David and Olivia Bisset sat down for a chat with Matt Mullenweg about open source, Tumblr, and how Matt deals with negativity. Matt has three roles today: CEO of Tumblr, CEO of Automattic, and project lead for the next release of WordPress. He shares what went wrong with post formats and what he would love to acquire next if he could. The answer may (or may not) surprise you! Recorded shortly before WordCamp Europe 2022.

🔗 Mentioned in the show:

• WordPress Openverse
• Matt Mullenweg (Twitter)
• Olivia Bisset (Twitter)
• David Bisset (Twitter)
• Post Status (Twitter)

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Transcript

David Bisset: Talk, uh, in the context and the celebration of the 19th anniversary. Woo hoo. Yeah. Like you’re already planning for your 20th when you hit your 19th. It’s a strange year. It’s almost, I mean, most of this, most of this was primarily interested in two interviews that you did recently and, um, they were excellent.

One of them was Nilay Patel from the verge. Did an excellent podcast interview one. Best I’ve seen you do. Um, I only followed him recently, but he dug into a bit about Tumblr and, um, and open source and he asked some real good questions about that. The other was a written interview from protocol by, um, David, um, David Pierce.

and that’s also something I wanted to touch on as well. I think was a little bit of a clickbaity. He admitted was a little clickbaity was kind can Matt Mullenweg, saved the internet. But once I got past the title, there was some really good things here that I honestly think. There was some really very interesting things in an article that I don’t think a lot of people have considered.

If they take a step back a little bit from more of the WordPress focus. And we’ll answer some, ask a few questions about that. But first about the WordPress itself, what’s one thing in the last nine years, 19 years that you considered a good idea or a good correction for WordPress that never got past that draft stage.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, this is very much on my mind since I’m marching on Tumblr right now, but, uh,

David Bisset: we’ll get on that in a second because I’m very interested in Tumblr for some reason.

Matt Mullenweg: Post formats. And it’s the thing I want most in my own blog. So as I think about like, it’s time to re redesign ma.tt, I’ve been tumbling a lot, and it’s so fun to just be able to share a link, basically have like post without titles and WordPress has always been, we’ve never really been able to nail that post without title experience.

David Bisset: Is that long form tweeting then? I don’t know.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. It’s sharing links. It’s sharing. This is actually how my blog used to work. So even prior to Tumblr existing, um, I sort of hacked my template and categories to do this. And, um, it’s very much inspired I say by like Dave Weiner style of blogging and it’s just so of Browns.

Like if every post has to be an essay, let’s be honest. Like very few of us. Write every single day, like long form, you know, that the ones who do I, I love following their blogs, but like for the rest of us, uh, mere molds, um, it’s nice to be able to share some shorter form. And part of that as well is, you know, just bringing back the bookmarklet, you know, making the easy one click from whatever webpage you’re on to.

Blog from there. So those are two things kind of on my mind, a little bit, uh, a little random, a little bit more blogging centric, but you know, back to the roots of WordPress as well

David Bisset: is post formats was in WordPress, but it didn’t go all that well. Or am I thinking of something else?

Matt Mullenweg: Um, I think

David Bisset: there was a video, there was a text, there was a quote, and then it got into core and then.

I don’t remember what happened to it. I just think it just wasn’t utilized well enough by themes or something.

Matt Mullenweg: I think where we failed there was actually not customizing the posting interface enough. So it would kinda you’d it was just the same old post form. And you could choose a post format and look very different on the front end.

But I think what you need is more of that. Like how you compose it needs to look more. Like what it will look on the front end, which we didn’t have the capabilities for at that time. Yeah. Pre Guttenberg Pre theme styles, pre lots of things.

David Bisset: So, so it wasn’t an apple toolbar, apple on toolbar on the MacBook type of thing.

It was, it just needed a little more, uh, experience Polish on that, which

Matt Mullenweg: it was a radio list at the sidebar. yeah. The block selector is essentially a bunch of post formats, but in the shape of blocks. And so I think there’s a way to build themes or build a theme that. Cognizant of the, the, basically what if there’s only one type of block there , um, hide the title or maybe we just make hiding the title, like an explicit thing.

