#169 – Wes Tatters on the Evolution of Internet Communities and WordPress Open Source

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So on the podcast today, we have Wes Tatters. Wes has been immersed in the tech space for close to four decades, starting his journey with early computers like the Commodore 64 and TRS 80. He’s been an author, with multiple books on internet technologies to his name, has worked across AV and media, and today he’s the driving force behind Rapyd Cloud, a globally distributed hosting company. Wes’ perspective is shaped as much by his hands-on experience building communities on CompuServe, AOL and MSN, as by his deep involvement with modern open source platforms like WordPress.

Wes starts off by sharing some of the fascinating stories from the early web, when getting online meant stringing together modems and bulletin boards, and long distance communication felt nothing short of miraculous. He talks about the evolution of the internet as a space for community, and how chance encounters in early online forums led to opportunities like writing for Netscape and shaping the very first JavaScript Developer Guides.

We then discuss the changing meaning of community across different eras of the internet, touching on the shift from closed walled gardens, like AOL, to the open source ethos that powers projects like WordPress, and much else that we take for granted online. Wes describes how WordPress’ flexibility and openness allowed anyone, anywhere, to claim their own piece of the web without technical barriers, and how this has contributed to its rise as a cornerstone of global digital freedom and self-expression.

Our conversation also examines the challenges, and potential missteps, of the modern internet from social loneliness, to the commercial world of social media. And reflects on WordPress’s role in helping steer a path back to more positive, open, and empowering online experiences.

If you’re interested in how the history of the internet directly shaped WordPress, the Open Web, and the communities we build today, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wp tavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Wes Tatters.

I am joined on the podcast today by Wes Tatters. Hello, Wes.

[00:03:50] Wes Tatters: Nathan, good to be talking together again.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve got to be very, very, accommodating of Wes’ time, because for me it’s about four in the afternoon, something like that. Wes, on the other side of the planet, is giving up his time at about one in the morning. I have no idea why you are here, but I appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:04:07] Wes Tatters: Oh look, my day tends to be largely focused on talking to people in Europe, and in the United States. Half my employees are in those parts of the world as well. So I tend to work midnight to midnight. And we’re in the middle of a big product launch, for Rapyd, which has meant we’re just talking, and being visible, and I’m awake and happy to chat.

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: So you literally pivot your day, your Australian day, you pivot it so that you are available for North American and European customers. So we should probably say you work for a hosting company called Rapyd Cloud, And that’s where the thrust of your marketing endeavors go. So you pivot your day?

[00:04:41] Wes Tatters: Yeah, like about, I think about 60% of our customers are in the United States, and about 30, 45, 35 are in Europe, and 5% or something in Asia, Which is pretty generic for the WordPress space. Our focus is around obviously those markets, but also because we’re a global company, we don’t have a head office.

Everyone who works in our team is doing it remotely. It might be Dubai, or Chicago or the Philippines or Pakistan, India. So we choose times of the day, we have this great calendar and for every meeting we post up a list of all the times, and then there’s happy faces, red faces and smiley faces. And someone will go, all right, I’ll take the red face. That’s the nature of WordPress though.

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, madness though, when you think about it. If you were to rewind the clock 30 years none of this was possible. I mean here, I am talking you through a web browser, as if it’s nothing, and it is utterly remarkable. And actually that’s going to be the thrust of this conversation, I think. We’re going to trace the WordPress community in particular, not just the community, the software and what have you, over the period of time it’s been in existence, 21 years odd.

So, do you want just give us your backstory, specifically I guess around WordPress, but just generally in tech? Because I know you’ve done quite a lot of other AV related things as well.

[00:05:54] Wes Tatters: I’ve, been in the tech space for close to 40 years. I was trying to work it out a little while ago, and it’s like, I remember my first computer. It was a Commodore 64 or something, or a TRS 80, or something like that. And I would’ve been 16 or 17, and even then it was like, I was programming them, not playing games on them. I enjoyed programming and coding.

So I started very early in the tech space, but as a result of which, even modems didn’t really exist when I first started in the IT space. Laptops and PCs and computers and certainly iPhones and all that wonderful technology we have today didn’t exist.

