• jedibob5@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      WordPress is built on decades of hacky code, probably more so than Tumblr. I would be shocked if this is an improvement.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

        Loki WP

      • jedibob5@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Not as familiar with WordPress, but if that’s the case, yeah, I don’t have high hopes for this going well…

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • catloaf@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • fake@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            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.

            • webhead@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              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.

  • MysticKetchup@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • Wrench@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • sodalite@slrpnk.net
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      11 months ago

      I see no mention of ActivityPub in the article, but I’m wondering if this is part of their plan to eventually integrate Tumblr into the fediverse as well.

      However I agree with others that this will likely result in hella janky hackable websites first…hopefully it smoothes out.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Sounds stupid. I wonder if this makes it easier to sell the content to AI scrapers?

    • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • [email protected]@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    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

  • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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

    • go $fsck yourself@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • fpslem@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.