WordPress and Tumblr
“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” — Nelson Henderson
Matt Mullenweg’s legacy is deeply entrenched, with bits that he coded or advocated for spread throughout the web. Way back in a blog post in 2003, Matt wrote about his “dilemma” to find the best software to run his blog:
Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name.
That name was WordPress. You can see in that post some of the principles that would remain with WordPress for nearly two decades: openness and longevity that still guide Matt’s company Automattic today.
After b2 was forked to create WordPress, Movable Type and WordPress were vying for popularity. One static, one dynamic. One Perl, one PHP. Although different approaches, together they cemented the idea of a blog database schema that has fields for title, body, categories, and keywords.
In recent years, WordPress has drifted away from its roots in blogging. When I attended a WordCamp in 2017, no one was talking about blogs. It was all about using WordPress as a full CMS.
WordPress’s Gutenberg block editor has also captured most of the development attention in the WordPress community, completing the shift away from simple, text blog posts to richer, full web pages. Gutenberg represented a multi-year vision from Mullenweg to make WordPress’s default editor competitive with modern blog platforms like Medium.
While WordPress was growing to become an even more capable full web site editor, Tumblr launched trying something different. In 2005, Jason Kottke blogged about first discovering tumblelogs:
A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere.
Tumblr was inspired by early tumblelogs as founder David Karp realized there was no simple, hosted service with a focus on tumblelogs. Tumblr was a microblogging platform before microblogging was a coined term. The new twist in Tumblr’s UI was post types: start a new post as a link, quote, chat, or photo. The UI adapted to the post type, with most types not using a post title field.
Lead developer and CTO Marco Arment blogged in 2007 about potential self-hosted competition and the trade-offs for centralized hosted platforms like Tumblr:
Some people just don’t feel comfortable having their data and services in someone else’s hands, while most people don’t want to (or can’t) host, maintain, and upgrade web software themselves. There are also different feature sets: installable software is more easily customizable with plugins and source modification, while hosted services can more eaisly provide community and directory features.
This ease of use was a key part of Tumblr’s growth. Tumblr attracted a diverse, large user base full of both traditional-looking blogs and lighthearted niche topics.
Years later, when Yahoo! acquired Tumblr, CEO Marissa Mayer said that Tumblr and Yahoo! shared “a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design – and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.”
But the acquisition’s potential as part of Yahoo! never went anywhere. Marco had already moved on to dedicate more time to Instapaper. Tumblr changed hands again, to Verizon, as Yahoo! sold off many of its properties. Tumblr seemed derailed as other social networks gained momentum.
When App.net’s crowdfunding was successful, I blogged about loving the transparency of the new platform, because co-founder Dalton Caldwell was blogging regularly:
Where we only hear from Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costolo, through big news publications or at conference keynotes, for Dalton we hear it directly from his own blog posts, the way a small company should communicate. Being on the ground in posts and tweets is a perfect complement to his goal of treating users and developers as real customers.
Almost exactly seven years to the day after I wrote that, Automattic acquired Tumblr. There’s a kind of symbolism to that date coincidence. Tumblr is effectively being re-funded.
Like Micro.blog, Tumblr is about making blogging easier. Like Micro.blog, Tumblr allows custom domain names for your blog, something no other major social network allows. Unlike Micro.blog, however, Tumblr’s community is only Tumblr blogs, although earlier versions of Tumblr supported adding RSS feeds. Micro.blog’s community brings together not just Micro.blog-hosted blogs, but people using WordPress, Mastodon, or home-grown IndieWeb solutions.
Tumblr seems in the best hands at Automattic since Tumblr was that small platform envisioned by David Karp and Marco Arment. Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic team have a bunch of work ahead of them to integrate Tumblr into the WordPress ecosystem. I don’t know how that’s going to play out, but I know that preserving all the Tumblr blogs and giving them new life is good for the web.
Micro.blog and Automattic may be on parallel tracks. Two companies wildly different in size and scope, but we can all learn from platforms that have come and gone, finding our own path to a shared vision of the future that embraces content ownership, supports healthy communities, and deemphasizes massive social networks. I’m wishing the team at Automattic the best.
People were pulled away from blogging, drawn to social networks that were faster to post to and easier to interact with friends. It’s our job to pull them back to blogs by bringing the best parts of old-school blogging and modern social networks together.
Next: Interlude: Interview with Marco Arment →