David Bisset: There’s some blocks that operate similar to that on the WP 19 site. Cuz that that site was actually the first site. That was no code for me, honestly. Which is, I know it sounds, it sounds like a big deal, but you know, I’m a developer. So like everything I do, I have to customize, but with that is a one page site, but that is posting videos.

And I made, and I, I, Olivia and I helped build it. And then I’ve turned it over to her necessarily, and she can process everything. And obviously without blocks, I would be a little bit more pain in the butt, even if you did have the right plug-ins and themes, but block formats too, I’ve seen some blocks kind.

Some of the blocks that we use on that side, kind of. um, you turn, you turn something from a, from a video to a video with post or something, and then it just basically nulls out the title. But speaking of blogs though, um, we’re, we’re so deep in the woods. Do you ever have a standard WordPress experience, like in the everyday average WordPress experience where you would, you would have, you would log into an update, a standard WordPress site?

Is that something you still do? Do you still, as the king go out still to the common people and experience them for a day, you know, how. Forgot what story that is that king disguises himself goes among, goes among his service. I’m about to be, get a lot of emails for calling you a king in that regard, but the analogy is more of the experience.

So let’s focus on that and then maybe I won’t get canceled tomorrow.

Matt Mullenweg: So yeah, I think it’s one of the things which I get the most. Sort of invigoration from, uh, examples of this. Uh, sometimes I go to work camps and I’ll sit down at a lunch table and people don’t know who I am. And so we just talk about WordPress I love that.

David Bisset:

That must be so comforting because you’re not you’re, you’re not a, um, You, I was about to name a celebrity and I can’t name a celebrity who doesn’t have a felony already. Um, you know, , but you’re, you’re not one of those that like you, you know, you’re just at the right level where people will notice you and they come up and talk, but it must be so refreshing to, to be able to have an uninterrupted experience like that.

I mean,

Matt Mullenweg: also it was, is nice. This is more when I go to often my talk at a work camp would be at the end. So until then there’d be, I think it’s a Testament to how work camps would bring in people from outside the kind of core community. Um, and so I love that also. I’m always changing my hairstyle, so I, I look very different.

David Bisset: You look clean. I mean, I wasn’t gonna say that and confuse my daughter, but yeah, you look nice. I’m actually, I’m getting a, um, I’m getting a text right now that says Taylor swift was the correct. Taylor swift good celebrity, no current felony record there. So good for you.

Matt Mullenweg: Put some beef with Kim and Kanye.

So although I do love that Taylor is, is a daily active user of Tumblr. So I always appreciate that. And I, I love our music too. So, uh, The second thing is I just try to run sites. Like I run my own C panel server. I, you know, help friends. And the, the double version of that is just doing tech support. So whether that’s for friends or, you know, going in wordpress.com, live chat or.

Browsing forms or just going on Twitter, reading things on the different Twitter handle, like people tweeting at WordPress and like sometimes responding to random ones or . So, wow. I just try to have as many channels as possible that, um, where I’m getting flow of information, because. more information, the better, right.

And luckily I’m very fast at reading so that I just wanna process as much as possible and then synthesize that it’ll be like inputs into. Maybe informing a conversation that Mattias and I have, or Joseph and I have about like what might be next in core WordPress. Um, and that’s why I’m so excited to get back to word camp, particularly word camp Europe next week, because I love the kind of in person version of that.

You know, we we’ve always been mindfully distributed, both my company, automatic and WordPress itself. And the secret ingredient was these meetups and the word camps and everything. So I was so excited to, to get back to them.

David Bisset: Yeah. Um, you read so much and a lot of it. Obviously you don’t respond to ’em good for you.

You shouldn’t, um, I don’t know if I could do what you do, because if I was, if I was in your position, I would, there’s a lot of negativity and criticism out there and you take it so well. And I envy that, um,

Matt Mullenweg: part of it it’s because there’s so much positivity, right? It’s a glass half full or half empty. Now our natural disposition is humans.

They do studies around this, like let’s say, when they do behavioral economic studies around. Losing money versus gaining money. We feel a dollar lost seven times more than a dollar gained. Hmm. And there’s versions of this in, in you hear that, Olivia, my psychology, you know, they talk about in relationships, like if you’re in a personal professional, romantic, whatever relationship, um, you might think that you.

