stevegrunwell, 2 months ago

Well, this blew up. 😳

I want to take this opportunity to say that the #WordPress community is full of amazing people. Some work for #Automattic, but plenty do not.

Please don’t let the actions of one (albeit prominent) company in the space diminish the hundreds of thousands of hours of labor done by people who have/will never work for Matt.

elfin, 2 months ago

@stevegrunwell Right. WordPress Core is NOT going to be sending your data from your WordPress install for consumption. If that code showed up in Core, this might be an interesting issue.

If you have stuff at Tumblr, WordPress.Com, Blogger, Xitter, FaceBook, the companies can and will monetize it and AI is this weeks darling (read "crap") tech. WordPress.Com is a company like any other.

wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip is a whole different animal...Until you install that total sack of shit JetPack.

jargoggles, 2 months ago

@stevegrunwell
This is coming right off the heels of some serious transphobic bullshit from Matt, as well: https://mashable.com/article/tumblr-transphobia-matt-mullenweg

Absolute dumpster fire.

airwhale, 2 months ago

@stevegrunwell

Still confused.

1. WordPress.com hosts a lot of blogs. It can't seriously claim any transferable rights to the CONTENTS of these blogs?

2. Why would AI Tech Bros want to pay for readily available blog content? Don't they just point their crawlers to wordpress.com/* and disregard any robots.txt anyway?

stevegrunwell, 2 months ago

@airwhale

1. I haven’t run anything over there in a long time, so I’d refer to the Terms of Service.

2. Have you seen what AI tech bros will pay for? A fool and his money…

I’d imagine ease of parsing would factor in; instead of crawling, get a nice, packaged export full of supporting metadata.

WP databases (and WXR exports) can contain way more data than you might see on the front-end (but I’m speculating)

airwhale, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

@stevegrunwell

Thanks Steve!

1. Having made it this far without reading ToS'es, I am not about to start. Life is too short. May be in there tho...

2. Fair point.

Edit: just read the Verge article, reporting that WordPress.com and Tumblr are currently blocking most content scrapers on their sites, including the ones from AI companies. As for 1), shared data is only publicly posted AND the site has not opted-out.

Opt-in would be a better model though.

cmdr_nova, 2 months ago

@stevegrunwell so, I should uninstall Jetpack?

stevegrunwell, 2 months ago

@cmdr_nova I mean, if you’re able to, probably not a bad idea. It depends on how easily you can replace (or live without) the modules you use.

cmdr_nova, 2 months ago

@stevegrunwell I mean I’m only really using it for the simple social shares and easier reach to the Wordpress community, both those things I can just do manually

stevegrunwell, 2 months ago

@cmdr_nova in that case, migrating away from Jetpack should be fairly straightforward. Good luck!

_L1vY_, 2 months ago

@stevegrunwell @cmdr_nova If I have the most basic level of #Wordpress blog that doesn't allow plug-ins, am I safe? Or do they all have #Jetpack regardless 😩

johnlehet, 2 months ago

@_L1vY_ If self hosted, installing Jetpack is something you have to go out of your way to do. If hosted by Wordpress.com, I have no idea, but it seems in that case Jetpack is not the greatest worry today if you don't like AI.
In 20 years of using Wordpress, I've never installed Jetpack on my own or anyone else’s site.

stevegrunwell, 2 months ago

@_L1vY_ as @johnlehet said, it would depend on if your “basic” WordPress instance is hosted on WordPress.com or not.

If you self-host (e.g. Liquid Web, WPEngine, GoDaddy, on a VPS you control, etc.) then you should be in the clear. This news is specific to instances running on WordPress.com (presumably of any service level).

_L1vY_, 2 months ago

@stevegrunwell @johnlehet My business website is on wordpress.com. It has always tried to make me accept or use JetPack.

stevegrunwell, 2 months ago

@_L1vY_ @johnlehet if it’s on WordPress.com, then this sale of data is relevant to you.

FWIW, Jetpack has traditionally been Automattic’s “get some of the niceties of WordPress.com (especially those things that may require additional server resources or API configuration) on your self-hosted instance!” play.

It seems odd they’ve been pushing Jetpack if you’re already on dotcom, but it’s been ~2yr since I’ve dealt with Jetpack licensing. Upsells to unlock features?

_L1vY_, 2 months ago

@stevegrunwell @johnlehet Yes, I believe it's upselling. They always tried to get me to use plug-ins and other features in higher subscription rungs.

bowreality, 2 months ago

@cmdr_nova @stevegrunwell Yeah I am wondering too

cmdr_nova, 2 months ago

@bowreality @stevegrunwell I've gone ahead and gotten rid of jetpack and all Wordpress organization plugins

bowreality, 2 months ago

@cmdr_nova @stevegrunwell I’ll take a look as well. I am self hosting and maybe a good time to look for an alternative to Wordpress as well