But there was already people in the space at places like DARPA, that were going, how do we connect the world? It was a government military strategy. How do we connect the world in the event of a nuclear war? That was the driving mentality behind what they were planning. It was originally going to be a network of radio towers sending, a bit like we had with the old modems, the buzzing noises.

But it was this whole concept of, how do we build a disconnected system that can survive massive breakdowns in the structure of communication? And a part of what they build, ironically, is what makes the internet so powerful these days. It’s that ability to interconnect disparate technologies, disparate systems, all different types of capabilities and devices and all those sorts of things, in ways that are transparent.

As you just said, we’re in two parts of the world and we are talking together in real time. I grew up in the, as a part of my life, in the media world, and film and television and primarily television. In a point in time where if we wanted to conduct a live interview with someone on the other side of the world, firstly, we had to book satellite space in the thousands of dollars per minute almost. And then we would go, Nathan, are you there?

And Nathan would come back four seconds later, and we would conduct these really bizarre interviews, with delays on this crazy technology. So much so that when live television was first starting, obviously there was a big fear that someone would say naughty words, or swear on television for the want of a better word. And one of the early ways that they originally managed, we have what’s called, a lot of television stations had this big red button called a dump button.

The whole idea was someone said f, someone had to slam the big dump button. But the way they we’re actually handling it was they were actually sending the entire signal up to a satellite and back down to the ground station before they transmitted it. Because that gave them roughly two or three seconds of delay, which gave them the ability for that big red button to stop the transmission point. But the signal had gone up and down through a satellite just to even achieve that craziness.

I came into that world, and started in that world. I was incredibly lucky that I lucked into an IT firm, here in Australia, that was at that stage of company that doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s a company called Wang Microsystems. Dr. Wang was the guy that invented the first memory ship, so he, he’s reasonably well healed, but that entire platform doesn’t exist. But Wang was one of the first it companies to release a processor with a box. There was this three racks that was a modem.

300 characters per second. It was bleedingly fast. But for, its time, and I was one of the first people that got to play with one of those things in Australia. And I’ll tell you what, I was hooked. I just went, even then I could go, oh my goodness. There were dreams of we can make it faster.

And we got 1200 baud, and then we got 1600 baud, and then we got 3,200 baud and 56 k. And every bit was exciting. Because what it was allowing me as a person to do, especially a person in Australia, was to reach out and communicate with people that weren’t in my part of the world. And we had things like America Online, well CompuServe first, I guess prior to America Online.

We had bulletin boards and local BBS software and things like that. And all of them were creating communities. All of them were starting to build communities around this same space. It was something that I really engaged with.

When I got into CompuServe though, it for me changed a lot of things. Because until that stage it was hard to communicate with anyone outside Australia. But with CompuServe, all of a sudden, I was connected to people around the world.

[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: What did that connection actually feel like though? Was it literally, you’d type something, and was it you’d leave the computer, like the email sort of exchange?

[00:10:46] Wes Tatters: They were really very, very similar to an early sort of discussion board. People would leave comments, and people would make comments back and respond, and people built relationships and discussions were built. And in my early life I was an author. I’ve written a number of books on internet technologies.

This is the guy in Brisbane, Australia, who happened to luck into a forum on CompuServe with a guy named Mark Tabor, who was the head of publishing acquisitions for Schuster and Schuster, which is McMillan, and sams.net, the biggest publisher on the planet.

And Mark was going, we are looking for authors to write in this space. They were releasing a new imprint at the time called sams.net, which was going to be like. Theirs was Teach Yourself series.

They were building it at McMillan, and their biggest problem was respectfully that IT people don’t make good writers. Love us, or like us, we don’t even like writing comments in code, let alone knocking out 4 or 500 pages of a book, to tell someone how to do something.

But that ability to be in a community outside of my own space, this is me in Brisbane, Australia, talking to the head of acquisitions for Macmillan, going, yeah, I can write a book. I’d already been doing some writing. I had, as I said from, because I have a media background, I’d been writing for magazine articles in Australia, and I’d been involved in communications and had some journalism experience, so I was kind of already in the space.

And yeah, the book got written. We actually wrote a book that told people how to connect CompuServe to the internet, because previously CompuServe couldn’t be connected to the internet.