Uh, say something critical to your partner, very rarely, but they’re gonna feel that seven to 10 times more. So they say you need to like compliment your partner seven to 10 times more than you say something critical. And so these are . Is that a little bit, see that?

David Bisset: See, yeah. Yeah. I now we’re grit now bringing you in, but now you’re gonna repeat this.

Matt Mullenweg: No, by the way, I, I know about this stuff, cuz I’m also not great about it and particularly in my role. At automatic where, you know, it’s a 2000 person organization now I’m, I’m reading lots of P twos movement between a lot of things. I’m typically seeing things that aren’t going well. Like that’s where I zoom in on.

Um, but I’m also cognizant that that means I’m primarily giving critical feedback. And so I’m really always thinking about, and working on I’m reminding myself, like there’s so much going, right. It’s nice. Just to send a little note or a little slack DM and be like, Hey, that was an awesome launch. Or, Hey, this feature’s really cool.

Or. And so that is something I’m working on myself. That’s why I’m able to comment on it.

David Bisset: I credit your accessibility, um, for someone in your position and your schedule, you’re more accessible than most people that I know, um, in that position. And I really and every time I, and I know, and I I’m comfortable with you enough to know that if I drop something in your slack, you know, it’s, you know, I wouldn’t be, it would be important.

And then I know if you don’t respond even ever, then I know you’ll probably have read. and at, at some point in your life, and even if you hadn’t, it probably wasn’t that important to begin with. That’s why

Matt Mullenweg: I would say if I don’t respond at all, please send it again because I do like to respond to, to everything.

Maybe not on email, but at least on like other things like slack and stuff. Yeah. Uh, but so if I don’t respond, it might have been like, I read it, but then like, Forgot to follow up or missed it. So feel free to send things multiple times, particularly anyone in the WordPress community.

David Bisset: Oh, but you’re so busy.

I mean, you’re also, like I said, the C are you still the CEO of Tumblr?

Matt Mullenweg: I am. Yeah. So third day job is, uh, okay. Is, uh, running Tumblr day to day right now.

David Bisset: Oh, CEO of Tumblr. Your, are you lead of the next WordPress release?

Matt Mullenweg: They have a lead role within WordPress, but if we’re super honest, The group of people, developing WordPress things is, is so robust.

I would say that the lead role there is very minimal for me at this point. It was big around 5.0, by the time we’re at 6.0, like it’s, uh, it’s really driven entirely by the community.

David Bisset: So what is your res um, so your responsibilities of Tumblr, that’s your main focus right now?

Matt Mullenweg: well, I’m also CEO of automatic.

David Bisset: So that, that was the third finger I was holding up. I didn’t get to. Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: So was this finger that, that’s the, um, that’s the big one? I would say that, uh, yeah, I mean, that’s a 2000 person company, so there’s a lot going on every day. It’s a big business. There’s, you know, the market has been very interesting in terms of like the broader macroeconomic background mm-hmm of which we all operate in both in the us and abroad.

Uh, so there’s just a lot going on there and it’s, um, It’s a huge honor and responsibility to have 2000 colleagues and all other families and everything that we’re all part of the same team working towards the same, our paychecks all come from the same place. So, um, I take that very seriously.

David Bisset: What’s your percentage between automatic and Tumblr right now?

Matt Mullenweg: I would say a majority focused on Tumblr right now, actually, but that’s just because the rest of automatic is in such a good place. that? I don’t need to, uh, I was able to put that on autopilot a bit since, uh, February, when I took over Tumblr.

David Bisset: And as it transitions to WordPress, um, what do you see the next year of, of Tumblr?

Like, are you going to see that transition in the next year or?

Matt Mullenweg: Uh, I would love that. Yeah. I mean, Tumblr’s half a billion blogs. How cool would that be? To switch half a billion websites over to WordPress and to be able to share all the code and the plugins and like, you know, I meet so many. One of my favorite things about the WordPress world is like, there’s probably some listeners that people come up to me at campus to say, I learned to code from WordPress.

Uh, that’s been happening a lot with Tumblr as well, too, where people were modifying their Tumblr themes. Weird thing about Tumblr is that until very recently they allowed like full JavaScript and HTML and all their themes totally insecure, but like was never.

