I still scan the socials occasionally, both Mastodon and what’s left of Twitter (it’s been nearly two years since I swore off Twitter, but “slowly, carefully” building a Mastodon feed to replace it has proven to be slower than I initially thought), and I started to see a lot of murmuring and grumbling on the subject of Matt Mullenweg.¹

You may have heard of Matt Mullenweg. He runs the company that’s hosting the blog you’re reading now.

Anyway, I heard claims that Matt had betrayed the community often enough that I eventually decided to find out what he’d done exactly, and…

First, he apparently tried to shake down one of the larger third-party web hosting services for a percentage of their revenue, because he’s in the web hosting business himself and doesn’t like that he isn’t the only one making money. (He’s reportedly worth about $400 million, by the way, which I don’t begrudge but do keep in mind when I hear him crying poor-mouth about other people’s lack of “contributions.”)

Later, while in the process of getting rid of anyone at Automattic who disagreed with how he was pursuing the above… well, there’s this service called Blind, for work-related discussions. It’s anonymous but needs a work email for signup, and Matt (according to multiple sources) redirected email confirming any new signups by Automattic employees to himself. It isn’t immediately obvious whether he wanted access to all those Blind accounts, wanted to add names to his list of dissenters, or just wanted to make it slightly harder for people to talk about their workplace on a third-party site that’s out of his control, but none of those are good reasons.

And a few days ago, he used threats of lawfare and doxxing against the creator of bullenweg.com, for the crime of… (checks notes)² …cataloguing his public statements and actions in chronological order. Sure, the result made Matt look bad, but I’m pretty sure that opinions aren’t defamation and neither are provable facts (like the contents of publicly made statements).³

So yeah, it looks like Matt has his head and one shoulder up his ass. (Here’s a more thorough and excoriating rundown.)

And I started thnking about writing a post like this one, because it’s sort of in my wheelhouse, but then, since a large chunk of the above was Matt acting like (or appearing to act like) a censorial dickhole, I thought I should double-check to see if posts like this one are being suppressed.

For those few of you who couldn’t guess, I hated that idea, and I hated even more that it’d even occurred to me.

So I took a look at what I thought would be the most sensitive censor canary: WordPress Reader. I searched Matt’s name – not the other hosting company he’s beefing with, or Blind, just Matt – and started scrolling down…

Mixed in with the unrelated news and neutralish mentions, I found at least one post supporting Matt by a current WordPress employee and a few other posts along the lines of “Matt is EVIL incarnate,” “Matt surely means well but it’s tragic how hard he’s screwing up right now,” and “enough of this, I’m going back to Substack.”

OK. Maybe Matt doesn’t have both shoulders up his ass.

Yet.

I was already considering alternatives:

• Blogger is a Google service, and we all know what that means.
• Medium is run by a guy who now believes the marketplace of ideas was a mistake because Trump claimed to have benefited from it. Paradoxically, Medium’s rules against “shaming” and “obscenities” would interfere with my calling Trump an assclown every time I mention him. Pass.
• Weebly looks a bit bare-bones for even my limited needs, but still, maybe.
• Squarespace is a bit pricier than what I’m paying now, but still, maybe.
• Wix… I don’t know yet. If I find myself revisiting this idea, I may have to research their offerings. Ditto Ghost, and maybe Substack as well.

“Well, it’s nice to know I have options,” I’m thinking sarcastically right now.

Have I mentioned I hate this?

I can’t even think of a satisfactory end to this post. I think I’ll just publish and see what happens.

---

1. This backwards way of catching up with news won’t surprise the four of you who remember how far behind I often am on RSS; currently it’s about two months.
2. The Internet Archive has been enduring a lot od DDOSing lately, which is probably why there’s no Wayback snapshot from later than October 9.

3. Bullenweg has, or had, a Github repo (which has since been overwritten), and the first clone I found contained something that the Wayback version didn’t, a blatant and blunt attempt at satire that is redundantly labeled “Not an actual quote from Matthew Mullenweg.”

   Satire and parody aren’t defamatory, either, but since I’ve seen people claim that was the reason Matt turned censorial, I thought I’d mention it.