As we announced and TechCrunch covered, my.wordpress.net has soft-launched.

What this means is you need to fundamentally shift how you think about WordPress.

From the beginning, WordPress has always been open source, giving you freedom, liberty, autonomy, and digital sovereignty. Open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.

For the past few decades, WordPress was software you got from a cloud provider or web host, such as WordPress.com, Bluehost, Hostinger, or Pressable (the currently recommended WordPress hosts). You could self-host it on a Raspberry Pi or home server, but few people did.

The experience of downloading WordPress, as my Mom did, is that it unzips a bunch of PHP and various code files onto your desktop. Very confusing!

But now, thanks to incredible advances in WebAssembly (WASM), we can spin up a web server, a database (SQLite or MariaDB), and a full WordPress installation inside your browser in about 30 seconds. Instantly. No server needed. I introduced Playground at State of the Word in 2022.

You can even use it to cross-publish apps to the web, desktop, and iOS, like Blocknotes did in 2023. You can get the latest Blocknotes at Blocknotes.org. One codebase, multiple platforms.

These WordPress Playground containers are fully composable and atomic. You can track and roll back any change. Undo for everything. Stop thinking of WordPress as just on a web host and worrying about maintenance and management, and more as a self-contained unit of open source goodness, a fun little package where you own and control the code and data and can run it however you like.

How perfect is that for AI to work with? Playground makes WordPress local, fast, and trivial to spin up multiple instances, test code changes, and save them.

Next up, we’re going to add peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing so other people can access it.

I believe this will take us from millions of WordPresses in the world to billions. Hosting isn’t going away; in fact, I think demand for cloud syncing will increase drastically as we radically open up what people can build on top of WordPress.

In an AI age where it’s trivial to spin up software from scratch, consumers will have to give much more thought to brands they trust to be in it for the long term. We’ve been relentlessly iterating on WordPress since 2003. I plan to work on it the rest of my life, and there’s a broad community of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who make their living on top of WordPress.

On WordPress.com we offer 100-year plans and 100-year domains, and I believe we’re one of the few companies where that’s credible. It’s led by Zander Rose, who ran the Long Now Foundation (one of my favorite non-profits) from 1997 to 2023, a quarter century.

In core WordPress, we are obsessed with backwards compatibility. You can run plugins and themes written 20 years ago on today’s WordPress. I’ve stumbled on decade-old installs, and the built-in auto-upgrade took everything to the newest version.

At Automattic, for better and worse, unlike Google, we almost never shut things down. We obsess about maintaining or redirecting permalinks. We make it easy not just to get your data in, but take it out too. We build businesses that lower churn not by locking you in (Wix famously has no export) but by making it easy for you to leave. If you love somebody, set them free.

In the next few years, there will be a Cambrian explosion of software and services. You’re going to have a lot of choices about where to put your most precious data and software. You should demand open source and bet on those who are clearly in it for the long-term.

Today, everyone gets a phone number and email when they grow up. That will expand in the future, everyone will have a domain and a WordPress. A part of the internet that you own.

Technology is best when it brings people together. Technology is best when it puts you in control, gives you ownership, digital autonomy, freedom, and liberty. That’s open source. It’s so exciting to see how AI is supercharging open source.

Join the WordPress community. It’s fun! We have cookies that don’t track you.

For a brief period, Tumblr was unavailable to the 115M+ people in the Philippines because the government had blocked it. To their credit, the Philippines CICC quickly reviewed and corrected their block after mass public outrage from the Filipino Tumblr community. Let the people tumble!

Very excited to share that the Clay.earth team that joined Automattic last year is re-launching under a new, very cool name and brand: Mesh. Imagine something that joins you (me) to everyone you’re connected to. It’s going to be a very important layer of the distributed identity and social work we’re doing. It’s an amazing app you should try out if you haven’t yet. Available on the web, MacOS, Windows, iOS, and even the Vision Pro. Stunning design.

If you host your WordPress on WordPress.com your AI agent can now manage your entire site, including updating posts or pages, making drafts, pretty much all the things you normally do with WordPress. Hook this up to your OpenClaw, Hermes, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, whatever and have fun!

I’m in NYC for the Stephan Wolfram dev/ai/nyc conversation tomorrow at the Automattic Noho space. While walking back from the Apple Store in Soho where I had picked up a new Studio Display XDR to try out, ran into one of my favorite YouTube accounts to follow right now, Ari at Home! I ran into him around 32 minutes into this Twitch stream. Here’s how he set up his rig.

A video I’ve shared with friends recently is when Harry Mack ran into Ari, which was fun for me because they’re two of my favorite accounts to follow. Sorry I didn’t freestyle! I had to get back to do some work, which is why I got the monitor.

In other cool X/Twitter news, they launched an awesome feature today that lets you restrict replies not just to people you follow, but to people they follow as well. Nikita gave a hat tip to the conversation I had with Peter Levels / @levelsio.