buying it from other providers like WPEngine.
Those who buy will be able to buy from providers like Ghost, because they're not doing the deployment in that case. They may go to Wix et. al, but I doubt it. these platforms tend to not be quite flexible enough for their needs. It'll be interesting to see what happens but I don't think its cut-and-dry.
Those who contract ... will do whatever their contractor suggests, which will probably be some other Opensource CMS (of which there are now many). The contractors will not want to support SquareSpace, Wix, Shopify because it undercuts their business. We'll see what they move to instead.
Where I think it'll suck is for small businesses, ma/pa shops, and niche nontech communities. Wix et al. is really aimed for that crowd, and nothing is quite out-of-the-box like wordpress is. If wordpress does fork, maybe that'll be a force, but we'll see. That crowd also tends to ignore drama, like you said.
@NullNowhere I think this is all about money as the accounts and even Kellie’s (a former employees at Automattic) believes that Matt is acting this way as he is pressured to make more money for Automattic.
I think Automattic probably has money issues since they lost a lot of money on Tumblr and that his services isn’t bringing in money. I really do think that Automattic will go backrupt, especially if they lose the case with WP Engine, which they will most certainty well.
I think if it keeps happening, I think the whole community, except his sycophants will just fork and continue from there..
In one way or another, WordPress will probably survive if Automattic goes under or the community decides that they have enough of his behavior. I think there might be a few core developers that are willing to take on a community effort without Matt.