I had the privilege of speaking twice at WordCamp Canada (“WCEH”; as in WordCamp, eh?)this year but had to leave before Matt Mullenweg’s town hall because of a family emergency. After catching up later through his recap post, I was struck by how much ground he covered, from personal publishing tools and encrypted journaling to AI, open media, and the future of the web itself.
His remarks touched on several themes that feel central to WordPress’s next chapter: helping people reclaim their online identities beyond centralized platforms, and navigating the tension between openness and authenticity as AI reshapes how we create and trust content.
I wanted to ask Matt two questions that build on those ideas about the role WordPress can play in making “publish once, syndicate everywhere” a reality, and how it might help rebuild trust in what’s real online.
Let me give a little update on what I’ve been up to. My life’s mission is to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging.
On the social side of publishing, I have Tumblr, which is a microblogging social network, but right now it’s on a different technical stack. I need to switch it over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue. We’ve had to prioritize other projects to make it sustainable. It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it.
Day One is a fully encrypted, shared, and synchronized blogging and journaling app that runs on every device and on the web. You can also have shared encrypted journals with others. It uses the same encryption as one password. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea—for example, to write this talk. Its editor is not as good as Gutenberg yet, but it’s pretty decent at allowing multimodal input—which means you can record voice notes, draw things, etc.—and capturing it all. It’s mostly replaced Evernote, Simplenote, and even private P2s for me. It has some fun features, like when you make a new entry it records, the location, what music you’re listening to on Apple Music, how many steps you’ve taken, the weather. Honestly, some features that would be nice to get into WordPress, at least as a plugin.
So WordPress.com Studio is built on an open source project called Playground that we created to allow you to spin up WordPress in a WASM container in about 30 seconds, right inside your browser.
So my first question to Matt is this: WordPress powers much of the open web, but most people still publish primarily on centralized social platforms. There were some good talks at WCEH on the open web, the social web, and the indie web, shared by Dave Winer and Evan Prodromou this week and by Tantek Çelik at WCUS 2019. What role do you see WordPress, either in core or through plugins, playing to help people reclaim their online identity and make ‘publish once, syndicate everywhere’ a mainstream reality?
However, when AI creates a face, there’s no such restrictions there. So something that we could actually start to do, because right now I think we have some anti-AI rules in the photo directory, I think we should probably start to look at evolving that. So, for example, you can take a picture of me right now, change my face with AI to a face that has never existed, and that could be CC0-licensed and anyone in the world could use it. So I think there’s some possibilities there.
I also think there’s some opportunities to use AI analysis of all the photos to give a better semantic understanding and a better search that we currently offer, which right now is typically monollingual, I don’t think it translates well into the, you know, 60-plus languages that WordPress supports, and it’s manual tagging. So there might be things to do, like a more automated understanding, which, of course, gets better over time.
You know, we started to incorporate some of the AI models like Gemini and other things on WordPress.org to make us way more efficient on things like plug-in submissions and some code scanning. I actually think we’re very much in chapter one of where this is going to be.
So first I will say, I don’t want to say that there’s bad actors. I think there might be bad actions sometimes, and just temporarily bad actors who hopefully will be good in the future. You know, every saint has a past, every sinner has a future. I never want to define any company or any person as permanently good or bad. Let’s talk about actions.
Which leads to my second question for Matt: As AI makes it harder to tell what’s real online, trust in content is slipping. The Breaking News episode of RadioLab in 2019 showed how deepfakes blur the line between truth and fiction. How can WordPress and the open web help rebuild that trust? For example, could it support initiatives like the Content Authenticity Initiative that use open tools to verify the source and history of digital media?
Featured image source: https://canada.wordcamp.org/2025/thats-a-wrap-for-wordcamp-canada-2025-wceh2025/
