#automattic — Public Fediverse posts

Automattic Pushes Back On WP Engine’s Sanctions Over Allegedly Missing Messages
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Automattic has asked the court to reject WP Engine’s motion for sanctions, arguing that WP[…]
 
#WordPress #Uncategorized #Automattic #WPEngine

https://www.wpnews.io/automattic-pushes-back-on-wp-engines-sanctions-over-allegedly-missing-messages/

Put together a sourced timeline: WordPress Student Plan 2026: How Students Get a Website They Actually Own.

The WordPress student plan is a free-for-one-year WordPress.

Sources are listed on the page. Corrections genuinely welcome.

https://aitimeline.in/wordpress-free-student-plan-history-timeline-4845/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=wordpress-student-plan
#WordPress #WordPresscom #Automattic #Education #Students #Technology

Search Engine Journal: Automattic Fires Back At WP Engine’s Motion For Sanctions. “WP Engine is asking the federal court to sanction Matt Mullenweg and Automattic for destroying evidence. Automattic fired back at WP Engine with a late-night blog post that called the request for sanctions “desperate,” explaining that what’s missing is “personal communications with romantic partners” […]

Some years I back I really wanted to work at Automattic - developers of :wordpress: Not only it is open source, but also job ad was on headers:

X-nananana: Batcache-Hit
X-hacker: Want root? Visit join.a8c.com and mention this header.

But rich men tend to screw things up: especially after Matt Mullenweg's drama with WP Engine, there is no fireworks left about the company :blobcatheadinitshands:

#headers #career #wordpress #automattic

We have a new addition to The PHP Foundation Governing Board: Anne McCarthy from Automattic. Anne brings a balanced mix of thoughtful empathy and deep technical knowledge and will bring tremendous insight to the Board. Welcome, Anne! Read more https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/08/04/anne-mccarthy-joins-the-board/
#php #automattic #wordpress #phpcommunity

‘#AI makes shit faster.’ Like hell it does. #WordPress #Automattic

Automattic quietly acquires WebHosting.com from AT&T for WordPress push
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Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has landed one of the most self-explanatory domain names on[…]
 
#WordPress #Uncategorized #acquisitions #Automattic #WebHostingcom

https://www.wpnews.io/automattic-quietly-acquires-webhosting-com-from-att-for-wordpress-push/

Breaking news: 🎉 Automattic's latest "innovation" 🤡 makes #Gravatar the social media equivalent of a clogged toilet 🚽. Users are fleeing faster than WordPress's credibility after the Gutenberg disaster. 🚀
https://unattributed.cc/re-bye-bye-gravatar #BreakingNews #Automattic #SocialMedia #WordPressFail #HackerNews #ngated

⚡ #Harper is an offline, privacy-first #grammar checker for developers, written in #Rust and maintained by #Automattic #opensource
It lints a document in milliseconds and uses less than 1/50th of LanguageTool's memory footprint 🧵👇

🧑‍💻 https://codeforthepeople.com/
#CodeForThePeople #OpenWeb #Documentary #Automattic

Automattic’s ‘Code for the People’ Documentary Is a Rallying Cry for Users to Fight for the Open Internet
#Variety #News #Automattic #AutomatticIncScreening #CodeforthePeople

https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/automattic-code-for-the-people-1236802508/

Automattic Gives Teams A Month To Build Anything. Here’s What They Created
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What happens when more than 400 teams are given a month to build whatever they[…]
 
#WordPress #Uncategorized #Automattic

https://www.wpnews.io/automattic-gives-teams-a-month-to-build-anything-heres-what-they-created/

#TechIsShitDispatch
Let's talk about the overflowing wheelbarrow of shit I recently encountered while reinstalling a whole bunch of apps onto my #Android phone after deleting them for privacy reasons before going through customs. Buckle up, it's a wild ride.
#Signal #K9Mail #Slack #2FAS #Okta #Vivaldi #Microsoft #Wise #YubiKey #Synology #Jetpack #Automattic #Wordpress #LinkedIn
1/24