[00:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember those times like halcyon day’s, rose tinted spectacles. Because that was real pioneering stuff. The idea that, okay, so dear listener, if you are under the age of 30, your world was entirely connected from the moment you could conceive a thought. In some respect you could turn the tele on and be live tele from around the globe. You may not have had internet access.

[00:12:44] Wes Tatters: I remember trying to explain to my parents what I was doing, and they were looking at me going, you’re doing what? And it wasn’t until the first book, 500 pages, 50 copies arrived in a box from McMillan, that the lights went on in parents’ head who went, okay.

[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: There’s something in this.

[00:13:05] Wes Tatters: This is odd. And we sold hundreds of thousands of copies of edition of these books. I wrote the same book for America Online.

The joke was America Online actually wasn’t even in Australia at that stage, which was interesting. But it gave me lots of opportunities, and this was about communities. This was about getting into communities. While I was in that community, talking, working with the a AOL team on how they were going to connect to this thing called the internet. There was a little crowd called Netscape banging around, going hey, love what you did, Tim. Love that original browser. We’re going to build a better one.

[00:13:37] Nathan Wrigley: An open one.

[00:13:38] Wes Tatters: An open one. And the Netscape guys had seen my books, came to my publisher and said, hey, could we do a book with Wes on how to write, how to build websites for Netscape? So we wrote six books for Netscape over the next five years, going teach yourself HTML development for Netscape. So community was the whole basis of it.

[00:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious that for people that are born in the last, like I said, 20 years or so, the internet has just been a feature of their life, almost like a utility. Almost in certain parts of the world, like a human right. You might even describe it on that level.

This conduit of information that can come in. This capacity to talk to people, any point on the globe almost immediately with almost zero cost. And in the time that you are describing just the merest foundations of that were beginning. Little glimmers of that would beginning to emerge.

[00:14:34] Wes Tatters: Really edge.

[00:14:35] Nathan Wrigley: Really interesting though. I can imagine your passion and interest and all of that must have been. The curiosity that was spiked by that.

[00:14:42] Wes Tatters: It was. I loved it. But even then, we still didn’t truly understand where it was going.

I remember a call from the team at Netscape going, it was around, I think it was around version three of the Netscape. Going we’ve got this idea we’re going to, we’re going to put a scripting thing in Netscape. What do you think? And I’m going, yeah. What do you mean? What do you think? We need you to include it in the next book. It’s this little thing called JavaScript.

[00:15:04] Nathan Wrigley: Just little thing.

[00:15:06] Wes Tatters: And I remember sitting there going, interesting idea. Can you tell me more about what it can do? And they went, we don’t really know yet. We’re still working on those bits. So we ended up writing the first JavaScript development guide, me and my technical writer, who was my technical editor for my Netscape books. And I wrote the first JavaScript Developers Guide for Netscape.

So we were there in the middle of it, but all the way through, we still didn’t truly get it. It was still such this small thing. I was talking with Bud.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Bud Kraus.

[00:15:38] Wes Tatters: Yeah, I was talking with Bud at PressConf, and we were chatting about just the way the internet’s evolved. I had the opportunity to meet Tim Burnes Lee.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, the Godfather.

[00:15:48] Wes Tatters: The Godfather of the internet. And listening to Tim talking about his dream of the internet and the worldwide web, this was a worldwide web conference seven, which was back before WordCamps. It was, that was what a WordCamp looked like before it was WordPress. And I look back and I was thinking, and I’m going, there were some serious names at that event. Tim Burnes Lee was there. James Gosling, the founder of Java, was there.

And these were guys doing for the want of a better WordCamp style sessions, chatting about these ideas they’ve had. Seeing even then that what the worldwide web, and what we’ve grown into with WordPress had the potential to be, was entirely different to the way the world thought before that.

I remember there was like, I think it was the Friday night. I actually ran the media for that particular conference, that was held in Australia. It was the first time being held out of the northern hemisphere. But no fully explained reason, it was being held in Australia, in my hometown, and I ran all the media for it.

And I remember some guys, they had this sort, they were going to create this shoe library, it was like, this is the early web. Who knows what we’re going to do with it? We want a shoe library.

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: A shoe library, yeah.

