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Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress (techcrunch.com)

submitted 2 months ago by neme@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[-] jedibob5@lemmy.world 148 points 2 months ago

Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.

“We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.

We'll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather... makeshift, so I'm curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress' engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I'm fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 67 points 2 months ago

WordPress is built on decades of hacky code, probably more so than Tumblr. I would be shocked if this is an improvement.

[-] Goodie@lemmy.world 27 points 2 months ago

is it decades of hacky code, or decades of battle tested code?

I haven't touched wordpress in... many years, but I've seen far too many developers look at old code and call it junk... only to break things horrifically when they attempt a rewrite.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 17 points 2 months ago

Hacky.

Wordpress has a reputation for the most moronic security issues. Especially when it's built on PHP, which has its own reputation for moronic security issues. And that's saying nothing about the quality of plugin developers or plugin code.

I've worked on Wordpress sites, plugins, and themes. That was many years ago now, but I doubt it's changed that much. If anything, it's mostly benefited from improvements to PHP.

[-] fake@sh.itjust.works 15 points 2 months ago

Has to rank as one of the most exploited pieces of software ever.

Definitely be not aided by the fact it's targeting an audience without the skills or knowledge to adequately configure, maintain and monitor it. And the plugin community only makes the vulnerability exposure worse.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago

Yup. I imagine a lot of users install a lot of plugins they don't actually need, which just expands the attack surface.

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[-] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

Both honestly. Very spaghetti, but noone can deny that it just works from a user perspective. Would I want to maintain the code? Hell no! Do use it as an end user? Hell yeah!

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[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

my thoughts exactly. Who in their sane mind sees WordPress as a solid foundation for anything?

you must be truly desperate to come to me for help.

~~Loki~~ WP

[-] Peepolo@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

Most large publishing companies, the white house and various government departments all use WordPress for their main sites. Its the third party integrations that cause security issues, not the core code.

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[-] jedibob5@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Not as familiar with WordPress, but if that's the case, yeah, I don't have high hopes for this going well...

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[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 2 months ago

Wordpress supports activitypub tho, so that could be cool if they want it to be.

[-] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

I read a couple of Tumblr blogs. If I could follow them from Mastodon instead I could delete that app entirely.

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[-] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 80 points 2 months ago

They summarised the history of Tumblr, but failed to mention how they lost 3 quarters of their users by banning porn?

[-] fpslem@lemmy.world 23 points 2 months ago

Like, two owners ago. Wordpress took Tumblr off Verizon's hands for $3 million USD, ~six years after Yahoo! bought it for $1.1 billion.

[-] gmtom@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago

Where the fuck does yahoo even get money from to do this kind of shit at this point?

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[-] MysticKetchup@lemmy.world 72 points 2 months ago

Even after Automattic acquired it, the site continued to lose money at a rate of $30 million each year, the company’s CEO Matt Mullenweg had said.

I still wanna know what they're spending all that money on, because I'm sure it's not developers or even servers. The idea that they can only be profitable if they're constantly growing their user numbers is an investor idea that's doomed to fail eventually and why so many social media sites are crashing right now

[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago

if they’re constantly growing their user numbers

All social media needs to constantly grow because attrition. Social media requires basic levels of user ship to be functional, even lemmy. Its a network effect where you need to have certain levels of users for some emergent properties to exist. For example, I speculate that defederation early between .ml and .world was the trigger that will eventually kill lemmy, principally because this results in fragmentation and a reduction in the properties we would get from "more users". Having more users begets more users, more content, more memes, etc. And I don't necesssarily see the defederation as something unneccessary, but what I'm describing is an inherent property of networks. Its not something that can really be argued with because this behavior is consistent across physical, biological, social networks. It just "is" as a property.

So foundationally, you can't sit still on a train moving backwords (which it always is). An organism needs to be constantly recruiting and growing new cells into its network because its also always dying. Growth is "holding still" for any networked system.

[-] TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 21 points 2 months ago

Lemmy can work without user accounts made directly on the server. I'm posting from a completely different instance using completely different software (mbin), and I can see both .ml and .world and interact with them both just fine despite their defederation from each other.

It's kind of more like a random street gathering instead of an exclusive club.

[-] Wrench@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Or like the golden age of instant messengers, where you had multiple choices of multi-client apps like Trillian.

You still had individual accounts for each IM platform, but a single app to chat on any platform.

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[-] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 7 points 2 months ago

Funny how all these social media corporations were run as ponzi schemes...

[-] sodalite@slrpnk.net 7 points 2 months ago

I see no mention of ActivityPub in the article, but I'm wondering if this is part of their plan to eventually integrate Tumblr into the fediverse as well.

