I think I just vaulted over the line between "WordPress is too much of a maintenance burden, I want to move away" to "I need to stop using WordPress. Now."

https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/113277490070161595

tante (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image When logging into Wordpress.org (login.wordpress.org) you have to confirm that you are not affiliated with WPEngine. While this looks petty and childish it's another sign the Wordpress is in the hands of people who can't find less destructive ways to handle their fucking midlife crisis.

tldr.nettime
How likely is it we could see a fork of the WordPress.org updates/plugins backend? At least some of the wordpress.org features are negatives to me anyway so I'd be okay with losing them (the "news" page contains information I don't care about, and it appears to be leaking my IP/location to Automattic every time I open my personal WP admin page). But the plugin repository is kind of hard to work without.
What's really worrisome to me is whether CEO Matt's errattic-ness starts to impact SimpleNote. I don't really like WP; it's just something I used in my twenties that now I can't get rid of. But SimpleNote is very possibly my favorite piece of software in the world at this moment, my one critical-path cloud app that never "enshittified". If you've been following this account, you may have noticed I come to hate software very easily. I really honestly like SimpleNote. And it's owned by Automattic.

So I was reading this article (h/t @ernie)

https://www.404media.co/wordpress-checkbox-login-wp-engine/

and I hit this kinda jawdropper of, sorry to link the bad place, a tweet:

https://twitter.com/JavierCasares/status/1843963052183433331

Where someone describes being banned from wordpress.org for asking questions about the "affiliated with WP Engine" checkbox. Note that's a thread, which neither the 404media post nor probably the Twitter website will show you, and there are followups beyond that one screenshot. I assure you they were reasonable and calmly stated

‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In

WordPress.org users are forced to confirm they are not "affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise" before registering a new account or logging in.

404 Media
Post by arch_ebooks, @[email protected]

CW: markov chain nonsense

bird.gmem.ca
@mcc i can't get over how perfect my markov chain is sometimes