David Bisset: Turn that off. So surprised it stayed up, honestly.

Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: Uh, so a lot of people will learn to code by like customizing their Tumblr and, uh, and I love that, right. Like, because honestly, when I think back to my own journey, like it was, I didn’t start off coding I started off like playing video games and like doing music on the computer. And then that led to like modifying the games or looking up how to, you know, Hack them or things like that.

And so there was very much an entry path to what eventually became like a lot of serious engineering. But if I had started like looking at like database structures, I probably would’ve run the other way. Cuz those aren’t fun in the beginning.

David Bisset: Yeah. Olivia’s going through that right now. Actually she’s getting into more of the, how these things work and the magic is it’s nice to see the magic behind the curtain.

Isn’t it. Olivia, can I ask a question to. Yes, go ahead. Not guaranteeing any quality of response, but go ahead.

Olivia Bisset: This is really, but like you, I started off with Minecraft and being able to, you know, do all those things near my sisters and my cousins would play Minecraft and like later on during summer camp.

So you’d be like, oh, like we wanna turn this off. How do we do it? How do we like customize Minecrafts that. haven’t yet made a mod. I’ve learned a Java to do that, but we’ve been able to like, try to hack into Minecraft going through the Java code. They probably didn’t like that, but still , it’s started off with Minecraft, which is eventually leading up to like learning Java and files and all that stuff.

Matt Mullenweg: Well, you answered the question. Cause I was gonna ask like in 20, 22, what’s the path from like thing that’s really fun to like learning a bit more code. So thank you for answering that and

Olivia Bisset: Roblox too. Just to go with that.

Matt Mullenweg: There .

David Bisset: Yeah. Roblox. Yes. Thankfully I haven’t, they haven’t entered the TikTok stage yet, so we still have a little time to save them.

Um, that protocol article I was telling you about, like I said, really opened my eyes. We have this saying. Have you ever heard of the, the Marvel cinematic universe? Yeah. And so I think that’s MCU MCU in, in the met mall, like open source, uh, open, wait a minute. Open web. So yeah, that is oo it’s. Oo, we got it.

Matt’s open web universe, you are collecting products or you an automatic or through automatic. However you use, you wanna put it, um, in that article and we’ll post a link for anybody who’s reading this. Um, you know, David in the protocol outlined it pretty well, and it didn’t Dawn on me. We’ve seen acquisitions through automatic.

You seem to be collecting and correct me if I’m wrong, but, um, you seem to be collecting almost one of every type of application or product or service. Um, And bringing that under the umbrella of either now or later of open source, because you said even Tumblr, you said in a tweet and that’s the first time I saw it was going to be open source, open source.

Yeah. Hundred percent. So my question to you is what’s something that you are automatic haven’t acquired yet that you would like to add to your RI don’t. Ooh, a type of product, not necessarily a company, but a type of product. Maybe if that’s easier.

Matt Mullenweg: I mean the big thing would be a browser. Hmm.

David Bisset: I didn’t see that one coming.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, what were you think I was gonna say? Oh,

David Bisset: I don’t know. Uh, I, I, I, I, the recent Mozilla question came up and I guess that was stuck in my head about, about, you know, the old, well, Mozilla does have a browser. Firefox. Firefox is my primary browser, but why would you say browser?

Matt Mullenweg: It is the gateway of the open web when you think of it.

I think it’s the most interesting computing platform created by humanity. So. You have like massively performance, um, sandboxed secure way to, you know, open any, any page could be an application documents, uh, everything. And it’s it’s, I think we’re most of the innovation of technology has happened over the past 10 or 15 years.

So, um, now the good news is there are organizations like Mozilla and Chrome to an extent and brave that create like, I think really nice user centric. Uh, browser experiences. So I don’t know if we actually need to do anything there. Uh, so I happen, been focused a little bit more on, you know, what’s the open source social network.

I think it can be Tumblr, um, podcasting with podcast mm-hmm is a big one that I’ve been thinking a lot. I’m working on the fully encrypted journaling space, which is day one, uh, for us. So I think that honestly, we’re pretty busy right now. So, uh, there’s a lot on our plate and. To me, we could easily spend the next decade working on all of our existing products.