As some of you may already know, Eric Binnion (ebinnion) of #Automattic and #WordPress has stage 4 esophageal cancer. His prognosis is about six months to live. This fundraiser is to support him and his family through this incredibly tough time. Every bit of support helps them focus on what matters most. If you’re able, please consider donating or sharing to help set them up with as much support as possible. 🙏

https://gofund.me/94f74495a

21 years at Automattic

One year ago today I published a post about 20 years at Automattic, so it follows that I’ll post this one today, with 17 minutes left in the day. AI is still disrupting our industry, and tech companies that are rolling in money are laying off thousands of developers. I don’t know what’s coming next,Continue reading

https://odd.blog/2026/06/20/21-years-at-automattic/
#Automattic

21 years at Automattic

https://odd.blog/2026/06/20/21-years-at-automattic/

“Rather than chasing perfection, the goal was to move quickly before ideas got too precious, share what was in progress, and iterate in real time based on your feedback.”

‘You broke it’

"Like we fucking care”

#automattic #wordpessdotcom

“Radical Speed Month is a creative experiment led by developers, designers, marketers, and many others across the Automattic team to build, ship, and test WordPress.com features faster.”

With absolutely NO regard for the impact on customers or the support ‘happiness engineers’

#wordpresscom #automattic

Nick Hamze about the lawsuit WP Engine vs Automattic:

»The Only People Winning This Lawsuit Are the Lawyers«

WordPress growth has stalled, and if the fighting continues even the winner will lose as both parties depend on WordPress.

#WordPress #Automattic #WPEngine #Lawsuit

https://regionallyfamous.com/lawyers-winning-wordpress-lawsuit/

Je constate des bugs avec #WordPress dans sa version 7.0 : image d'en tête qu'il faut réenregistrer pour qu'elle s'affiche, taxonomies qui ne passent pas "au premier coup", la marche forcée d'#Automattic vers de nouvelles fonctionnalités dont l'IA ne se fait-elle pas au déficit d'autres pourtant basiques ? Mais je suis peut-être le seul avec ces soucis ?

Move Fast and Don’t Break Things: Shipping the Simplenote MCP

When Automattic recently launched a month‑long hackathon, engineers Mark Biek and Evan Tobiesen knew exactly what they wanted to work on: the Simplenote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

Neither Mark nor Evan works in data science, so measurement might have been the easy thing to skip. Instead, they shipped a product with built‑in measurement from day one.

The team faced two difficult design questions. First, how do you give a large language model (LLM) permission to write to a user’s notes without a disaster? Second, how do you know if anyone is using the tool, without ever seeing the contents of their notes?

Simplenote is a lightweight note‑taking app for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, and your browser. It’s been around since 2008, and like many of Automattic’s products, Simplenote is open source and free. Mark launched a read‑only version on April 15. The hackathon was a chance to go further.

Radical Speed Month (RSM) was a single month where Automattic employees stepped away from their regular work to pair up, build, and ship a passion project. The hackathon started on April 22, and by May 8, Mark and Evan had already shipped a new version of the MCP.  Neither Mark nor Evan works on Simplenote day-to-day. Mark is on domains, Evan on marketing technology.

“I have been a Simplenote user for 10 years. I’ve always really loved it, and I have a gazillion notes,” explained Mark. “And back in February, I wanted an excuse to write an MCP server because I had never written one before.”

Designing for Data Safety

As Mark put it, “The last thing we want is to put a tool out and have an LLM run wild and delete somebody’s notes.”

At first, the MCP tool was Mac-only and read-only (list, search, get). Opt-in write tools (create, update, trash, restore, revert) were the obvious next step. The MCP spec lets a server tag each tool as either read-only or destructive. 

Part of the work involved quantifying LLM guardrails, turning vague safety concerns into concrete numeric thresholds.

Before enabling writes, Mark and Evan added several data safeguards:

• Discoverability: The MCP write tools are not exposed when the MCP is in read‑only mode, so LLMs can’t discover them by accident. 
• Content protection: There are also limits to how notes can be updated—text can’t be replaced by large amounts of white space, and updates can’t drastically shrink or blank out a note.
• Recoverability: Notes may be added to the trash but not deleted, so they can always be restored. 
• Rate limiting: Bulk operations are blocked, too. If the MCP detects more than five write operations within 30 seconds, it stops.

