The social network of the web

I was just catching up on tweets and saw an announcement earlier this week that Matt Mullenweg is going to lead a town hall discussion at WordCamp Canada next Friday in Ottawa. A week from today. I find that exciting. I’ll in the room for sure, and blogging it. Why not? 😉

I am presenting the day before, where I’ll do a demo of the new WordLand, explaining how it’s now twice the product it was last time you all saw it. It is still centered on WordPress as the place where all the user’s writing is published. And somehow through the magic of software, we manage to make it into a social network. And the cool thing about the whole stack of software we build on, all of it is replaceable and of the web, in every sense.

There are things that Bluesky and Mastodon can do that WordLand can’t. But there are also many many things we can do with the structure that WordLand creates that the others can’t touch. There’s a simple reason for that, if implementing something, no matter how attractive,  without limiting the web-ness of the system, we didn’t do it. This is the social network of the web. That means all the pieces connect with each other in fantastic unforeseeable ways. And anyone can discover these connections. That was the joy of the early web, the thought “Hey I think I can do that” and when you try, it works! We’re back there again, if the people come. The technical challenge is still there but now is smaller. Getting people to look and fall in love (hopefully) is the big challenge.

After WordLand 0.8 is ready, real soon now, who knows what’s next? That’s the glory of a bootstrap. Every step tells you where to go next. That’s how you know you’re hitting a target.

I don’t know if Matt will be there for my demo, I hope he is. He and Automattic and the community have created a fantastic platform. Finding WordPress has a super powerful API that I didn’t know about is  like finding a new web. Let me know if you see it too. 😉

So thanks Matt for your great contribution. I hope to be able to thank you for that personally in Ottawa next week. Perfect timing.