Kluthulhu' XOR 1=1--
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 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
SeanBurlington 🌈 🕊️@jalefkowit @Tijn I can't help but think there is a product gap there
I use Laravel at work, have done a lot of Drupal in the past, have used various blog engines for personal stuff.
I love https://gohugo.io/ for myself but yeah it's for techies
Which is a shame because with a half decent UI on top and a pre-built theme it could do a super efficient job of hosting many simple sites with no maintenance overhead.
I do get why people use Wordpress or Wix.
@sean @jalefkowit yeah 💯
I've been making websites for over 20 years, but when a non-tech person asks me how they can get a website online for themselves, by themselves... I honestly don't know what to tell them. None of the options I think are good are a good fit really.
@Tijn @jalefkowit generally I tell them that Wix and Wordpress seem to be the least bad options
But yeah it seems really odd that it's harder now for normies to have a website than it was back in the early 2000s
I'd love to run a small business running websites for local organisations
But say I got 100 clients, and wanted a gross income of £50k
That's still £500 per year - which is way more than those orgs could pay.
And I don't think 100 clients would be manageable
Capitalism doesn't align with our values.
@sean @jalefkowit Yeah, that's also the reason why I don't generally work with such small clients. I much rather handle 5 clients that can pay $10k each. Managing 100 clients by yourself seems very daunting!
Open RiskThere is an interesting design between WP and #Hugo. Flat-file based CMS's like #Grav.
I am a bit surprised they are not more popular, at least for small sites. Giving up on a DB while retaining dynamic pages does not compromise much if any functionality, even while it removes significant complexity and risks.
Intended user experience is closer to WP than Hugo but a techie could setup alternative / parallel workflows involving git and working with markdown.
@openrisk @jalefkowit @Tijn I think the problem is that the people who would use this have no budget
And the people who might build it for fun don't need it because markdown and git works for us.
Tarus@jalefkowit @Tijn I switched to Wordpress from MT because they changed the license.
I now run Hugo
Bruno Nicoletti@jalefkowit @tante @mttaggart For a variety of reasons I currently use WP for one static site I run and the Hugo static site generator for another. While Hugo took an ounce more digging to get going, it is infinitely less painful than my regular swearing at Wordpress.
Gryphon Myers@jalefkowit @tante @mttaggart anyone who tries to sell SSG as "easy" is either kidding themselves or being dishonest. You're optimizing for performance, hosting costs, reliability and security at the EXPENSE of ease of use.
Artemis@tante @jalefkowit @mttaggart For me, it doesn't help that a lot of these UIs (Ghost, Strapi, etc) are veeeeery corporate open source.
As in, they're trying to upsell you their cloud (and AI) at every opportunity.
The front page is "talk to sales". You wanna self-host? You dig deep into the docs. Beware of leopard.
As in, they're trying to upsell you their cloud (and AI) at every opportunity.
The front page is "talk to sales". You wanna self-host? You dig deep into the docs. Beware of leopard.
ermo | Rune MorlingSince you appear to have subject matter experience: Why *do* people use WordPress?
No, I'm not being facetious; I'd genuinely like to understand why. For starters, I'm assuming it solves a problem that people need solved, in a way that makes sense to them?
Esther Payne 
@ermo @jalefkowit @tante @mttaggart Plugins and a fairly simple backend. It gives the illusion of simplicity and control.
The only reason I stopped using it was it's overkill for my needs. Hugo was finiky and I'm happier just hand coding my pages.
Some of my clients still happily use WP.
There's also a huge ecosystem of designers who host it and can update it for clients. So in theory you can easily move providers.
Other folks in this thread are correct wordpress is the windows of CMS
@onepict @ermo @jalefkowit @mttaggart that and if you want to run it yourself it's super easy. Drop a few files on your host via Ftp. Done.
@ermo @tante @mttaggart 1) WordPress is super easy to get up and running. It requires no exotic infrastructure, just PHP and MySQL, which are available everywhere for peanuts. With many hosts it's a free one-click install. You can install it manually by dragging and dropping files in an FTP client.
2) WordPress is a GUI-first product. Content management and configuration are done through a graphical interface. You never have to touch the command line if you don't want to.
3) There is an unparalleled ecosystem of themes and plugins to tap into. You can bend WordPress into nearly any shape you can imagine without writing any code.
@ermo @tante @mttaggart (There is a way to manage WP via the command line, and it is extremely useful for people like me, but normal people never have to touch it.)
J4ck
🏴🏳⚧🏴☠
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.
Baloo Uriza@fiend_unpleasant Im hungry for a 7-layer burrito after reading that and I don't know why.
stux⚡️@mttaggart Yikes
“developed by Coinbase, Cloudflare, and Stripe”
@stux Two companies I hope die before the end of the Trump Depression and one I vaguely tolerate because I mostly don't encounter their brand of bullshit.