Joost de Valk, creator of the Yoast SEO plugin, writes about WordPress, CMS market share and open web governance.
HN links it in WordPress governance disputes, where commenters debate whether he and others banned by Mullenweg were starting a fork, and for market share data.
They never claimed to be starting a fork (at least not yet)[0]. They only called for reform to the existing governance structures.[1]
Matt Mullenweg painted it as a fork to suit his narrative and pre-emptively poison the well (by implying they are incompetent) of a potential future fork.[2]
He's done that a couple times now. He claims to support forks and says "I'll even promote them on WordPress.org" (paraphrase) but what he does is post before a fork is even ready or properly organized. Thereby sabotaging the effort and making everyone involved look bad. [3]
It's truly evil.
[0] https://x.com/jdevalk/status/1878210129914409063
[1] https://joost.blog/wordpress-leadership/
[2] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
[3] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/
EDIT: Matt just posted another childish taunt in response to Joost's clarification. See https://x.com/photomatt/status/1878227222927933815
For context, Joost de Valk is the original creator of Yoast SEO — an extremely popular SEO plugin for WordPress. He's also one of the people Matt Mullenweg banned from WordPress.org on January 11th for "starting a fork" (which wasn't something that was currently happening) [0]. Post Status is a WordPress business community which de Valk just acquired, and is going to be turning into a non-profit with an advisory board. These actions match some of the thinking de Valk wrote about in December. [1]
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/11/matt-mullenweg-deactivates-wordpress-accounts-of-contributors-planning-a-fork/
[1]: https://joost.blog/wordpress-leadership/
> None of the banned people mentioned a fork
Steady on, at least one of them wrote a big blog post on his own site Dec 20 basically prematurely accepting the honour.
https://joost.blog/wordpress-leadership/
I can imagine the excessive smugness there about 'taking back the commons' triggered the purge.
Thanks this is helpful, and your response tells me a lot of why some people don't want to use it anymore. It's still massive though https://joost.blog/cms-market-share/