 Cool, and and I'm realizing that we should probably do a Reset on fellowship of the link and figure out where we are and what we're interested in and Pete It sounds like you had a nice chat with Chris last week It was you and Chris Yes Did you talk about those kinds of things like what is fellowship or now we talked about some specific? Some specific things and I forget what cool it was fun Cool And it feels like there's a whole bunch of things going on out there that we should maybe corral into What we care about and see how that remix affects our own conversations and so forth. So It'd be nice to have Chris and SJ here and a couple others. So Hmm We can cruise into it I will note real quick. I will have to drop a quarter to the next hour I learned about micro blog from Chris So it's like very popular in the indie web community because it's fully Integrated with micro formats and indie off, which are both like big things It's also Also got activity pub Yeah, that's much more recent But yeah, it's very cool. I mean I feel like part of the indie web second cell posting So I'm not quite sure I understand But if people like use the people like using it, I can't object have more social networks The thing I was looking for and it might fit the bill is I Actually, what I was looking for was an email newsletter something that's not sub-stack or goes And I wasn't even really thinking it to be micro blogging too, but I think they do I Think they do Email as well as Everything else That micro blog has email. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting Because it seems like just posting stuff someplace and then pretending it's a mailing list pretending It's a wiki pretending. It's whatever else is the way to go Yeah, like just put the file someplace and then do things with it into it. Yeah I wonder if it's micro blog maybe it's something else because I don't my blog is looking like a plain old blogging hosting service it doesn't Doesn't smell very different So the cool thing is it's it's kind of like a little Twitter. It's a it's a social network, but it's also Independent they can be independent Yeah, it uses the Mic the micro formats contact will help you to syndicate things to it really So it's more mastodonnie But so I guess let it works with activity pub, but I think the idea is more that Once again because the any web community is right into self-hosting It's more about the idea that like individual self-hosted entities can syndicate to it and Use it like a social network through that interaction Somebody can subscribe to your micro blog like it was a Mastodon account Yeah, yeah And and it is this micro blog is what I was thinking of from mr. Manton So it also has email subscription Yeah, I will say a lot of people are a fan of button down for email. I haven't used it. Yeah, that's also one Thank you. I appreciate it. I Made a list and button down was definitely on it and it's pretty good My In my list I've got paragraph and newsletter glue, which is a wordpress plug-in So done with wordpress Yeah In fact, I've got a whole bunch of wordpress blogs I have to go like shoot in the head because I keep getting update messages from a Service that was hosting them. We're psych. We've updated your php server. I'm like, I don't want those anymore I'm interested what has turned you off of wordpress. So I Tried hard for more than a dozen years to love wordpress I built my I had a business site for the relationship economy expedition that I built on wordpress And I hired a web mistress to run to build me a little bit of custom code Which she did and it worked for a while then I got hacked and somebody owned that domain and I had to fight to sort of win it back And then I had to pay a company called sukuri which does wordpress site protection I basically had to pay them almost like ransom to protect the site Because I was self-hosting and didn't have the cops to do my own security And I was paying them more than I was paying dream host to host a variety of other sites and do a bunch of other work I was like that was really irritating Then I went to try to change my website and it turned out my web mistress had gone upscale and was like I only do retainers now and Her rate had gone way up and I was like I don't have retainer kind of business for you So then her chunk of code basically blew up and didn't work anymore. So I just went and rebuilt The room I I built a way worse version of the site on Google site Which is my go-to and I figure if I'm on Google sites, they're not gonna let themselves be hacked Which has been true so far. I've had no trouble there and then and then I tried for years with Sundry plug-ins and themes and other kinds of things to make WordPress do things I wanted it to do and it never did and I always had trouble placing images and making images do what I wanted in them in the flow of text and all that They've never seemed to fix that and I was like I'm done. I'm spent. It's over. My love affair with WordPress is done So that was it and it was me trying to fend for myself in WordPress in a sense that probably did me in but but the ecosystem wasn't working for me Yeah, yeah, that's legit I Don't know. I also have sort of to be clear I spent like probably almost five eight years being primarily Sort of like your web mistress so a WordPress developer for hire. Yeah So I was able to make WordPress to a lot of things for me and I still have WordPress sites. I use in very abnormal ways But my my problem has more been the the intended user for WordPress