WordPress is the most important piece of software in 2023 (and beyond)

Attn: Creators and small brands Buy a domain. Get some hosting. Install WordPress. Don’t bemoan about bloated software, legacy code, or that WordPress is too complicated. Start learning the software all over again. Invest time into it. Play with it in the browser before you do anything else if you want to see what you’re getting into. We’re watching another social media platform burn. Ashes comprised of our followers and years of content. My business of publishing WordPress news is getting hit with a steady decline of referral traffic from, what was, a major source of readers. I’m forced to be on Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Facebook — again. How many lessons must we learn about rented land? Feeding platforms that want our content to run a cash machine for advertising profits. No more excuses. It’s time to learn WordPress, invest in open source, and become part of the community. We took open source for granted It’s easy to look back at the last 5 years and point fingers at Gutenberg or FSE for piloting us all in a direction we originally didn’t want to go in. Or to be cautions when there’s only one VERY influential person calling the shots. Especially when he’s also the CEO of two large tech companies, and responsible for a dozen other products. Josepha Haden Chomphosy recently restated the Four Freedoms of WordPress, in the 2022 State of the Word: “the freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works and change it so that it does your computing, as you wish. The freedom to redistribute copies so that you can help your neighbor and the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, giving the community a chance to benefit from those changes.” Josepha Haden Chomposy Read our recap of State of the Word 2022. Name a bigger piece of open source software that has the presence of WordPress, with a more diverse set of users. From engineers, to mom-and-pop pizza shops, WordPress touches a lot of humans. A community-driven effort, that for the most part, is 99% made in public accessible channels. Slack, GitHub, WordPress.org, meetups, WordCamps, etc. When was the last time you rang Tim Cook about your struggles with iOS? Elon about Twitter Blue? Not perfect, but It’s the closest thing humanity has to a town meeting for a “utility app” that empowers us to broadcast to the world. Twitter exodus should be the last warning you need to invest in a blog, a podcast, a newsletter, and RSS. The flaws you don’t like Yes, WordPress is complex for a large percentage of the user base. It costs money in licenses, hosting, and professional services. On the other hand, thousands of people contribute to it, make awesome stuff for it, and create educational materia