- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.
“We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.
We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.
WordPress is built on decades of hacky code, probably more so than Tumblr. I would be shocked if this is an improvement.
is it decades of hacky code, or decades of battle tested code?
I haven’t touched wordpress in… many years, but I’ve seen far too many developers look at old code and call it junk… only to break things horrifically when they attempt a rewrite.
Hacky.
Wordpress has a reputation for the most moronic security issues. Especially when it’s built on PHP, which has its own reputation for moronic security issues. And that’s saying nothing about the quality of plugin developers or plugin code.
I’ve worked on Wordpress sites, plugins, and themes. That was many years ago now, but I doubt it’s changed that much. If anything, it’s mostly benefited from improvements to PHP.
Has to rank as one of the most exploited pieces of software ever.
Definitely be not aided by the fact it’s targeting an audience without the skills or knowledge to adequately configure, maintain and monitor it. And the plugin community only makes the vulnerability exposure worse.
Yup. I imagine a lot of users install a lot of plugins they don’t actually need, which just expands the attack surface.
Kind of the old Windows vs Mac problem though. It gets so many exploits because it is so ridiculously popular. No one is going to bother looking for exploits in shit that no one uses right? I’m sure they’ve got problems like any project but I’m not convinced they’re THAT bad. Not to mention a lot of exploits you see are plugins doing dumb shit, not WP itself.
Both honestly. Very spaghetti, but noone can deny that it just works from a user perspective. Would I want to maintain the code? Hell no! Do use it as an end user? Hell yeah!
Nah, not touching that with a 10’ pole. There have been far too many exploits for me to feel comfortable putting any of my important data on it. And it’s not just that it’s popular, the level of sophistication for these attacks are… alarmingly low.
my thoughts exactly. Who in their sane mind sees WordPress as a solid foundation for anything?
you must be truly desperate to come to me for help.
LokiWPMost large publishing companies, the white house and various government departments all use WordPress for their main sites. Its the third party integrations that cause security issues, not the core code.
Yet the third party integrations are pretty much the whole point of WordPress.
Indeed, but using poor ones or not keeping them updated is what causes the wrong opinion that WordPress isn’t solid.
30% of the most popular 1000 websites are built on WordPress supposedly.
Sure, and who is vetting the plugins? How often are unmaintained plugins replaced in those popular websites? How quickly are vulnerabilities patched and applied?
The whole thing is easy to set up, but unlikely to be properly maintained.
Not as familiar with WordPress, but if that’s the case, yeah, I don’t have high hopes for this going well…
Every comment in this thread might as well be hearsay. I wouldn’t take it too seriously. I think I’ll trust the corporation that runs wordpress.com and maintains the open source WordPress project instead to know what they’re doing with WordPress.
Wordpress supports activitypub tho, so that could be cool if they want it to be.
I read a couple of Tumblr blogs. If I could follow them from Mastodon instead I could delete that app entirely.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Use rss feeds maybe? Adding
/rssto a tumblr blog’s url (in the x.tumblr.com format) shows an rss feed
They summarised the history of Tumblr, but failed to mention how they lost 3 quarters of their users by banning porn?
Like, two owners ago. Wordpress took Tumblr off Verizon’s hands for $3 million USD, ~six years after Yahoo! bought it for $1.1 billion.
Where the fuck does yahoo even get money from to do this kind of shit at this point?
Rich people can always get money
yahoo
Nowadays, I don’t know that they could, but more than a decade ago they still had enough mail and search users to be somewhat relevant, and Marissa Meyer had just taken over after she left Google. There was a real thought that Yahoo! could so something new. It obviously didn’t pan out, but for a hot minute, people really talked about Yahoo!
Ah yes, WordPress, renowned for it’s robust social engagement tools.
It’s the kind of decision you announce over Zoom so people don’t riot
https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
Hopefully they’re planning on using that to integrate with the Fediverse.
Neocities already has its own internal engagement stuff (with people following each other, commenting on updates etc), it probably wouldn’t be too hard to throw that into ActivityPub.
Just like wordpress though neoticies is much more “here is my stuff, browse through it” oriented than tumblr, which is at least 70% towards twitteresque “here’s a firehose of different stuff of different people please make comments and retweet every image”.
