#automattic — Public Fediverse posts

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg Put on 'Leave of Absence'

On a company-wide Slack this morning, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced he has been put on a paid leave of absence.

“And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.”

He wrote that Davies was voted to be the new interim CEO. “I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied,” Mullenweg wrote.

Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a host of other popular internet brands and pieces of software. Mullenweg has faced several controversies over his management of the company in recent years.

In the same Slack channel, Davies wrote that Mullenweg would remain a board member and “he will have a voice in setting direction and making decisions.”

"As you have seen from Matt's previous messages, Automattic's board has decided to ask Matt to step away from his CEO role and take a leave of absence,” Schneider wrote following Mullenweg’s message. “We have asked Mark Davies to assume the interim CEO role while Matt is out. We've worked closely with Mark over the years and we're confident he will steer the ship well while Matt is away. I'm sure you will have many questions and Mark and your leadership team will be available to answer them.”

“I want to thank Matt for his support and I intend to support him, the Board, Automattic, and our customers during this interim situation,” Davies wrote in that Slack channel. “It will take me some time to come up to speed, but we'll move forward with transparency, communication, and teamwork.” He wrote that nothing will change as a result of Mullenweg’s leave.

Mullenweg, Schneider, and Davies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An Automattic spokesperson confirmed the above to 404 Media in a statement: "Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark's leadership and in the team's ability to execute against the company's priorities."

For the last few years, Mullenweg has waged a divisive legal battle with WP Engine, sparing publicly with opponents and peers on social media and in his personal blog. In 2024, he made an “Alignment Offer,” giving Automattic employees who disagreed with his stances the option to take six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.

One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. He then made another buyout offer, and threatened employees who spoke to the press with termination, saying, “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”

https://www.404media.co/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-put-on-leave-of-absence/

#wordpress #automattic

So an interesting thing to watch for, here, is that Automattic doesn't own the WordPress trademark. That's owned by the nonprofit Foundation, which is three Matt Mullenwegs in a trenchcoat, and licensed to Automattic. So he could revoke that, which would be HILARIOUS. (In theory Automattic has a perpetual and irrevocable license, but there are almost certainly ways around that, and he's threatened to revoke it before.)

Mullenweg also PERSONALLY OWNS the wordpress dot org domain (it is owned by neither the Foundation NOR Automattic, but by Matt himself), which he could also make them stop using.

https://www.404media.co/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-put-on-leave-of-absence/

#wordpress #automattic

[description: Destiel meme macro with the text "Matt Mullenweg has been forcibly removed as CEO of Automattic/Tumblr]

:wordpress: Mullenweg was muscle out and I'm just hearing about it now.

｢ writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” ｣

Where's my bag of hammers?

credits to @404mediaco

https://www.404media.co/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-put-on-leave-of-absence/

#mullenweg #wordpress #automattic #opensource #transphobia

Automattic Pushes Back On WP Engine’s Sanctions Over Allegedly Missing Messages
----------
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
----------
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.

Why does #wordpress suck so much?
That fit your #DEI? Or did your agency drop the notion as shown in the #DEI report vs the funding, or however that initiative breaks down.

But yeah. Wordpress. Late to the party on the whole #DEI bandwagon, but they did jump on eventually. That's funny.
😬

The only time WordPress wasn't late to the party was in 2003, when they bought the champagne. Bad joke. You get the idea.
They're still trying to decide how to handle PHP8.2, while the rest of you are like, what's PHP? Do I really need to learn PHP? You've got to be kidding me.

Those guys love me. #Unrequited so The Heart aches. (Aching hearts are ill advised?
...and so on)

https://youtu.be/DguMk2Hze1E?si=kB6cWGR06RrFyNLi

Anyway.

Why does this seem like it might be less secure @zombiewarrior
🤔
😅

I'm sure there's a PHP thing. :scoff:
why does everything become ten-thousand-times #NLP more #difficult when #wordpress is the #backend / #CMS ?

#Django has been around forever. granted: i don't use it. Why? Because @wordpress
@wpswitzerland
Look! Do they not even have a #Mastodon account? The @automattic
ahh... there it is
#AutoMattic

I wouldn't trust them, but that's just I.
I'm just a gigolo.
With a totale #finsternis meines #herzens

WordPress owner acquires Beeper, giving it two chat apps to rule them all - Enlarge / Beeper's new apps are now available, without waitlist, across... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=2015698 #cross-platform #ericmigicovsky #automattic #beepermini #messaging #wordpress #imessage #telegram #whatsapp #beeper #signal #apple #tech

Could Claap, an asynchronous video meetings platform, end the tyranny of Zoom calls? - Because of the pandemic, we’re all a lot more familiar with remote working than we... - http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/n_fA38j65GY/ #telecommunications #jonathanuserovici #videoconferencing #webconferencing #generalpartner #rocketinternet #telecommuting #kimaventures #mattrobinson #automattic #e.ventures #gocardless #ianhogarth #localglobe #technology #chrisherd #groupware #articles

Meet Anne from Jetpack: Philosopher, Nomad, Happiness Engineer

https://jetpack.com/resources/meet-anne-from-jetpack-philosopher-nomad-happiness-engineer/

What will Tumblr become under the ownership of tech’s only Goldilocks founder? - This week, Automattic revealed it has signed all the paperwork to acquire Tumblr from Verizon, incl... more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/nGgUDGYigFY/ #interneteconomy #webdevelopment #mattmullenweg #socialnetwork #digitalmedia #marissamayer #verizonmedia #worldwideweb #automattic #wordpress #social #talent #tumblr #media #yahoo #m&a #tc