However I agree with others that this will likely result in hella janky hackable websites first...hopefully it smoothes out.

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[-] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 66 points 2 months ago

Ah yes, WordPress, renowned for it's robust social engagement tools.

It's the kind of decision you announce over Zoom so people don't riot

[-] asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 30 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

Hopefully they're planning on using that to integrate with the Fediverse.

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[-] davidfield@lemmy.world 40 points 2 months ago

Don’t envy anyone involved in this.. it’s a lot of work

[-] Scrollone@feddit.it 9 points 2 months ago

...and the WordPress codebase is utterly horrible. I don't envy them at all.

[-] davidfield@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago

I don’t know what you mean? How could a codebase so often patched for exploits and problems be so horrible, surely it’s a shining example of all that is good with the internet? ;-)

[-] Evotech@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

I mean it's probably the codebase most targeted, so it makes sense

[-] filcuk@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 months ago

I was supporting a WordPress site and we've had issues getting blacklisted by Internet providers because some WP scripts were in the malware database (local file matching WP github exactly). What a nightmare.

[-] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 29 points 2 months ago

Seeing how much CPU and memory is using a single WordPress blog, i wonder how much it will cost to host half a billion WordPress blogs

[-] BelatedPeacock@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

My guess is it scales a lot more efficiently the more you add. Still probably costs a lot though.

[-] realharo@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago

Most of them probably get 0 visits or close to it.

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[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 24 points 2 months ago

wtf i don't want this i want the blog ive had for a decade on tumblr

[-] zzx@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

They're not actually going to change anything you can notice. I guess they're just changing the back end for... Reasons

[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago

Sounds stupid. I wonder if this makes it easier to sell the content to AI scrapers?

[-] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 31 points 2 months ago

It makes sense that they'd want to move it to a single codebase rather than have both Wordpress code and Tumblr code in the same organization.

Anyone else old enough to remember when Wordpress was called b2? Good times.

[-] T156@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Tumblr's codebase is also both quite old and infamously terrible, even if it's from being shuffled around companies a bunch.

Centralising its backend into one platform doesn't like too bad of an idea.

[-] Roldyclark@literature.cafe 18 points 2 months ago

So much WordPress hate but I survived off making WordPress sites out of college. The new built in site theme editor is great. No more hacky plugins.

[-] RagingRobot@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Yeah it was a nice tool for making sites fast. I loved using it but haven't in a very long time. I hope it's still nice to work with like it was before. Even with PHP it wasn't that bad of an experience lol.

[-] Roldyclark@literature.cafe 4 points 2 months ago

The overuse of plugins is what made it a mess. But you need less and less nowadays!

[-] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 months ago

Automattic says the move to WordPress will have its advantages, as it will make it easier to share the company’s work across the two platforms.

I foresee no issues

[-] __init__@programming.dev 17 points 2 months ago

Wordpress is just the worst

[-] gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 46 points 2 months ago

The open-source software from WordPress.org is great for blogs. It becomes the worst when you try it make it do more than that. Even worse is WordPress.com which is very different and uses a very locked-down and restricted proprietary version of the WordPress software. They charge $25/mo for the tier that lets you add custom CSS.

Additionally, Automattic gets a free pass of violating the WordPress terms of use for the WordPress name and logo to intentionally trick people into thinking the paid platform at WordPress.com is the same as the free and open-source software from WordPress.org. They get to leverage the non-profit's name and likeness and gets preferential treatment to funnel business to their for-profit company.

[-] rmuk@feddit.uk 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Wow. For real, I always just assumed that .com was the commercial arm of .org. Holy shit.

Edit: So, for anyone curious, .com is owned by Automattic, who also own Tumblr, Beeper, PocketCasts and Buddy Press. The WordPress project and .org are owned by the WordPress Foundation. Automattic makes some contributions to the WordPress project but they and the WP Foundation are seperate.

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[-] Shotgun_Alice@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago

The face I made when I read that title and it was not good.

[-] Doorbook@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago

Ewww

[-] humble_pete_digger@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

~~Wait wtf. Automattic was sold in a fire sale?
When? Why? How?

They were not making money? I thought they had WordPress.com - that should be making pretty good right? Or paid plugins like jetpack - those gotta be making money.
How did this happen that they got sold in fire sale?~~

Edit oh. Ive read it wrong. Tumblr was sold in a fire sale, okok. Yeah I could see that.

[-] fox2263@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Hopefully they’ll at least use Bedrock and not default Wordpress.

Or modify it themselves.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Or use a shitload of insecure plugins for wp to do what it wasn't made for.

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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024

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