With the increase in scrutiny around how Matt Mullenweg manages the WordPress project, some people have asked whether it’s a risk to invest in .blog, which is owned by Automattic, and in fact whether Micro.blog is online only at the whims of the mad king. I’m not worried. It’s a fair question, though, and the answer is worth exploring in detail.
First of all, I believe Automattic runs .blog for the good of the web and to make money. The more people who blog, the more people who might choose WordPress.com for hosting. The web gets a little better anytime someone uses a .blog domain, because they probably just created a new website, and Automattic pockets a little cash. Everyone wins.
Unlike .com and .org, the pricing for .blog domains is variable. Shorter, common words cost more than you’d expect. We pay $2000 for the micro.blog domain, every year. We are a tiny company so it hurts a little each time the domain name renews. But I think the domain is worth it. Getting the domain in 2016 helped shape what Micro.blog would become.
I mention this because I don’t see Automattic stabbing its customers in the back and shutting down domains, cutting off a revenue source. What would be the point? A single subscription might not be very much to a multi-million dollar company like Automattic, but Automattic is built on thousands of subscriptions. You cut $2000 here or there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Next, I am conscious of centralized power and single points of failure. Micro.blog would not exist if I hadn’t become frustrated with Twitter locking down their developer API, years before Elon Musk took over. It’s why I want to work on an open platform where the business model is aligned with the interests of users and developers.
When we have a choice between two things… we try to do both anyway. Micro.blog supports ActivityPub and AT Protocol. It supports cross-posting to Mastodon and LinkedIn, Flickr, Bluesky, and Nostr. Take one away — such as when Elon put the final nail in the Twitter API’s coffin — and we still have something. Apple controls whether we can ship an iOS app, but not whether we can ship to the web, Mac, or Android. It is important to me that no single company can break my business and wreck my users' blogs.
Which brings us back to .blog. We recently launched a new special version of the platform called Micro.one. It is, obviously, using a different top-level domain, not owned by Automattic. If the worst were to happen, we would flip everyone to .one and carry on. Over time, I see us using .one more, as a new brand that can unify a suite of apps on the platform.
The point is the same as it is for so many other things, from features that depend on external services, to having redundancy in servers. It’s a risk to depend on a single company.
I still think .blog is a great top-level domain. I think Automattic is in this for the long haul. Even Matt’s worst critics are not going to convince me that he wants fewer people to have their own website, or that he is going to pivot Automattic away from blog hosting. And yet, it’s always good to have a backup.