[00:17:01] Wes Tatters: They taking photographs of people’s shoes, and I remember it was like 7:30 on a Friday night, and Tim’s in a pair of slacks and a t-shirt. Taking his shoes off so that they could photograph his shoes, so that his photograph of his shoes could go into the shoe library.

[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: Of course.

[00:17:20] Wes Tatters: And this is the guy that invented the thing that we all live on. This is the father of everything we do today. But even then, he was this amazingly humble person, that was happy to have a chat with a bunch of kids and take photos of his shoes. It’s a different world.

[00:17:38] Nathan Wrigley: When you are where you’re at. So in the year 2025, we’re concerned about the internet now. And so the way it ended up is how it now is. And honestly, it’s not one of those things that you pick apart, as like what is the history? What were the dominoes that fell to make the internet, what it now is?

Like, history, politics and warfare, and all of those kind of things get dealt with by historians. The migration of people over great land masses, all of the kings, queens, all of that.

But this, this kind of doesn’t, and it’s fascinating to listen to you there, because it feels like it could have gone in so many different directions. Maybe would’ve been a more AOL type thing, where everything was closed and you had to buy into AOL, and everything was handled by AOL. It didn’t turn out that way. Open won. I’m not entirely sure that we didn’t swing back to closed with things social media?

[00:18:29] Wes Tatters: One of the things that caused that was the people who started using the technology that DARPA invented first, and it was universities.

[00:18:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. That was the client base, wasn’t it? It was the academics.

[00:18:44] Wes Tatters: It was the academics. So Tim’s original agenda was to obviously create a way to communicate with all the scientists in Cern what was happening in the accelerator that was sitting under three countries. Even then it was about community and communication. But as it’s walked forward, I look at the whole journey of the internet and at every point community has been a part of that.

The ability to share things. The whole basis of what we have today in open source, moving towards WordPress, is about communication. So you can’t have open source without a group of people coming together to collaborate on a project as large as WordPress, or as large as, Linux or as large as Drupal, or as large as all of these other projects. And they’re not being paid for the most part.

They’re doing it because of community, and the underlying technology behind that obviously is the internet. And more insignificantly since then this thing called the World Wide Web that Tim originally envisaged as a tool for sharing.

[00:19:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But just tool for sharing with a handful of academics, and then it just grew exponentially. Do you remember the first time that the internet became more social. No, let me rephrase that. Do you remember when the internet shifted from something which a few people did? To something where, not the majority, but it was like hard to ignore at that point. Because definitely as a child have a of no internet.

[00:20:20] Wes Tatters: Done badly, but Microsoft MSN. Windows 95 was the watershed. So Windows 95 launched, and for the first time, anyone, in inverted commas, with a modem didn’t need to know someone at a university. Didn’t need to know how to hard wire AOL to connect to something else. They could literally go get me on the internet, and it happened. So that was the watershed moment.

Now, MSN as a platform also was heavily driven by community. And again, like it or love them, the original version of Messenger, an embarrassing mess, but it started the concept of community. The original version of MSN was a place where you could go and chat. Their design philosophies around. I remember, in Australia, 9 MSN was, the branding of it. 9 here is our major television network, and they partnered with MSN, in Microsoft and Australia and our major telco to bring MSN to Australia. But it was heavily geared around building communities. And I was quite active in that MSN community in Australia.

We used to do things like popular TV shows would go to air, and then we would host forums where the actor, or the presenter, or someone from the show would hop literally straight off, the show would end at 9:30, and they would be in a forum going, and hey, tonight we’ve got insert name of whoever it is.

And people could ask them questions. And we curated it. I was a part of the curations team at 9 MSN at that stage. And, again, it was using this crazy technology to build community, and to expand communities.

Now for that network they were using as just obviously a marketing tool, but what it was doing underneath it was again, building this ethos of communities and spaces.

We then have obviously Facebook that took that and ran with it in crazy directions, and commercialized it. But underneath it we’re still this open source thing. There’s still whole open source community.

[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember the moment as well when the internet went more from a consumption kind of thing? So you know, you would log onto somebody else’s property, MSNs Messenger or whatever it may be. I do remember that, by the way. To I can own a bit of the web, a bit of that whole thing can be something that I am in control of. And now we move towards CMSs I guess.