I think has shifted and I don't really like Dislike WordPress for this. It's just the reality of what WordPress is is At one point it was a blogging tool and now it is a corporate website slash large media company tool And that's fine. It is what it is and you know, if I was a medium to large media company I'd probably use WordPress, but the affordances that they have built for Or For making it work for that type of user make it much Less friendly from a user perspective to be a single-person blogger I have a Site I use to build like my personal archive that has a press forward, which is a tool. I helped build that's WordPress based I write nothing in that site It's literally just an archiving tool great for that. I have some old sites I keep up to date. I have a site that is an aggregator of my content that works automatically That's in desperate need of an update because the theme I used No longer works and if I try to change anything on that site it crashes And I have to go in and like wipe out the theme and rebuild the site And that's like it's just too much work and I don't want to deal with so yeah, I'm trying to figure out like Maybe some alternatives, which is why almost all of the things I built now are static sites Generated on github.io Domains that I can map domains to so much simpler and so Unhackable like the only point of failure there is my github account and that's been secured 20 ways to Sunday and I can run 20 sites 50 sites a hundred sites off of there It's just yeah Frustrated me because there are a lot of things that WordPress is good at that. I would like to apply elsewhere but the difficulty of just writing in it has raised Significantly to the point that I am frustrated by it. Wow. Wow And Pete you didn't really dabble much in WordPress Did you but the rest of the rest of the rest of our company sounds similar to your conclusions? Yeah I I did I've done a fair bit with WordPress hosting WordPress actually further. Okay And it's yeah, I wish I was smart enough to have Retainer arrangements with my clients, but then I would need paying clients and yeah, and actually WordPress is it's crazy making you have to really stay on top of the The security stuff. Yeah, yeah, it was bad Everyone's thinking like as as it as a you know, it's a tool for medium-sized companies It's it reminds me a little bit of media wiki as a wiki engine, you know, it's it's got a lot of capability And it's a heavy lift to keep it going yeah, I mean if you have the time and the Engineering capability to regularly invest into your WordPress instance just like with media wiki You can do a lot, but I would much rather spend time Building new things than doing boring maintenance work on old things. So an amateur question Have those two platforms become sort of the modern outlook server? Which basically like you needed a full-time admin to run a stupid outlook server because outlook was originally an x400 x500 server which they terribly we purpose to be an An internet mail server and it had all this crusty stuff that was like hard to maintain And so anytime I ran into somebody who's like on outlook. I was like, I'm so sorry Have these two platforms that used to be like interesting and fun become the same thing And is that an inevitable consequence of Serving corporate clients and getting bigger and getting older or is this just It's it's serving Wikipedia all the wikipedia. So it's you know, it's not necessarily a business thing. Yeah Yeah, wiki media is very definitely not a business platform But it is a scale thing. It's a scale thing Yeah, and and you know some weird weird path dependence to because they could have gone They could have scaled differently. Yeah, your question reminds me It's it's a it's a interesting and partially fair question and partly unfair question. It's they're not like outlook It reminds me of when I asked chat to BT as as one does compare contrast the all the Disney characters with the Indian gods and goddesses. Oh my god. It's all done. It's like, it's like, yeah I could compare those for you and they have some of the similar, you know, kind of but Yeah, no, that's not really fair Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is the more like sort of significant question is is the fate of all successful open source tools to become enterprise software I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's about the intent of the maintainers and The intent of the users and the intent of the community I think the thing about WordPress is like it's actually really interesting because one could argue that like Automatics Deared it in this direction, but I wouldn't say so actually automatic in my experience and I actually have code in WordPress core So like in my experience automatic is very hands-off. This is Sort of the outcome of the people who live and work in WordPress Also living and working in You know Capitalism which is to say they need to make money and they want to make the most amount of money and Therefore if you are a community of people who are Building this tool for hire both in terms of as users and as developers But also as contributors because a lot of contributors to WordPress in the same way that has happened with Linux Are paid by a company to contribute to WordPress great, right? So because of that it's inevitably going to turn towards The needs of enterprise because that's who can afford to contribute to it and because the project is not Particularly focused on any other intent whereas like Could that happen with ghost? It