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
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?
@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.)
