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.
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 @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 @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
@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 luck 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