[00:22:51] Wes Tatters: So this is probably 98 initially. So we were still writing books and Netscape was still trying to work out what they were doing in the world. And, Tim was, Tim was out telling people how big the internet could be. And I remember lots and lots of people, as I said, James Gosling’s come down, Tim Berners Lee’s come. The BBC had flown two camera teams, journalists, The Times had flown out people. NBC and CBS had flown out camera crews and to be at this event. Because Sir Tim was becoming Professor Tim at that stage. He was being reordered, a honorary doctorate from an Australian university. It was a big event.

Could not get a single Australian broadcaster to even show up. Now, put this in perspective. I knew them all. I was actually in that industry. I knew the people. I literally was on the phone to news directors going, dude, just send me one cameraman. Oh, what’s this thing? What’s this thing? It was the internet.

So 95 to 98, it was still a bit hokey. I think where it really started to change though is when things like WordPress started to arrive. Because before that my books on how to build a website, I love meeting people and go, I think I’ve got your book on a shelf somewhere. It was, and it was always either mine or Laura Lemay’s.

Laura and I were both writing in parallel for the same publisher. And some of her chapters are in my books, my chapters in her books. But then it was, we were still hacking HTML. If you wanted to use JavaScript, it wasn’t jQuery or anything like that. You were writing lines of code and hoping it worked.

And there were some predecessors and other things. Microsoft had to go at the same thing. Microsoft released a product called ASP, a little thing that.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, that’s right. Active Server Pages.

[00:24:35] Wes Tatters: Yeah, and then they released a thing called asp.net, and this wonderful new programming language called C#. And that was their push into this community space. They released open source product with it. They released a product which was called I Buy Spy Portal, which was eventually then forked into a product by a guy named Sean Walker to become a product called DotNetNuke, which was literally their version of WordPress.

I was there, I know Sean. I was in that space, and we were building communities again, coming outta the Microsoft space on DotNetNuke. At the same time, this little thing called WordPress was happening in parallel. At that stage, ironically, at that stage, I think DotNetNuke was actually more a CMS than WordPress was. Because WordPress was still really a blogging tool. It was still really MySpace for people who actually had a desire to code a bit.

But I think it was then, that WordPress journey, the arrival of a mechanism that did two things. It allowed you to create a website without knowing how to code, and it allowed you to become a part of something, a community online, where you could all of a sudden reach out of your local neighborhood, your local city, your country, into the rest of the world. And take things to the rest of the world. Sell products to the rest of the world. Communicate to the rest of the world. Share your opinions and thoughts. In the past, you could do that on CompuServe. You could do that on America Online. But in all those places, you didn’t own your content.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: Right, exactly that.

[00:26:18] Wes Tatters: Even MySpace, sort of like the predecessor to almost Facebook. Facebook groups and forums. None of these spaces you owned your content. And so I think WordPress in its initial incarnation, a blog, was a way for people to start expressing their feelings. And the concept of blogging. And then we started to grow that how do we get our blog to the world? Well, RSS feeds, and then aggregators, and then this wonderful thing called Google came along.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: Discoverability.

[00:26:47] Wes Tatters: Discoverability, and visibility. And all along that journey, there’s this guy in the states beavering away, we’re talking about Matt, with a vision of what WordPress could be in that space. And he was creating that in parallel to these communities starting to emerge, to these other companies like Google, and Facebook building closed enclaves.

Where Matt, obviously very passionate about open source, had a philosophy to build this space that people could use, that people could communicate and share. It was incredibly open. Anyone could write a plugin. Anyone could write a theme. Anyone could decide that they wanted to commercialize that space by selling their theme or selling their plugin.

Hosting companies could host that platform. So the fact that was such an open product, tweaked something in the consciousness of the time. It tweaked something in that desire to communicate, but also I guess a concept of freedom to communicate.

Freedom of speech is a passionate position of a lot of countries. The right to freedom of speech, and to a certain extent the right to express an opinion, safely. Or in some cases the rights to communicate in communities.

I discovered during Covid that the platform that Rapyd grew out of Buddy Boss, which is a social media platform creation tool for WordPress. Install Buddy Boss and you’ve got your own private Facebook.

