Matt Mullenweg on WordPress 6.9 and Beeper: open source as a 'bill of rights for software'

home with precision. Our next guest is Matt Mulleng from automatic. He is in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in

parent company of WordPress.com. Tumblr [music]

I think are going to remain.

Welcome to the show [snorts] Matt.

How are you doing? I think we have you on a hot mic.

We might have you on a hot mic. Hopefully not. Welcome to the show.

They're about to come on the screen.

Yes.

All right. Well, a little little drum roll experience TVPN.

So, Matt, our audience.

We're streaming on them. They're streaming on us. How are you doing?

We'll clap, too. Fantastic. How are you doing? Good to meet you.

Howdy. Howdy. [laughter] Uh, thank you so much for I know this is a little non-traditional, so we're we're kind of like two hours into like our big annual address, the state of the word. It's kind of like our state of the union speech and um but thank you so much for allowing us to connect them. I'm kind of imagine a lot of folks in the room have never heard or seen TVBN before. So, this will bring a lot of new folks into your world and I'm excited for some of your world to learn about WordPress.

Yeah. Give me the state of the word. Uh and then also I want your your personal word of the year. We've been debating what the word of the year should be over here.

Oh.

Uh, so state of the word. And I'll say the state of the word is strong.

Okay,

there we go.

That's good. Let's hit the gong.

We're hitting the gong for that one.

The strong state of the word. [applause]

Congratulations.

We actually just did a live release of WordPress 6.9. So WordPress does major releases three times per year. We were able to do it right here on stage. We had a little button that we pushed. We got to get it going next time.

I love it.

That was uh It was pretty fun. Don't worry, I didn't just ship it again. It's [laughter]

But um you know uh one of the things about WordPress is is it's a it's not just built by one company, but it's a community of in WordPress 6.9 over 900 contributors from all over the world, different countries, different languages, different companies, all coming together. And so that was pretty exciting. Uh my word of the year and actually a theme we were just talking about is I'm going to choose freedom. Uh so powerful

as technology like starts to influence more and more of our lives you know how we travel who we date the things we learn the news we're exposed to um you know the sort of freedoms that are embedded in an open source license I like to refer to open source licenses sort of like a bill of rights for software um gives you inalable rights that no company or person can take away from you and that freedom and agency I think is really really important and something that um I think you know as technologists or builders that we should try to embed into everything that we give us an update on Beeper. I was super fascinating. I was super fascinated by that product. Uh I love I love walled gardens. I also love tearing down the walls of gardens. Uh it seems like a a good shot across the bow of the uh the iMessage uh walled garden. Uh how's the progress going there? Are you using the service personally daily? Is are we going to see a lot of growth there?

Um well, obviously I'm using it daily. Um, so I would think of it not as like a replacing a wall garden, but more like allowing your gardens to come together.

Um, so I'm sure you like me, I have friends on lots of different networks, and some of them always love to use WhatsApp, and some of them always love to use, you know, Instagram or LinkedIn DM. Sometimes I even get some interesting stuff there.

Um, and I hate it when I miss these messages, you know, because, you know, checking all the different apps sometimes or in the notifications I might miss something. So, think of it not unlike how email clients, you know, can bring in lots of different email accounts. Beeper takes all the different networks where your friends already are and maps them together. Um, now the plus and minus is that you're it's not going to replace the networks. Like I still keep all the different sort of specialized messaging apps because like for example, if someone sends you an Instagram story, when you click on that, you're going to want to load Instagram for example. So, I think of it as complimentary and hopefully even increasing the usage in a very small way right now. It's pretty nent, but in the future, think of it as like sort of a different interface. So, you might still have like the dedicated apps, but then having this all in one inbox that you can sort of manage everything, uh, tag people, have folders, and does cool features like scheduled messaging across all platforms, or even just like weird huristics that are pretty simple to do, but like show me all the not don't just show me unread, but show me all the people I've messaged that haven't messaged me back yet.

Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure. uh we we've talked to some young hackers, some startups uh who are building, you know, sort of Bieber competitors and their whole value prop is like we've figured out a way to get it into the iMessage ecosystem. Uh do you think that uh we need a new regulation there or some sort of law change or some result to actually open up iMessage or do you think that uh with enough tricky hacking it can be done? Um well technically it's it's not hard. Well it is hard but it's very possible to reverse engineer these networks.

Um however as we saw with sort of a previous iteration of Beeper

if uh the network really really doesn't want you to do that

um it's probably not good to pick a fight with a trillion dollar company.