So I wouldn’t say that we’re particularly like driven to move into new area. , but what I really wanna do is make all the things that we currently have really well integrated. So how could we make every, you know, Tumba gets like 70, 85,000 signups per day. How can we make every one of those be a WordPress user that has a path then like add plugins and themes or domain or something like that.

It’s basically like a different on-ramp onto the WordPress universe, which is, I think what I’d prefer for the, the name of this, the. The wa woo,

David Bisset: woo. Woo. I didn’t say it was good. I said it was a work in progress.

Matt Mullenweg: well, I just wanna make sure to recognize that I’m such a small part of all these things we’re talking about.

Yes. Like in your head, maybe a spokesman at times, but, um, the reason all these things are successful is. That the wide variety at, at sometimes, you know, with like 6.0 close to a thousand people who are part of that release. And, uh, and that’s where the magic WordPress is. So I’m think of me. I don’t even wanna say spokesman.

Think of me like the main cheerleader I will use my, to whatever extent I have, like some prominence and some success and everything to cheerlead for these things. Align us all philosophically like creating web watch is more open, more inclusive, more accessible to people all over the world. And every language of every economic ability.

Like that’s something we can all spend the rest of our lives working on. We’ll never be fully done, cuz there’ll always be another billion people coming online or another language we’re not translated into yet or some new technology platform we can be part of. So that’s that’s I think the thing. It really animates the WordPress community.

David Bisset: Well, we need a word to surround these, these things that you’re collecting. Um, we’ll leave your name outta it. I’ll I’ll, I’ll send this, I’ll send this feedback back to marketing and I’ll see what they come up with.

Matt Mullenweg: Open menagerie. That’s kind of a fun thing. Although a lot of people don’t know what the word menagerie.

I. Um, so I dunno if it fully works, but I believe it means like a collection of like zoo animals. Right. It’s a

David Bisset: fancier version. Yeah. And, uh, I’m a star Trek fan. So if there’s anybody listening, who’s a star Trek fan really older than you probably recognize the name. That’s that’s, that’s stuck in my head for the past 30 years.

Um,

Matt Mullenweg: I have two things there. Mm-hmm uh, one, we gotta get you on star Trek tum. It’s so good, amazing memes. There’s references. We now have original like, uh, script writers of star Trek coming on and like answering questions about really old episodes. Oh, it’s so fun. Um, huh. And two, one of my favorite fiction books.

It’s a collection of short stories, uh, by this amazing sci-fi, Ahan named OU it’s called paper menagerie. And so if you’re looking for a fiction read and it’s also really nice, cuz the stories. Our short story. So, you know, they don’t take that long. Really great, cool book to read, uh, paper menagerie by Ken Lu.

Uh, L I U is his last name. I’ll throw it into show

David Bisset: notes.

Olivia Bisset: I have a question.

Okay.

David Bisset: Yeah. So he can probably tell what it is, but let’s just, he’ll. He’ll he’s good. He’s a good actor. He’ll he’ll play. He’ll play. So

Olivia Bisset: Matt, we know that kids K get introduced to elementary and middle school students blogging.

WordPress at times like the general, but when they’re in high school going to college or like me, like applied and, um, going off the college they’re school, some many different allocations, like Tumblr for some people I like notion personally. And I might use that for something that y’all might not use.

you all might a website for, how do you think we can show to like my friends in schools and my other friends, the value of open source and WordPress. Yeah. WordPress to them.

Matt Mullenweg: I think the answer changed over the years when you asked this and by the way, it’s something we should keep asking ourselves, cuz I think we could do a better job.

Uh, so part of the reason I’m working on Tumblr personally and wanted. To really devote a bunch of my time onto it is I do believe that this could be a really amazing on ramp to the WordPress ecosystem. If we’re able to rearchitect Tumblr to be WordPress powered. Um, you know, like I said, 55% of Tumblr’s user base is under 25.