We discovered that there were communities using Buddy Boss to communicate things to their people that they were terrified to communicate on private spaces, like social media or Facebooks. I know people specifically in some of those communities, doctors, other frontline groups and organizations that were facing the real challenges of what was happening in Covid and impacts of those things. They were able to use that gift of community, freely given, freely shared, where you own your raw data in ways that I hadn’t even considered.

And for reasons that I hadn’t even considered. And each time I look at it, people find ways to use community creatively and in incredible ways. And we find that at the core of WordPress.

[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we really do. I remember the first time I ever produced anything online, and it wasn’t with a CMS, it was just HTML. There was no CSS at the time, it was just tables and things. But I remember publishing that, a friend of mine knew more than I did, and he said, okay, here’s the environment. Here’s the text file. Just write it in there and, I’ll click a button and it’ll go to some server.

And then I saw it, saw it on his computer. And then I said to him, but it’s on your computer. And he said, no, no, no, if you go home, it’ll be on that computer well.

[00:29:44] Wes Tatters: And if, you go down the library, or you go up the road, and all you needed to know was where it was.

[00:29:50] Nathan Wrigley: And I remembered this profound feeling of, what the heck. That’s so amazing. What, I just put something on your computer, and now anybody in the world should they, discoverability is the big problem, but they could find it. He’s yeah, that’s it. That’s what the internet basically is. And I remember thinking, gosh, what a force for good.

[00:30:10] Wes Tatters: Huge force for good. Unfortunately, it’s also been a force for other things. I had a conversation with Tim, as a part of a set of interviews that the BBC were doing, this was in 1998. And at that stage, Tim was just exploring the idea of what he called the semantic web, which was zaml, and underlying metadata. And what Tim always envisaged the worldwide web should be, he always envisaged that every page, because he’s a data scientist, he envisaged that every page would have a beautiful set of metadata and structures, so that it could be searched and indexed.

Of course that’s everything the worldwide web didn’t become, respectfully. We have enough trouble in the WordPress space remembering to put a, an alt text on a photo that we upload. But his envision was of this beautiful semantic web. So it hasn’t gone exactly the same way as he envisaged.

But even without that semantic web, the additions and add-ons of things like Google, and Google search, and the ability to create an index, a massive index of the web. And now in 2025 going, hey, ChatGPT, can you just tell me the answer to this question please? And then can you write me a presentation?

I was having a meeting with an associate of mine. I haven’t caught up with each other for about six years, and he’s deeply involved in the concept of human centered design, which is, a business practice where you, look at the customer to identify the problem. Not look at the business and try to solve a problem.

He wanted to know about what I was doing in AI and that sort of stuff. And I said, did you know that I could write you a business plan? And they used to spend a lot of money creating business plans for people, and creating sessions and seminars. And I went, I can write you a seminar structure and plan in two minutes, on any topic.

I said, no, we’ll do better. Hey, ChatGPT, tell me what you know about human-centered design and why it’s good. And of course it printed out 20 paragraphs. And then I went, can you summarize that for a presentation seminar? And of course it did that. And then I said, now can you give me the structure of the seminar?

And it did that. And this guy sitting there going, are you kidding? And I said, that’s where we’ve come. But underlying all that is data and information. And none of that’s of any relevance unless you’ve got a community to share it with.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a sense that the internet has gone in a, I’m going to use the word bad or poor direction over the last decade? Do you have a sense that mistakes have been made? If you could rewind the clock, were there any moments in time where you think, I wish it hadn’t have gone in that direction?

Because I often think things like proprietary platforms that kind of want to put a wall around the conversations that we have. They seem like, maybe in 50 years time when we look back, maybe they’ll seem like missteps. I don’t know. Maybe they’ll carry on and it’ll all be, as it is now.

But it does feel like there’s a resurgence more to owning your own conversation. So obviously we do that in WordPress, but it does feel like there’s a bit of a groundswell towards more federated protocols. Things like the AT protocol that Bluesky are doing, but Mastodon and an ActivityPub and those kind of things.

[00:33:12] Wes Tatters: I think again, if you harken back to Tim’s semantic web and, he wrote a document, 2022 I think, which was 30 years on. And he talked about where things had gone. I can tell you right now that the way I read Tim’s take on the worldwide web is that e-commerce was not a part of it. That was not a part of his idea of.