Yeah. So um perhaps these things might happen through open source or something but as a commercial company I think ultimately you have to be somewhat respectful and try to complement these networks.

Um so how beeper works today is we don't support iMessage on the mobile or Android.

Um

in theory we could but Apple has indicated that's something they don't want. We do support on the Mac OS client. We have a way to integrate with sort of iMessage using some APIs that are available in Mac OS. And so on Mac OS we can bring in your iMessage. Got Um but again I'm building this for the long term and we are a commercial company as well.

So um you know we we want to work with the networks and um you know perhaps there can be uh regulations like the European DMA or things that can encourage interoperability. Um but ultimately I think that the the sort of people who run these networks have to see a longerterm benefit for them and for things like um you know some of the other networks I mentioned that Bieber works with I think um their business model and everything the increased usage is really useful for them. I think for today Apple's business model of particularly in the US kind of the lock in effect to the device business which is of course where they make uh a lot of money from iMessage probably indicates that unless forced to I I doubt uh they will adopt u sort of iMessage interoperability uh but who knows sort of like they used lightning for a while and eventually got USBC and all of our lives got better um who knows what'll happen in the future.

Talk about links on the internet. I feel like we're at a point in time where social media platforms are trying to keep users in in their own applications so that they can monetize them to the fullest extent. Meanwhile, you have LLMs which are ultimately doing a lot of the same thing. They're taking content from all over the internet trying to keep users in the individual applications. uh feels like WordPress in in many ways is uh uh making moves to kind of like almost fight back against that. I might have that incorrect, but I feel like it's important if you're running a business independently online, it's great to have people like on your own website so you can develop a a deep uh relationship with them. Uh but what what is your view on that? We're very much anchored around X as a as a business. Obviously X has had uh issues with links or you know chosen to um demote them in the algorithm over the last couple years but uh give us kind of the state of the union on on links.

That's a broad one. Well, I will say X is actually a great example and I've I've talked to Nikita about this. So they now um they've shifted some of the balancing of links and they now have this really nice in sort of app browser. So, you've probably noticed that now that when you load a link, you actually still have the ability to like like and reblog and everything. And I think that's kind of the future. Um, so I I do think that there you can have things that are complimentary because so much of the like great content and everything is more on this open web. It doesn't have to be like fully embedded in an app. Um, but that is sort of a technological change. So, I would say actually point to X as some place where I think things are going in the right direction. Although I do agree that sort of time when links got really deboosted and everyone had to do it as like a reply was kind of weird and sucked.

Um so for for WordPress publishers, you know, we support so many different types of websites and different types of websites I think might have different motivations. So for example, um a popular plugin for WordPress is called Woo Commerce. It's an e-commerce plugin. It actually runs on about 8.9% of all websites in the world are now running this e-commerce plugin. You can think of it like an open source Shopify. And when you if you're selling something a merchant

um you don't you just want to sell the product you don't might not necessarily care that someone comes to your website to buy it.

So some of the new things that are happening with in partnership with OpenAI and others where we're allowing products to actually be like browsed and bought inside of the LLM are pretty exciting.

Um I also think that the incentives of these uh open source chat bots in particular um are very complimentary to the open web. So, for example, like if you're on Amazon, Amazon really wants you to say or eBay or Etsy or something like that, they want you to stay in their marketplace on their system. But when you think of how Google works and sort of the growth of Google in the open web, you know, they they have their search pages, but they also would link out and that was whole part of their business model and how they grew. Um, we're seeing that with the chat bots as well. And in fact, something I talked about a little bit earlier is that the traffic from bots, both from them crawling, but also user initiated actions is exploding and has already surpassed sort of human traffic and it'll be interesting to see where that goes in the future. So, you know, there's never a better time, I think, to invest in having a domain, but also invest in publishing. And, you know, just like you might have a direct relationship, like for example, I suppose I could get like a, you know, chat GBT to summarize today's TVPN episode, but it's more exciting to watch it. I think that creators developing a direct relationship and brand is going to be um part of the future as well.

Very very cool. Well, there's so many more things that I want to ask, but uh I know you're in the midst of of your own presentation. So, uh thank you for for tuning in. Come back on uh soon and uh thank you for having us. The the view is spectacular as well. So, [laughter]

it's a pleasure for me. I love to come down and hang out when we're I'm in LA next. So,

fantastic. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon.

Great chatting.

Have a good rest of your day.

See you. Hi.

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