seems less likely because the intent of the project has always been Small And so there's a different Set of outcomes that are expected of contributors that WordPress where it's just The only requirement is better and the definition of better is according to the contrary according to the people who contribute That's why I'm not angry about it like WordPress develop the way that it develop Because that's how things develop in general unless you make a very strong intent otherwise. Yeah, certainly I made a career off of developing WordPress for almost a decade. That probably would not be possible if I had Done just ghost not that ghost was a thing, but I couldn't imagine doing that with just goes now, right like That is what it is And other people were doing what you did on Drupal or on the other major platforms at the time or if they were in education On what was it called Moomba? No, yeah, there was a Moomba There was a replacement to Moomba also that I can't remember the name of yeah Yeah, there was a major there were some of these major platforms in different areas that people adopted and got good at But they were all hard to use There also like an information architect Strategic software development question here about how do you scale and how migration actually winds up working? I think Maybe but I I would I would contribute something different. Yeah, I like Arum's Analysis that makes a lot of sense another thing is that WordPress Despite being you know groundbreakingly simple Has always been a little bit hard to use So it's not quite a muggle friendly tool Even though muggles were using it. So you had to have a layer of you know insulation people or Translation people or whatever, you know, you needed infrastructure people to be able to run the WordPress and so that that was the foot in the door kind of for Turning that into an industry If you were able to run it yourself ghosts you can run yourself. I think nowadays pretty much Maybe that's not true But it but anyway, it was just complicated enough that you a soul proprietor blogger Was probably not going to be running WordPress by themselves. They needed You know help and then that turned into part-time paid help and then full-time paid help and then along with that The the plug-in marketplace and the theme marketplace. I think was a huge thing so as soon as you started having a theme marketplace and It's always been the themes of markets and themes and plugins have always had free and paid, which is great But as soon as you have free themes and and and sorry paid themes and paid plugins Those are people's livelihoods, right? So they're gonna drive it, you know up the complexity curve and up the Price curve and up the and also try to keep their special sauce features out of the core code If they can well a good a good developer will do a mix, right? They'll do loss leader features into the core code and then they'll do premium features into their proprietary stuff gives you platypus And yeah in a way, yeah, it's a way to you know WordPress is platypus-y like that it's good right because then you've got people making money off of And this is kind of a virtuous open source cycle and in general, you know You want people making money on open source and shedding, you know good kind of Generic things right to the rest of the community Because if they weren't making a living doing it they wouldn't be able to be donating the free stuff So it's virtuous. Yeah. Yeah I think the other reason like it's somebody who worked with Drupal as well that WordPress one-out sort of amongst these other CMS platforms like very clearly at this point I think their latest stat puts them at like 40% of all websites and is that they have There they have the advantage that the foundation is not just the automatic WordPress foundation It's not just hands-off but has a clear source of revenue through hosting and leverages that revenue to run events and sponsor people and have Like a lot of collaborations and more than anything else what it valued That no other open source project succeeded at valuing of my opinion was documentation Where the automatic foundation paid for professional technical writers to write documentation and made it public and well put together and clear to read and Like well SEO'd And that was a huge advantage for not just attracting users But also developers, which is the other thing that you need for a success Drupal and a lot of these other tools Chambla was one Text pattern was another a bunch of these right they're just they are very poorly documented and when that happens the inevitable developer brain Disease comes in where they're like why are you asking questions? Shouldn't you just know that the answer is in the code and then nobody wants to Contribute to that community because it comes off like assholes So yeah Automatic and WordPress are not only developer friendly, but developer community friendly. So they've always been a huge You know builder of the community around around it Unlike anything else Yeah, then nobody else really does it like that and They've leveraged that really effectively for WordPress and for their WordPress VIP business and for Buying tumblr. It's just a great move by them And that they were smart enough to understand that From their experience the value for these things does not come out of the tool it comes out of the community And as long as they invest their time and encouraging the community the tool will improve One way or another so interesting. So why did tumblr die? How did