[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, how would you even have conceived that?

[00:33:38] Wes Tatters: Yeah, e-commerce wasn’t a thing. I don’t truly think, Snapchatting or no fully explained reason, 15 second videos in TikTok were anywhere on the radar, because there was this whole deal of philosophy. But each of these things actually has the same underlying traits.

It’s all about communities, it’s all about relationships and building relationships with people. Where I think personally we have made a misstep is in how our younger generations consume that community.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot.

[00:34:12] Wes Tatters: Well, it’s more than a lot. There was a survey done and I haven’t got the figures in front of me, because I wasn’t planning on discussing where we were here. That’s looked at the level of loneliness of people in 2025, compared to the level of loneliness of 20 and 30 years ago. And it directly related this online community thing. The, unfortunately, what do we call false community sometimes. The people we have never met that we talk to in a Snapchat or something like that, that are not community, and they’re not really our friends.

And there is an increase in loneliness. And I think if there’s any misstep that we as a society have maybe taken out of this thing, is a lack of understanding of the impacts of loneliness. And I think the internet’s to blame for that.

[00:35:13] Nathan Wrigley: The internet is so beguiling, isn’t it? Because there’s so much interesting stuff there. I think throw the mobile phone into that equation as well. This always on device, which is available 24 7. But it’s that capacity, incapacity, to put it down. You start doing something with it and then five minutes later you realize, often, in many cases, five minutes is not even the benchmark. More like an hour or something.

[00:35:36] Wes Tatters: And, there are clinical reasons for that. We’re actually getting out of these devices the same dopamine hits that lead to depression. The same dopamine hits that lead to mood swings and to a certain extent mental health issues.

We now have this whole, go on the internet and you’ll get, especially when you’re hitting my age, are you dopamine deprived? Join this, get on this dopamine detox. And it’s real. It’s a real problem. And the five minutes bursts, the swiping, the scrolling, the doom, scrolling, they’re not things that you could have even comprehended. We have all this data, massive amounts of data available to it, but we prefer to consume a, TikTok video, or look at photos of funny dogs or kittens, or dogs and kittens or whatever it is. The internet and the things that have grown out of that, have all contributed to that.

[00:36:32] Nathan Wrigley: It really is interesting. Bit of a double-edged sword, really. Like on the one hand, the internet is probably the greatest innovation, maybe of all time. Or the electric light or, you know, what did the Romans us kind of thing.

But also, curiously, it also has aspects of it which are really deleterious to humanity, and can really bring out the worst. It allows us to consume the worst to, I don’t know, to spend hours where we probably got other things that we should be doing, but for some reason we can’t let go of the phone, and things like that. So it is really curious.

[00:37:06] Wes Tatters: It’s the speed that it’s happened.

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: And continues to happen. I don’t see any slowing down.

[00:37:12] Wes Tatters: At PressConf the other day, one of the sessions was an AI session. Of course there’s going to be an AI session. Seriously, if you go to the opening of a restaurant in the town center, there’s some guy doing a presentation, and we’ve got Barry to talk about AI for 15 minutes. It feels like that anyway.

One of the demonstrations was about two paragraph script, and it said effectively, hey, insert name of AI tool. I want you to create me a five second video, and I want the five second video to be of a dinosaur running out of a valley with a volcano erupting in the background. And as the dinosaur runs towards the camera, the ground shakes and the dinosaur’s then going to pass to the right hand side. And I’d like it to look a bit like Jurassic Park. That was literally the wording, and you hit enter not that long later, here’s a 15 second video that looks lifelike, realistic.

[00:38:05] Nathan Wrigley: Jurassic Park.

[00:38:06] Wes Tatters: It literally was, you may as well have been in the feature film. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that would’ve cost couple of million dollars for that five seconds of animation. Now it’s literally something you can get on your mobile phone.

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: Anybody can get on their mobile phone.

[00:38:22] Wes Tatters: I was looking at a video thing today. I was like, some AI tool where you can go, hey, can you, put me in a video of me flying? Yeah, sure. I just need 10 photos of you please. And, now what would you like to fly over? Yeah, technology’s changed.