Even after Automattic acquired it, the site continued to lose money at a rate of $30 million each year, the company’s CEO Matt Mullenweg had said.
I still wanna know what they’re spending all that money on, because I’m sure it’s not developers or even servers. The idea that they can only be profitable if they’re constantly growing their user numbers is an investor idea that’s doomed to fail eventually and why so many social media sites are crashing right now
if they’re constantly growing their user numbers
All social media needs to constantly grow because attrition. Social media requires basic levels of user ship to be functional, even lemmy. Its a network effect where you need to have certain levels of users for some emergent properties to exist. For example, I speculate that defederation early between .ml and .world was the trigger that will eventually kill lemmy, principally because this results in fragmentation and a reduction in the properties we would get from “more users”. Having more users begets more users, more content, more memes, etc. And I don’t necesssarily see the defederation as something unneccessary, but what I’m describing is an inherent property of networks. Its not something that can really be argued with because this behavior is consistent across physical, biological, social networks. It just “is” as a property.
So foundationally, you can’t sit still on a train moving backwords (which it always is). An organism needs to be constantly recruiting and growing new cells into its network because its also always dying. Growth is “holding still” for any networked system.
Lemmy can work without user accounts made directly on the server. I’m posting from a completely different instance using completely different software (mbin), and I can see both .ml and .world and interact with them both just fine despite their defederation from each other.
It’s kind of more like a random street gathering instead of an exclusive club.
Or like the golden age of instant messengers, where you had multiple choices of multi-client apps like Trillian.
You still had individual accounts for each IM platform, but a single app to chat on any platform.
Don’t envy anyone involved in this… it’s a lot of work
Seeing how much CPU and memory is using a single WordPress blog, i wonder how much it will cost to host half a billion WordPress blogs
My guess is it scales a lot more efficiently the more you add. Still probably costs a lot though.
Most of them probably get 0 visits or close to it.
I mean when I made one such blog, the default install did not have a single index in the database? Like even a small dataset took seconds to process.
People love to shit on PHP, and I also love to shit on WordPress, but performance was definitely possible to easily improve.
Wordpress is just the worst
The open-source software from WordPress.org is great for blogs. It becomes the worst when you try it make it do more than that. Even worse is WordPress.com which is very different and uses a very locked-down and restricted proprietary version of the WordPress software. They charge $25/mo for the tier that lets you add custom CSS.
Additionally, Automattic gets a free pass of violating the WordPress terms of use for the WordPress name and logo to intentionally trick people into thinking the paid platform at WordPress.com is the same as the free and open-source software from WordPress.org. They get to leverage the non-profit’s name and likeness and gets preferential treatment to funnel business to their for-profit company.
Wow. For real, I always just assumed that .com was the commercial arm of .org. Holy shit.
Edit: So, for anyone curious, .com is owned by Automattic, who also own Tumblr, Beeper, PocketCasts and Buddy Press. The WordPress project and .org are owned by the WordPress Foundation. Automattic makes some contributions to the WordPress project but they and the WP Foundation are seperate.
Completely separate entities besides the owner being the same.
Sounds stupid. I wonder if this makes it easier to sell the content to AI scrapers?
It makes sense that they’d want to move it to a single codebase rather than have both Wordpress code and Tumblr code in the same organization.
Anyone else old enough to remember when Wordpress was called b2? Good times.
Tumblr’s codebase is also both quite old and infamously terrible, even if it’s from being shuffled around companies a bunch.
Centralising its backend into one platform doesn’t like too bad of an idea.
Automattic says the move to WordPress will have its advantages, as it will make it easier to share the company’s work across the two platforms.
I foresee no issues
The face I made when I read that title and it was not good.
Ewww
Hopefully they’ll at least use Bedrock and not default Wordpress.
Or modify it themselves.
Or use a shitload of insecure plugins for wp to do what it wasn’t made for.
Who knows what they use under the hood but WordPress architecture is horrible
~~Wait wtf. Automattic was sold in a fire sale?
When? Why? How?They were not making money? I thought they had WordPress.com - that should be making pretty good right? Or paid plugins like jetpack - those gotta be making money.
How did this happen that they got sold in fire sale?~~Edit oh. Ive read it wrong. Tumblr was sold in a fire sale, okok. Yeah I could see that.
Tumblr is such an old technology
Still better than tumblr live