A lot of people don’t know that. um, it’s actually a majority women. So it over indexes on female versus male participation. Hmm. And has the highest L G B T plus, um, percentage of any other social network it’s 25% plus. So this is a place that is providing something different than all the other social networks and even other sites on the web is, and attracting a really interesting audience, you know, an audience that is often like early adopters or drivers of new trends.

um, that’s, that’s actually an answer I’ve never given you before. Uh, and I don’t think I know if I would’ve before February because, um, I wasn’t as personally involved in how time I was running. Um, the other part I think is just cool examples. So, you know, I always get back to, if we could make having a domain cool or show people what they could create being different is interesting.

And I think, especially when you’re young, you wanna differentiate yourself from the crowd and have something. And so. Being just another, that’s why I, my outside perception of why games like Roblox and my craft have been so successful. Cause they they’re so generative. They’re so creation. And um, when I was a kid, but also still today, I got the most joy, not when I was just consuming something, but when I was creating or co-creating, uh, for me, a lot of that was music.

You know, co-creating a song with other jazz musicians or something. So we need to, uh, Do, but by the way, keep the kids camps, keep the curriculum, make it. Oh, of course. Like all those things, like I think we could continue those programs. We should and should continue to invest in them. And I’m also looking for other, like, OnRamps like, that could be fun.

Like if you’re on Tumblr, just because Taylor swift is there and then we get you tumbling and then we, you wanna customize it. And all of a sudden you’re, you’re learning WordPress. Whoa, that’s kind of cool. . And then by the way, the other thing that’s been great in our community is like, as we’re entering, I would say a period of economic downturn and economic uncertainty.

Unlike we’ve seen probably since 2008, the good news is this isn’t WordPress’s first rodeo. In fact, we kind of were born in a period of like post.com crash when they came mm-hmm . I remember we had two, this Nate, we had 2014, so we’ve been a few through a few of these already. It’s always been periods when WordPress has grown a lot because, uh, we’re free and it’s a community, but I think can I read that otherwise, like it’s a community, which also is a lot about education and teaching and then once you learn it, there’s a lot of opportunities available.

Um, In terms of businesses that need websites or consultants. So the agencies like TenUp that need so many people, places like automatic that are hiring so much hired 700 people last year, really, really excellent jobs in economic opportunities, by the way, also often available worldwide, not just in America or other countries, which I think, um, are really.

David Bisset: There’s five for the future too. But when we had that discussion, Olivia and I, we had, um, I was also commenting to her, especially when people transition from high school to college and they enter these kind of like internship roles, you know, that various, you know, various times it’s that, um, like one of the things I’m doing over the summer with her is we’re doing some small projects.

Um, like the w like w 19 could. Like a very small one, but it’s an example of, you know, build something with WordPress or educate somebody with WordPress. If there is, if there were companies, agencies, hosting companies or design agencies, if there is a WordPress focused company that could take somebody in and then train them or, or, or get them used into using WordPress enough, I think the WordPress, the companies and the WordPress ecosystem can kind of help, you know, suck in some of that internship from the young people, high school and college.

And then. You know, that would be a way maybe to turn them around in a couple of years and can, and you know, if they go their own way fine, but you know, they might stay end up staying in more in the WordPress community and do what they love or what they’re interested in. That’s what Olivia and I were talking about earlier.

Olivia Bisset: But especially with my robotics team, we have over like thousands of teams. And when we went to championships, there have thousands of teams and every. Has a website. So maybe that could be a thing

Matt Mullenweg: that’s really cool. You should make a theme for. I was gonna call out a community member that I’ve appreciated recently, which is, um, RT.

Who’s a big consulting firm. Mm-hmm they actually have a learn dot RT camp.com. They’ve been developing curriculum, uh, focused, uh, on what’s called freshers in India, which is a term I wasn’t familiar with, but I think it means like people, either in school are coming right outta school. Mm-hmm for sure.

And have a whole, like actually paid six month program. That teaches you all WordPress, and then also you’ll have an opportunity to be hired by RT camp at then. So I think that there’s particularly as like so many WordPress companies are, are growing so fast. Yeah. And that want people, I think that will also have companies, uh, doing this.

What I love about what RT learned did, or the RT camp version is they license it under CC zero. So all of the stuff they created is actually. the content version of open source. You know, , it’s basically a public domain and available for others to use. That’s interesting, which is, uh, I I’ll just also call out open verse, which is one of my favorite things we’ve done in the past year.

