TaggartThe Linux Foundation getting in bed with Coinbase to develop a web payments standard.
No thanks very much
No wait, it's worse than you thought!
Membership [of the x402 governing body] will be comprised of participants from multiple verticals with initial intent and support being expressed by Adyen, Amazon Web Services, American Express, Ampersend.ai, Base, Circle, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Fiserv Merchant Solutions, Google, KakaoPay, Mastercard, Merit Systems, Microsoft, Polygon Labs, PPRO, Shopify, Sierra, Solana Foundation, Stripe, thirdweb, and Visa.
This is a list of people I don't want in charge of my money. And yes, I am forced to use some of them. Doesn't mean I trust them.
Stijn van Drongelen@mttaggart It's going to be shoved into the "open" web platform, innit?
Jason Lefkowitz@mttaggart My limited reading on x402 so far makes it sound like it's crypto-based and optimized for use by AI agents, so it really is a perfect storm of WTF
@jalefkowit Ah, so it is! Takes some reading, but "Payment method" is basically a crypto wallet. It accepts USDC, which is a dollar-indexed stablecoin, but that's as close as you get.
Sheesh.
@mttaggart Cloudflare made a big deal in their announcement yesterday of a new CMS (which I had to read three times, wary that it was an April Fool's joke) that it comes with x402 support out of the box. The cynic in me wonders why this thing I had not heard of before yesterday is suddenly popping off all over the place
Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
Today we are launching the beta of EmDash, a full-stack serverless JavaScript CMS built on Astro 6.0. It combines the features of a traditional CMS with modern security, running plugins in sandboxed Worker isolates.
@jalefkowit Hunh. I'm deeply conflicted about a WordPress hard fork of this nature.
tante@mttaggart @jalefkowit it is not a fork, is it? Just another probably vibe coded reimplementation to strip a GPL from popular code.
@tante @mttaggart They drop the WordPress name a lot, but it's completely unrelated as far as I can tell. It's built on Astro and Node, it's not compatible with any existing WordPress plugins or themes. They give you an importer that can ingest content from an existing WordPress site, but that's as far as compatibility goes.
But it IS agentic, because of course it is
Stephen Dioxide 
@jalefkowit @tante @mttaggart When they say "spiritual successor," I hear, "please transfer all positive feelings you have for WordPress to us."
@tante @jalefkowit Ah yes, that's correct; I misspoke. It's not a fork, although it aims to be "compatible with WordPress functionality."
Although I don't think it is entirely fair to equate this to stripping GPL the way chauvet did. That felt materially different.
@mttaggart @tante It's a forgivable mistake, because the announcement really leans on comparing it to WordPress. They really really really want you to think it's related. It just isn't, except in the broadest sense (it's a CMS with a plugin architecture).
@jalefkowit @tante It's a shame too because the sandboxing of plugins is a good idea. It would take a massive lift to refactor WordPress to do it, but well worth the effort.
On the other hand, I really understand why someone would want to...not bother with Automattic right now
@mttaggart @jalefkowit also: The sales pitch for WordPress is buckets of plugins and it runs everywhere.
Now they have something without those plugins that is massively harder to run. What are they even doing?
Now they have something without those plugins that is massively harder to run. What are they even doing?
@tante @mttaggart For my sins, I have spent 15 years toiling in the WordPress ecosystem. I have seen many CMSes claiming to be "the next WordPress" come and go in that time. And the one thing they have all had in common is that the people making them have no idea why people who use WordPress actually use it
@jalefkowit @tante Yeah I would call it the Windows of CMSes at this point. Network effect, sunk cost, and ecosystem mean you'll tolerate much to stay on familiar/supported ground.
@tante @mttaggart (Of course these days I'm not sure Automattic understands that either)
@jalefkowit @mttaggart they do not.
I recently set up Ghost for a test and it's nice UI wise and all. But the setup is so complicated and fragile ... I've been running services on Linux boxes for more than 2 decades now and I failed twice to get it to work.
@tante @mttaggart Yeah.
For a long time the thing that was going to kill WordPress was static site generators. I'd listen to SSG developers pitch their product: "It's so easy! Everything's stored in Markdown files, changes are tracked via Git, when you push commits out to prod everything gets rebuilt via CI!"
And I was just like, man, have you ever met a person who uses WordPress? Like, even once
Martijn Frazer@jalefkowit omg so much this.
"Just run this one command to compile your website" yeah ok buddy, good look with that.
@Tijn The irony is that Movable Type hit a SSG sweet spot a quarter century ago: static output, but managed through a graphical backend. I set up normal people with MT all the time back then with zero problems.
But changing things required waiting for MT to grind out static files, and people got tired of waiting. Since WordPress output was fully dynamic, there was no waiting! Everyone loved it.
So they switched to WP, and then spent the next 20 years layering caches on top of WP to keep three extra visitors from knocking over the database
Murphy NoMad
AA@mttaggart This follows a story that was posted last week saying Linux bug reports went from slop to very good overnight https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/greg_kroahhartman_ai_kernel/
Idaho buckeye@mttaggart awful news.
Deven Phillips@mttaggart
I had noticed a significant increase in "spammy" e-mails from LF the last year. I guess this aligns with that. #enshittification
I had noticed a significant increase in "spammy" e-mails from LF the last year. I guess this aligns with that. #enshittification
Kees N ✅🔻@mttaggart
In my humble opinion "web payments" are "off-topic" for any operating system, especially Linux.
I am aware that, as Wikipedia says, "The foundation has since evolved to promote open-source projects beyond the Linux OS ...", but I consider that unwanted feature creep.
In my humble opinion "web payments" are "off-topic" for any operating system, especially Linux.
I am aware that, as Wikipedia says, "The foundation has since evolved to promote open-source projects beyond the Linux OS ...", but I consider that unwanted feature creep.
Angelino Desmet@mttaggart @linuxfoundation God f@#$% damnit, had to check the date to confirm April the second.
💢 What a disgrace.
https://www.arscyni.cc/file/crypto_cult_science.html #CryptoCultScience
Elias Probst@mttaggart Linux Foundation doing Linux Foundation things.
No surprise here.
They should just rename themselves to "VC & Corporate Bullshit Vehicle".
Chinga la migra! 🍉🌈@mttaggart This is why the OSI should have never been created. If this was all still Free Software then these queefs would have never been interested because they would think there was no way to make money from it. RMS, as weird as he is, knew exactly what he was doing in naming the movement.