“You don’t own a community; you influence, co-create and curate it.”

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2024-10-02 15:30:14

✌️ Hello again, it is I, your friendly newsletter purveyor, here with yet another high-calorie info snack* Issue #176: goat herding, job hunting, and zooming out By Harris Sockel

The internet is a story of people using things in ways their inventors didn’t intend. Take the early internet, which was a private network of government agencies, meant to help researchers share classified info. Soon, people were chatting and turning punctuation into faces. Texting was originally invented to help people get updates from their phone carriers… but we’ve since come up with more delightful uses for it.

Anyway. Take WordPress, which hosts — by their own estimate — 40% of websites. The service is so ubiquitous it feels like air (especially if it’s hosted your website for decades). But, last month, its CEO took aim at one of its largest users.

Here’s what’s happening as succinctly as I can manage. There are actually two “WordPresses”: (1) WordPress.org, a nonprofit open-source community software project that anyone can contribute to and use to build their own hosting service, and (2) WordPress.com, a hosting service built on that open-source project. WP Engine is a third-party hosting service also built on WordPress.org. It’s grown into a $400 million/year business, rivaling WordPress.com in scale.