An acquisition that kind of went more on the workplace org side versus the automatic side. You know, the idea there’s tons of great stock sites out there, but that if we can create the open. Version of that, the open directory, which shows all the content people choose to freely license, um, kinda like the GitHub of contents, GitHub of photos, GitHub of, uh, video GitHub of, um, sounds and other things.

How cool. And that’s basically what open source is, is indexing creative commons, license content, and now host it on wordpress.org. So check out the open verse. If you haven’t already launched it way before. Zuckerberg was like metaverse blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think open verse is way cooler. That’s what we wanna live in.

We don’t wanna live in the metaverse. We wanna live in the open verse. Yeah.

David Bisset: And then, like, I, that’s another piece of all this, of all these items that are being collected together. Um, I mean slightly different because it belongs to everybody. It is not a automatic acquired company or anything like that, but still it is under the open web umbrella.

I would say that was it basically. Um, we just really wanted an opportunity to be able to just chat about. It was just my way of getting to figure out what, what was up at Tumblr because we are actually, um, I actually saw somebody, what is on Twitter, the other, uh, of a couple of days ago. And I’ll have to share the tweet with you cuz I’m not gonna recall it really good off the top of my head, but they, um, there was some, somebody was approached, uh, from a hiring department at Tumblr about something about open web or indie web. Stuff. Yeah. So, um, I’m liking the things that I’m hearing from there, even, you know, even if it’s not official. So I really, really like, and, um, there’s somebody made a Tumblr blog from all the feeds of wordpress.to make wordpress.org website. So now it’s just, it’s just a continuous, um, way to keep track of that.

And all it is is just RS to Tumblr. Really appreciate the work that you’re doing over there, especially now that you’re taking so much time devoted to it versus what you normally do. And it sounds, it looks like you appreciate and love it. .

Matt Mullenweg: I mean, it’s been fun to be kind of in the nitty gritty of our product too, you know, cuz my, my background’s engineering and product design and everything.

So, um, just being able to be hands on with, uh, a really talented group of people, uh, building things has been, um, yeah, very fun. And also tum is such a tight feedback loop because it has so many active users. I. we talk about a bit, but it has 10 times active [email protected] daily. Like it’s wild. So any change we make the ripples happen so quickly.

So the feedback loop is really, really fast. And, uh, yeah, through that, I hope that we can make blogging really fun for everyone who, who uses WordPress. It’s kind of wild people know this, but still half the people who come to wordpress.com are there to blog, not to make a website or a business or anything like that.

So, good. Good for us. Well, blogging is just one of these things that, gosh, it’s been, even when I started blogging people like blogging is old, cuz it started in the nineties, but like. It’s still the most rewarding activity to have a space on the internet that really shows what you’re excited about and what you’re doing.

And then it kind of attracts and allows other people to follow them. Uh, I guess to answer your early question where I said browser, We, we need to nail that kind of RSS reader thing as well, too, right? Like that kinda open web following. It’s nice when you can syndicate in the Tumblr’s Twitter, but also I think it’d be really cool to, um, do it.

We have a wordpress.com reader. We have the Tumbl dashboard and wordpress.com reader does support RSS feeds. You can subscribe to anything on the web, but really nailing that experience of like the old Google reader would be cool. Yeah.

David Bisset: It’s it’s it’s it. When we remember that experience and being able to publish and syndicate anything without having a Google or any other party take, it’s kind of like, we’re slowly seeing that happening in podcasting a little bit.

And I think we’re trying to hang on to it as much as we can.

Matt Mullenweg: people forget, by the way, podcasting is all built on RSS it is literally the basis as, as Dave Weiner invented essentially 20 years ago, plus, um, all the crypto stuff that’s gone crazy by the way, Bitcoin and Ethereum are open source projects, not unlike WordPress that’s part of what makes them so powerful.

So there is open source now in a lot of different places people are getting excited about, but it just might not even realize how open.

David Bisset: Wanna thank you very much for talking with us and, um, Olivia appreciates it and we’re glad for, including us both in a busy day and we’ll, we’ll see you, we’ll virtually see you in Europe and hopefully, maybe even see you in person in us in

September,

Matt Mullenweg: Olivia, David, it’s been a real pleasure and, uh, feel free to reach out whenever you wanna do this again.