A change in the winds: WordPress

We're a project that's aiming to improve the free and open access to information, culture and collaboration. You can find out more about us by browsing around our site, if you're curious, especially Signals - but that's not what I want to talk about today.

WordPress is facing a scandal right now, where, simply put, they wrestled control of their plugin directory away from the people that expected to have some control and autonomy over it.

Whether you think what @photomatt did with recent actions was wrong or right doesn't affect the point we're going to make: That much power, and the ability to unilaterally decide to force update millions, tens of millions, of websites - without the explicit permission of those involved - should not be in the hands of any one party, and ideally nobody should have that power at all.

We've decided to help in this effort, so for the next few weeks we're going to be pivoting hard and making sure Defederation is implemented in our codebase fully and beginning to modularise it so we can begin tackling use cases other than our "Netflix/Spotify but you're not the product" core idea that led what Riff.CC was for so long.

In short: We're going to build, with the help of the WordPress community: a fully decentralised, (de)federated WordPress plugin directory - owned by the people, for the people, but with good controls in place to stop people from being able to upload garbage or worse.

We'll allow each directory that runs on this system to moderate according to their own rules and standards, we'll publish the standards Riff uses for ours (wp.riff.cc is our current planned URL) and we'll federate with anyone else who is willing to follow the social contract that WordPress broke. Together, we'll fix this.

We've engaged some WordPress community members (thanks and shoutout to Jeremy Nusser - @blackmagikcodes for inspiration) to tell us what they actually need in a decentralised plugin directory, and we're open to ideas from the community and we want to truly make a lasting solution.

So far, we've settled on ways we can allow plugin directories to work together, a plausible update mechanism for using a Defederation-based network of the directories (Lenses, in the Riff Project's parlance) and we'll work on making a plugin that lets you pick from a list of truly independent plugin directories.

Thanks to the way Defederation works, they'll all pretty much have the same content. We're even strongly considering sponsoring CDN access and use of our gateways for the entire WordPress community so that anyone can just use our system for a public good.

Why are we doing this?

Simply put, it helps us test our project, which is great, and prove out our concepts in the real world, which is even better, but fundmentally, WordPress is just a massive part of the Internet. We'd hate to see it wasted, whether or not intentionally. We believe WordPress and all associated are just trying to do the right thing in a complicated world, and we aim to give people choices that make that easier to do.

Ultimately, we hope they're actually happy to hear this.

If you want to find out more, join us on Matrix (follow the breadcrumbs on riff.cc) or email me - wings@riff.cc - or tag me on X/Twitter as @gnomethrower.

Let's keep the web open and free.

~ Wings