Matt never cared about WordPress' (environmental) sustainability to begin with

If you follow web development, you'll know WordPress has been going through some self-inflicted drama for several months now. It all centers around WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and the decisions he's been making.

A couple of days ago, out of seemingly nowhere, Matt showed up in the WordPress Sustainability Slack channel, didn't say hi, and then proceeded to shut the whole endeavour down. Two years of people's work, time, and effort just shuttered.

I guess we should have seen it coming, because right from the beginning because in retrospect it was pretty clear that Matt never cared about the environmental sustainability of WordPress.

There's a whole Reddit conversation about this latest grenade Matt's thrown into the community. There's plenty of commentary about Matt himself and the dollar store Elon Musk-like vibe he's giving off. It's Reddit, interesting read.

But one Redditor's (u/notvnotv) comments caught my attention. They linked to a video from WordCamp 2022 (the global WordPress conference), where Matt is asked what can be done to begin addressing the environmental impacts of WordPress and the ecosystem around it. Here's a link to that part of the video.

The video shows Nora, a member of the Spanish WordPress community, standing to speak in front of a conference hall full of people in a language she is not native in. She raises concerns the community has about the sustainability profile of WordPress to Matt and Josepha Haden Chomphosy (former WordPress Executive Director), and asks what can be done to support the idea in a more official way within the WordPress community.

Josepha starts off by saying some people spoke to her about it in 2019 & they were going to follow up. That didn't happen because she wasn't able to attend the next WordCamp. She then goes ahead and puts the blame on them for not coming back to her. Probably not how yougo about showing that you care about something.

Matt then chimes in with a smugness that gives you a vibe. The German word for it is "backpfeifengesicht". His response? "Start a Slack channel." Lip service. Nothing more than lip service to the question. No acknowledgement of any issue. No thought about how this fits in with the rest of the community & other initiatives. Just start a Slack channel & we can hide this away in asynchronous conversations.

"Sustainability channel in make.wordpress.org's Slack. Nailed it."

Josepha Haden Chomphosy, former WordPress Executive Director.

Maybe Uncle Xi should start a Slack channel to solve the Taiwan-China issue. Sounds solid. I'm sure the asynchronous discussions there will be fruitful, and Xi will one day, eventually, get an AI to summarise them. Probably just before he shuts the whole thing down because he's not really interested in talking about the matter constructively anyway.

Needless to say I think this is a mistake. My colleague Chris has reflected on this on his blog too. You should read it.