Masturbatory

What is this thing?

On 12 October 2024 WordPress.org (i.e., Mr. Mullenweg, who owns WordPress.org and all related infrastructure), in a move that many have since described as a supply chain attack, took over forcibly the listing of Advanced Custom Fields on the official registry for WordPress plugins.

This was an unprecedented move. As the Advanced Custom Fields team said on Twitter:

A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

Emphasis in the original.

Source

For many people this move made it clear that the official plugin registry is not a safe place to host plugins, for plugin authors or for plugin users. Some started exploring ideas for solutions that would reduce the dependency of plugin authors and plugin users on WordPress.org and its owner.

One of the projects that have come out of the exploration is AspirePress, whose first goal is “to offer a viable solution to the centralized control of the .org website”. In a Twitter thread that Mr. Mullenweg started by taunting another project and its developer, AspirePress presented Mr. Mullenweg with a challenge:

In fact, here’s a challenge for you: why don’t you fund the next fork’s endowment?

Partner with some of your friends in the community, work with a group to establish governance, and put a seed together?

You know exactly how expensive WP is to maintain. You keep saying forks are beautiful. Why not help make one?

EDITOR’S NOTE. Mr. Mullenweg does indeed say that forks are beautiful. He has been repeating it at every opportunity since he launched his campaign against WP Engine. He even published a post on the official WordPress News site titled “Forking is beautiful”.

In any case, it seems that Mr. Mullenweg did not like the suggestion. He replied from the official Twitter account of the WordPress project:

If you aren’t a fork, what are you?

We have lots of useful things to do with our funds; sending it to your masturbatory governance and repository work that won’t benefit users at all is a waste.

If you’re going to do something useful, spend time there rather than reply-guying every post we make. You’ve been working since… September 28th?

What have you shipped of value?

How many users do you have?

EDITOR’S NOTE. It is possible that Mr. Mullenweg misunderstood the suggestion by AspirePress. AspirePress did not ask for funds for itself. It asked for funds for the next fork that maybe would come out out of this affair.

Mr. Mullenweg’s tweet was deleted after a few hours and cannot be found on Twitter any more. But you can still find it at various places on the web. You can also view this screencap of the whole thread that we host on our server: 2024-10-31-x.com-wordpress-masturbatory-whole-thread.webp

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The screencaps we use in this article were originally shared on Twitter by Kellie Peterson.