Automattic CEO calls Tumblr his ‘biggest failure’ so far

Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch:

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the company’s Tumblr acquisition his biggest failure — but one he hasn’t given up on yet. The comments were made at the recent WordCamp Canada 2025 conference, where Mullenweg went live for a Town Hall session to connect with the open source-focused WordPress community.

The exec noted that Tumblr was still on a different technical stack than WordPress — something he had intended to correct by migrating the back end to WordPress infrastructure. However, that massive undertaking was put on hold earlier this year, as the cost to move Tumblr’s half-billion blogs would be difficult given that the blogging platform wasn’t profitable and continues to be sustained by the profits of other Automattic products.

and

Mullenweg acknowledged these concerns at his Town Hall session, saying, “I need to switch [Tumblr] over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and, as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue.”

I’ve always thought Automattic’s purchase of Tumblr was a bit of an odd decision. It made me wonder what Matt’s endgame was — and honestly, it feels like that vision still hasn’t solidified. With the right leadership and a much-needed cleanup, it could absolutely thrive again. Matt’s juggling too many things right now, but I really believe someone could make Tumblr the go-to platform for the coming years, especially once it becomes part of the Fediverse.

October 21, 2025 · + Permalink

Instagram Tests Reels-first Experience in India

Meta has today announced that the company is testing a new “Reels-first” experience in the Instagram app in India.

To make it even easier to access these most-loved parts of Instagram, we’re testing a new Reels-first experience for a limited group of users. This experience is similar to our recent launch the Reels-first experience on iPad:

  • When you open Instagram, you’ll land directly in Reels. Stories remain at the top, making it easy to connect with friends.
  • DMs are now just one swipe away in the navigation bar for quick access to conversations from anywhere in the app.
  • There will also be a new “Following” tab, which gives you multiple ways to see the latest and greatest from the accounts you follow:
  • All: Recommended posts and Reels from accounts you follow.
  • Friends: Recommended posts and Reels from accounts you follow who also follow you back.
  • Latest: Chronological posts and Reels from accounts you follow, with the newest content first.

Very interesting, and I fully expected Instagram to dive head first into Reels considering how much they’ve blown up in the past couple of years. But more than the Reels feed taking centre-stage in the app, I’m very interested in experiencing the new “Following” tab that gives me a way to browse my “Friends” and “Latest” feeds separately.

I don’t have this new experience just yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

September 29, 2025 · + Permalink

Luke Harris says ‘No more WordPress’

Luke Harris, writing on his blog:

After 14 years I’m out. All of the WordPress sites I managed have been converted to static sites or Kirby. The expensive Cloudways server has been shut down. GeneratePress, GenerateBlocks, Akismet, and ManageWP cancelled. WordPress dot com accounts deleted. Feels good.

It’s really sad to see such experienced WordPress supporters go away from the platform, and it’s quite clear that the WordPress-WPEngine drama is causing more harm than good to the community.

I’d be lying if I said haven’t thought about my future with WordPress, but I’m far from taking a drastic step like this. I still love this platform and community, and still love building sites with WordPress. In fact, I’m actively looking for a new job that has me working closer to WordPress, so if you have any leads, you know where to find me.

March 21, 2025 · + Permalink

Sarah Gooding’s “Last Call” at WP Tavern

WordPress has been an important part of my life for the last decade or more. I’m not sure when exactly, but I’ve been subscribed to WP Tavern for a long time now, and it has been an excellent source of news and updates about what’s been happening in the world of WordPress — everything from plugin acquisitions and notable theme releases to security breaches and fixes and other updates. Many of my favorite or most memorable articles were written by Sarah Gooding.

Unfortunately, Sarah has posted possibly her last article on the site, titled “Last Call“. She writes,

This has been an emotional, bittersweet morning for me, reading through old posts, as I close the book on my time at this beloved publication. Today is my last day before moving on to embrace a new challenge in the world of tech.  

In 2013, the year I started writing at the Tavern, just 17.4% of the web was running on WordPress, but the momentum I felt at that last WordCamp San Francisco was intoxicating and undeniable. It marked the ascendency of the global WordPress community and the move to embrace new tools like Slack and GitHub for contributing to core.

At that time, one frustrating thing I frequently heard was “It’s just WordPress, don’t take it so seriously.” Yet there we were, standing on the edge of an amazing acceleration of WordPress’ adoption and expansion of the ecosystem that brought meaningful work to millions and gave people a voice on the web. It was never “just WordPress” to me. As the software enters its third decade, powering 43% of the world’s websites, WordPress continues to be an irrepressible force of good on the web. I’d like to think the Tavern had a small part in that.

WP Tavern has been a fantastic place to get a no-nonsense feed of excellent articles and many of them were written by Sarah herself. I’m actually feeling sad knowing that Matt doesn’t have a ready replacement for Sarah yet, and I’m definitely going to miss Sarah’s content.

November 28, 2023 · + Permalink

Adding ActivityPub Support to this WordPress Site

I just installed and enabled this fantastic ActivityPub WordPress plugin by Matthias Pfefferle & team Automattic on this blog. You should be able to follow new posts published here going forward by searching for the following user in your favorite Mastodon or Fediverse app of choice.

@nuclearbits.com@nuclearbits.com

Do let me know at https://mastodon.social/@preshit if it works!

September 27, 2023 · + Permalink

Twitter Auto-Sharing Feature Discontinued in Jetpack WordPress Plugin

Kristina P, writing on the official Jetpack blog, in a post titled “The End of Twitter Auto-Sharing”:

Twitter decided, on short notice, to dramatically change the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, the Twitter connection on Jetpack Social will cease to work, and your blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter.

This was bound to happen, and we’ll be seeing many more such announcements in the coming days.

May 2, 2023 · + Permalink

WP Engine Acquires Delicious Brains Plugins

WP Engine, a popular managed WordPress hosting services company, has today announced the acquisition of 5 WordPress plugins from Delicious Brains.

The plugins have a total installed base of approximately 4 million users and are widely adopted by WP Engine’s customers. The acquired software includes Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WP Migrate, WP Offload Media, WP Offload SES, and Better Search Replace.

Over the last few years, WP Engine has been snapping up a number of products, aiming to level up their offering from developers. This includes Flywheel and Local, as well as StudioPress and the Genesis framework. Interestingly, it was exactly a year ago on June 2nd, 2021 that Elliot Condon — the original developer of Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) announced that Delicious Brains had acquired the plugin from them.

I’m currently using a number of these WordPress plugins on many of my websites, so I’m curious to see where WP Engine takes them.

Also read: The announcement by Delicious Brains.

June 2, 2022 · + Permalink