they kill tumblr? What broke no tumblr died because yahoo owned it and yahoo kills everything. Yes And after yahoo killed it after having paid billions of dollars for it Automatics like we'll take it off your hands and it's been improving not just as a platform, but the amount of activity on it has been improving and Traffic from it has been increasing to other sites, which is an indication of a healthy network So interesting. So under tumblr in my brain. I've got an article from the New York Times yahoo to buy tumblr for 1.1 billion Then I have automatic buys tumblr and then in parentheses for three million question mark Wow Very little because yeah, this is what yahoo did damn no longer fully exists, but that's what does it just kills things It's very bad Yeah, like like flicker is another good example Yeah, yeah, delicious. What an opportunity delicious to two opportunities that could have bade them a ton of money if they They bought up a bunch of good companies then managed to kill most of them Yep They kill they bought up a bunch of ad tech companies and killed those two Yeah, so they're not even good at making money on the things that are supposed to make money for them They bought ink to me geocities flurry Alta Vista broadcast comm Delicious Docs pad egroups. Oh, that's right egroups Via via web upcoming org remember upcoming. Yeah upcoming is the one that yeah Kill them all boom kill them all there's a great article about this That talks about like I'll have to hunt it down. I think it's in my pinterest Where it talks about like how yahoo just like is designed to kill everything I'd love to see that Yeah, here it is how yahoo killed flicker and lost the internet back in 2012. Oh wow. Oh you beat me to it Peter Yeah, the good old days That one was one of my favorite how things Got killed by But the other one was Have to hunt it down Think I also have it in here How aim got killed it was like an oral history of aim. I think was what it was Aim got bought by a well, right? So aim was a well. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what happened to it. This is I've pre dated this archive I wish I knew what happened there because I did some consulting to John Borswick when he was so AOL bought New Total New York, which was Borswick's little startup in New York and he became an AOL VP He basically went over the you know to Virginia and worked out of the building and then he hired me for a while Because they made him they put him in charge of all the different buddy list acquisitions And we were you know, they bought I see Q I think And they had AOL native and there was another one in the mix. I'm forgetting what it was So they were kind of like buddy list central for a while and trying to figure out should we put a business model on this or whatever And I don't remember what happened there that much But then then that got that space got eaten. I guess later by Skype order another another thing that just Shot itself in the foot over and over again. Yeah. Yeah Here it is. It was mashable. This is a great article to it would be fun to do this You know, so Paul Roni and I are gonna do this Podcast and I think he's he just sent me a note this morning saying he's finished his fundraising round So he can come out of the underground for a bit Well, thank you Jason ever says a And so this would make a really nice kind of retrospective topic just to talk about the graveyard Yeah, I mean there's so many you could you could spend a literal career just writing about the things Google has killed It's own product that has killed off like in their cribs. Yes, it's own products crazy just crazy Yeah, the tote one more reason to do things you can own I do You know, I think it's I do think it's interesting to watch how some of these things take the huge lead and resources they have And just sink them Just sink them entirely billions of dollars hundreds of people's careers for not and It's it's just like back and forth. I remember I wish I remembered who this was now and what company it was But I remember seeing a little startup show up and they put this gray-haired guy in charge They basically hired in a guy who I had watched kill a couple other companies and he looked like a CEO he looked so good in that role and Had a famous name because he had like companies that he had done stuff And he was clearly in the old boys club and then I watched him kill off this little startup It went no place because I was like, oh, wow, they're doomed. They're doomed from launch because they hired in a Dude that doesn't really know what he's doing Yeah, it happens a lot in the media business too where there's somebody who looks the part of leadership Yeah, they hire them and the guy it's just a moron and doesn't know what they're doing and screws the company I mean, it's sometimes like How do you it's just it baffles me that Very often people who have bankrupted every company they've worked at are considered more qualified Than somebody who has had spent a little less time working as a CEO It's uh, I think I've mentioned this book before but they talk about this in Disney war the book Disney war where there's like a certain set of executives who believe that being an executive is like a universal Skill uh-huh where it's like as long as you have been a good executive in one place Then you'd be a good executive in any company doing anything. Yeah over anything. Yeah And like it's so like it doesn't even stand up the basics scrutiny as a conceit and It's just it was very clear in that