Dave Winer:

People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years.

Fascinating to imagine what the web would look like if WordPress didn’t exist. What would fill the void, and would it be as open?

Chris Enns

Yes but... I'm really tired of the trope of the lone (usually male) saviour story about tech. And especially when said saviour turns out to be an ass about it. 😆

Sam Clemente

Same could be said for Tesla and the EV industry

Obviously, Mullenweg is not even remotely close to a comparable level of problematic as Musk, but there was a good decade where Tesla was the only widely known name in the space

A

Wait does bsky support renaming URLs now? Like actual hyperlink support?

Manton Reece

@iChris I generally think the recent criticism of Matt has been more negative than is justified, but I agree with you about the lone savior. It's not actually a good thing that a single platform has 60% share of the web. Much better to be split across smaller players.

Yury Molodtsov

@manton There were (and are) a ton of CMS out there. Hard to fight WordPress when it exists, but something would be in its place regardless. Drupal, Joomla, another PHP Nuke fork.

Manton Reece

@samclemente.me It is wild to think back not that long ago when Elon was the hero. Sad, really.

Phillip Upton

@manton

Moveable Type?

Manton Reece

@alexcartaz.bsky.social Not from the Bluesky app, but it does from the API. I post to my blog and Micro.blog translates inline links to Bluesky posts for me.

Thomas Brand

@manton iWeb’ 08 FTW

This image is a promotional screen capture for iWeb '08, a web page design application.

Manton Reece

@Eggfreckles iWeb is actually a product that should still exist! A shame about that "WWW your life" tagline, though. 🤪

Thomas Brand

@manton I was also a big fan of RapidWeaver until they nuked their developer community.

Jay

@philsplace @manton Not free as in beer

Dave Winer

I was mainly writing that for Matt, but I'm glad you picked up on it Manton. You make a huge mostly unappreciated contribution to the open web. Matt does too, and even he doesn't see it that way. I think his product is going to become central to the rebirth of the open web for the simple reason that much of the open web is also the product. How did we miss that? As Yogi used to say "You can observe a lot by just watching."

Mark Stoneman

There's a logical flaw in that counterfactual argument in that it is a counterfactual argument. @ichris Hard agree about the lone savior crap.

Ngati Pakeha Kuia
@manton

@billbennett I had a Wordpress blog many years ago.

Bill Bennett
@manton

@CarolynStirling It was great for a long, long time. Then suddenly it veered off in a different direction and became an ordeal.

Brian Grinter

@manton drupal? Joomla? Neither reached the level of Wordpress

isaiah

@Eggfreckles @manton i’m right here!!!

Adam Tinworth

@philsplace There was a short-lived fork of Movable Type called Open Melody that I had high hopes for. Ah, well.

I'm amused, as a Movable Type user back in the day, that static site generators are all the rage again… It was one of the big criticisms of MT in the late 2000s.

Adam Tinworth

@philsplace There was a short-lived fork of Movable Type called Open Melody that I had high hopes for. Ah, well.

I'm amused, as a Movable Type user back in the day, that static site generators are all the rage again… It was one of the big criticisms of MT in the late 2000s.

Phillip Upton

@adders

I loved MT and have dabbled with the idea of getting it running in a docker container and using it again.

FWIW, before MT came along I was using Greymatter… which was also using Perl and created static sites.

I really think that static site generators are the best of both worlds… easy generation and top performance.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greymatt

Adam Tinworth

@philsplace Oh, I remember looking at Greymatter before settling on MT. My journey was Livejournal -> Blogger -> MT -> WordPress -> Ghost

Adam Tinworth

@philsplace Oh, I remember looking at Greymatter before settling on MT. My journey was Livejournal -> Blogger -> MT -> WordPress -> Ghost

Manton Reece @manton
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