Anatomy of a fall
I used to love WordPress unconditionally. Then Gutenberg replaced Calypso and the user experience became quite poor. Then WordPress.com rejigged their subscription plans, got it wrong, and fortunately switched back. Finally, Matt Mullenweg's actions and words of late have really tested my sentiments. I'm not a software expert, just technologically curious and technically inclined. Since 2008, WordPress has hosted my blog; I've also brought many of my friends who wanted to blog online through WordPress; built or moved their startups' websites here; and launched The Wire on a self-hosted setup in 2015. All platforms have their problems but WordPress has of late had more than most, thanks to Mullenweg.
After he banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org via their API, I high-tailed my site to Ghost.org, a good alternative for being not bloated and more blogging-friendly but on the flip side more expensive and less customisable. Sometime later I wondered if I should return but then Mullenweg published an acerbic post on his blog (that he later took down) directed at David Heinemeier Hansson. The incident left me quite unsure about how Mullenweg would react to a post criticising him in a blog hosted by his own company.
Ownership is at the heart of the ongoing dispute. Mullenweg has made a big deal of it. Since his campaign against WP Engine became public, it has become clear he believes WordPress.org is his personal fiefdom, where he is immune to the rules that apply to his colleagues, and that there is little in the form of reason in his decision to target WP Engine alone. His attempts to spin the dispute as one of trademark violation, presumably to take the focus away from his own mercurial actions and ad hoc imposition of sanctions, further deepen the place of ownership, the rules that do or don't apply to owners, and their accountability.
On October 20, Mullenweg finally offered to stop commenting on the dispute in public while citing his own freedom of speech. I can't say if this post inspired confidence in others to believe Mullenweg wouldn't censor them by invoking trademark or some other similar instrument of convenience. (It didn't in Bullenweg.) I just really wanted it to because WordPress is so valuable.
This whole fracas may have reinforced in a more technically capable person the importance of owning the infrastructure that hosts one's digital assets. I'm not one of them; instead, I and frankly most of the world depend on solutions that are less fundamental, more pre-configured, and more accessible to keep and use our assets. WordPress.org and WordPress.com are two such solutions. Important places on the internet are hosted with/on either of them. W.org and W.com were once quite different (even with the confusion surrounding their domain names) but now, after Mullenweg's unilateral attack against the most successful competitor to W.com, they're evidently similarly vulnerable to the threat of his discretion.
Acquiring the technical chops to take full ownership and control of my sites, etc. would be a waste of my time, and rendering my presence on the internet contingent on the existence of an ideologically congruent and fully ethical CEO at the helm of a hosting company would be futile. I admit Mullenweg's actions of late constitute a difference in kind rather than degree: no other hosting company CEO has behaved in a way that endangered the properties of their own customers and the wider community of people vested in their product. But leaving WordPress.com because Mullenweg crossed this particular line is to make my choice about where to host a site a matter of where I draw the line and where, when it moves, I'm going to draw it next. That's exhausting.
It seems better to me to (completely rather than partially) decouple where I host my blog from how the hosting company's owner behaves simply because I can't afford it. My other alternatives at this time are Ghost, Drupal, minimalist alternatives like Bear or Mataroa (self-hosting WordPress may be too but I don't want to leave for a host that, if it becomes successful, could become Mullenweg's next target, at least not until the court's verdict in the dispute restricts such behaviour). And each one of them has deal-breaking problems. I suppose I'm just too well-settled at WordPress. But it's no longer unconditional love for WordPress either, and it won't be the first platform on my mind when a friend asks me for suggestions for where they could start blogging or where a news site should be hosted.
In one of his posts Mullenweg had asked customers to vote with their wallet and quit using WP Engine. Voting with your wallet is expensive, requires a specific kind of web-hosting literacy, and, importantly, time and mental bandwidth. Yes, it's important to make rational and informed choices about the things that are important to us, but we also need to pick our battles. The wisest courses of action (for someone in my position) here seems to be how we expect Mullenweg v. WP Engine is going to in court as well: to place one's trust in only the laws and terms governing the provision of these services and the reasonably full and free expression of one's own beliefs, ideas, and expectations. Everything else is going to be the price to be paid to keep a blog online, uncensored, and written.