“If you have a note that is above a certain length, and that length changes by more than 50%, we block it,” Mark explained. “Let’s say you have a note that’s a dozen paragraphs long, and the LLM does something wacky and tries to wipe it out with just a single sentence… the rate limiting will prevent that.” 

Designing for Telemetry

The MCP only records two data event types: setup run and tool call. That may look like it wouldn’t be enough. But those two event types answer more questions than you’d expect. The telemetry records data on adoption, stickiness, tool popularity, and connector preference.

Instrumenting an MCP server without leaking user data was part of the project. 

“On a technical level, we generate a random or a unique ID,” explained Evan. “It’s just an ID for the install. And then we track very minimal data…. So we can see that this random user ID ran the tool ‘get note.’ While we don’t see which note or anything like that, we still get worthwhile usage stats.”

One way to use Simplenote is on a Mac with a local install rather than in the browser. This way of using Simplenote can be fully offline, so notes never get to the web. The MCP also works with this setup.

Users can also opt out of tracking completely with a single command.

We both spent a lot of time making sure we understood what the AI was doing and whether it was the right way to do it.

Mark Biek

How they built it

Connecting AI to Simplenote was only half the story. AI also helped build it.

“We worked really hard at not just vibe coding this, letting the AI crank out whatever and not knowing what it was doing,“ Mark explained. “We both spent a lot of time making sure we understood what the AI was doing and whether it was the right way to do it.”

The team applied guardrails to their own process, not just to the LLM’s behavior at runtime.

“We didn’t just say, ‘hey, build me an MCP server,’” added Evan. “We had the documentation and the scope of the project lined up. We used issues in Linear, pull requests, and automated tests, kind of like guardrails around the AI.”

Working with multiple AI tools created a separate problem: keeping the codebase consistent.

“The agents’ markdown files, which definitely helped to keep [the project] on track, made it easy to review, and ensured that, in the end, it looks like a uniform code base,” Evan said. “It’s not like parts of it look different depending on which AI agent or which prompts we used.”

This is especially important because Simplenote MCP and Simperium, the open source sync backend that powers Simplenote, are both publicly available on GitHub.

“This is available as an open source project,” said Mark. “People could fork it, people could submit their own enhancements or bug fixes to it. And so we wanted to make sure that the project was organized from that perspective as well, in case there are outside contributors who want to add anything.”

The number of open source contributions the project receives is just one of the metrics the team will watch.

“I think it’s just going to be: are people using it?” said Mark. “That’s the first level of success. We don’t have a number in mind. But if anybody’s using it at all, I’m going to be excited.”

He added: “A second layer of success would be if we actually started getting some outside contributions.”

The Simplenote MCP shows a pattern other teams can copy: Set numeric limits on writes, so an LLM can’t run wild. Record which tools ran on which platform, but never what the user wrote. Let users turn telemetry off with a single command. Apply the same discipline to how the AI writes the code as you do to how it runs at runtime. None of this is technically difficult. It just has to be decided early.

The new Simplenote MCP currently works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code (Copilot), Zed, Cline, Windsurf, and anything else that speaks MCP. Give it a try, and, in the comments below, please let us know what you think.

Radical Speed Month, and a new Reader

https://herve.bzh/radical-speed-month-and-a-new-reader/

Your WordPress Site — From RSS Feed to Social Account

https://activitypub.blog/2026/05/22/your-wordpress-site-from-rss-feed-to-social-account/

DreamHost Requests Court To Keep Documents Under Seal In WP Engine V. Automattic Case
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In a filing to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, non-party[…]
 
#WordPress #Uncategorized #Automattic #DreamHost #WPEngine

https://www.wpnews.io/dreamhost-requests-court-to-keep-documents-under-seal-in-wp-engine-v-automattic-case/

#wordpress #automattic #chatgpt

If you missed the live event Wednesday in NYC, never fear. There’s a recap and recording available for your pleasure. automattic.com/2026/04/hila... #HilaryMason #ai #firesidechats #nyc #automattic #developers

dev/ai/nyc with Hilary Mason

If you missed the live event Wednesday in NYC, never fear. There’s a recap and recording available for your pleasure.

https://automattic.com/2026/04/hilary-mason/ #HilaryMason #ai #firesidechats #nyc #automattic #developers