book where like who was it Eisner I love moving his executives around where somebody who was like, yeah We turned Disney store into an amazing Working company that nobody thought would ever work and then just take that executive and now they're in charge of TV programming Right, and it's a complete failure and then the person who was there was the person who gets put in charge of Disney store destroys it It is like such a self-evidently incorrect Conceit, but it's still there No, but there's any more. Thank you. Oh, it's a great book Yeah, what my favorite I call corporate dramas That's a great one Arjun Abisco the story about Arjun Abisco barbarian at the gates is a great one bad blood is a great one Yep There's no category of these in my bag and slowly adding to my good reads that is just The most Another RGR, right? Yeah, the first multi Like the first greater than a hundred million dollar Leveraged buyout. Yep, which is now Mondalays. Who named that? We had that great idea God another baffling idea. Oh, yeah That's like the trunk thing Naming their selves naming themselves trunk. Yeah. Yeah. Oh god. That was just so bad This is kind of fun. This is a review of business horror stories Yeah, oh here it is Here's my list of corporate drama All these are great Smartest guys in the room Yeah, that's it as a classic one. Yeah, that's your Do I have that on here? I don't think I have it on here. It should be the big short too big to fail Yeah, the big short is I love the big short movie and book They're just so good Adding a new couple new thoughts in my brain around us Yeah, that's a good one. I'm gonna add that to the list Because that's a great book too Disney War Gonna have to add barbarians at the gate Gonna have to add your Goodreads list Flash boys right the big short Disney War barbarians again fall into the house of Forbes nice Conspiracy super pump is a good list. Yeah. I I love This sort of thing I didn't realize I did and then like after resisting for a long time Well, because I feel like big short is almost a little different because it's like a general a lot of companies Where something like Disney Wars or the fall of the house of Forbes is like just one company's insane drama And it's it's it. They're all good but I feel like that is super engaging because you get this window into these people who Like the other piece of it is the type of people who do dumb shit and something like Disney or Or RJ Reynolds or RJR Nabisco, right? Like they have no shame So they have no problem being open about all of it and the but and they all hate each other And so they're all like trying to put down for posterity how terrible their mortal enemies are right Which just makes for great reads It's also the man who broke capitalism about Jack Welch That's a that's a good topic. Yeah Capitalism here, I'll give you the title in the Good long title You know a good corporate drama book Subject about one company would be Hewlett Packard because he went from Dave and Bill And when when they died the board went kind of wacky and killed the whole thing Yeah, that's another yeah company that just Dove itself into the ground full heart. I still am upset about them for what they did to POM OS That's a grudge. I'll hold forever. I loved POM OS I got a hop but Do I will note in terms of like what sort of interesting Stuff can come out of Working on I do think the inter wiki Concept is still really good. It's still something that I am working on. It's just I've been delayed by being sick and I Will work priorities that have taken up more of my time than I usually get to work Yeah, so I think like in terms of like what we are intending to produce out Initially, I think this is a good one and of course the The map of knowledge tools. I think is another good to good outputs for this group And I think we have neighboring projects that are like Synergistic with those things so we should just spin them up and blend that stuff together and sort of show each other our work and See what's up there. I think that'd be really nice Cool and then as I said Paul and I should be spinning up the podcast now, I think And I think in particular these conversations in the fellowship of the link are just beautiful sort of background and fodder and if we wanted to launch a Small series to run under the umbrella of hyper talk that would be pretty pretty awesome And then we could make this a little bit dressier and make it into a podcast a series of podcast episodes I'm always down to try to turn things into podcasts before I have to leave though real quick Yep, Peter. Do you are your is your headset a bone conduction? What is do you have a link to where you bought that because I really like bone conduction? Stop but my problem was always it couldn't be used for calls. It's a shocks And these are the open-com one Um, there's just a regular the regular ones without a boom mic. They work pretty well, too Yeah, I had not a shocks one, but a different one I think but it was It didn't have the headset. So I thought I was always taking it off to use the phone Yeah, actually these are great both the You know both of the regular ones on the boom one, it's really nice and they're they're beautiful They just work great the the Bluetooth for this really good The sound is really good. They sound really good Cool, all right. Well, I got hop. We'll talk later. All right. Thanks. Thanks for coming and I'm thinking if I can figure out how to do it to turn off the recording and then we can either hang up the call or there we go