[00:38:35] Nathan Wrigley: Madness though, when you think about it, if you were to rewind the clock 30 years none of this was possible. I mean here I am talking you through a web browser as if it’s nothing. And it is utterly remarkable.

[00:38:48] Wes Tatters: So we live in a society where we’ve moved from the first time anyone heard of a deep fake, but now it’s just what you do when you’re at lunch break.

Things are changing. Forget about the ethics, the morals, and all those things, but our technology has changed. So yeah, to answer the question, are there missteps? Probably. But the interesting thing about the internet, and it’s something that was built into it at the beginning at DARPA, it’s actually got this amazing ability in technology to recorrect itself.

And that was how DARPA was built. The whole idea was, if you can’t get it this way, it’ll go this way. And if you can’t get it this way, you’ll find a carrier pigeon, and you’ll keep the communications going. What we’ve discovered with communities, and with groups, is that they seem to have an inordinate way of self-correcting as well, through moderation, through conversations.

When you get critical mass, and you pull enough people together, there is this inordinate ability to self-correct. I don’t fully understand the psychological basis behind it, but it’s fascinating how the internet has this ability to self-correct itself. So maybe over time it will, who knows?

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Certainly in the world at large at the moment, we do seem to be in need of some sort of self-correction in all sorts of walks of life. And the WordPress community that we are both a part of definitely has had its schism over the last six months or so.

[00:40:17] Wes Tatters: Look, and it’s been, and that’s happened before. And even those things self-correct, because there are communities that are passionate in this space. Yes, there’s been some drama. and there’s no point in having conversation about that. But one of the outputs of that has been interesting new conversations in communities. Not looking at things like how we destroy WordPress, or how we, what we do next, but actually going, how do we build our community? How do we assist our community?

So even in those sort of challenges that every big ecosystem has, the community itself can self-correct. The community itself, can develop new relationships. And people grow out of those things.

PressConf was an amazing example of that. Obviously it had happened before in a slightly different form a number of years ago, but this was, let’s put 150 odd in a space for a weekend, and let ’em all chat and have conversations. And actually have intelligent dialogues and a whole heap of things grew out of it.

When we have WordPress events, we have WordCamps. We have Word Camp Europe coming up. Groups creating new vision. We talk about things like contribution and what contribution looks like. There’s been some negatives about contribution in the recent space, but there’s also been some huge positives about contribution. Out of the drama we’ve had, actually created a new conversation. Many people who didn’t even understand the concept. Oh yeah, I just assumed WordPress was this thing. I never thought that there was actually people giving up their weekends to go to a day in Hyderabad to fix bugs in wordPress. But that’s what people do.

And it actually helped us have a new conversation with a lot of people in the WordPress space that actually hadn’t even comprehended. Because they just assumed that they were, oh yeah, I just downloaded this WordPress thing.

[00:42:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do wonder if some things will come out of the year 2025 that would’ve been in the year 2024 unimaginable.

[00:42:21] Wes Tatters: I would say I’m quietly positive. There are lots of conversations, at many layers. I do think, and this is my own personal opinion, that there is a time for speaking and a time for listening. And I think that right now there is a need for a lot of listening from disparate part of the community, and by listening I think a lot of people need to listen to what other people have to say. And then as a community, look at what all those things are. What’s being said, and look at what we do to self correct. I think it’s important to listen.

[00:43:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, a conversation which drifted through what the internet even was and is. Then finally landing on CMSs and WordPress and the community built up around that. So Wes, what a pool of knowledge you are. You’ve really done the entire internet circuit and I’m really glad that we got a chance to speak today. Thank you.

[00:43:19] Wes Tatters: Nathan, it’s been a pleasure. Always happy to chat. It’s about conversation and communities. That’s what matters at the end of the day.

On the podcast today we have Wes Tatters.

Wes has been immersed in the tech space for close to four decades, starting his journey with early computers like the Commodore 64 and TRS-80. He’s been an author, with multiple books on internet technologies to his name, has worked across AV and media, and today, he’s the driving force behind Rapyd Cloud, a globally distributed hosting company. Wes’s perspective is shaped as much by his hands-on experience building communities on CompuServe, AOL, and MSN as by his deep involvement with modern open source platforms, like WordPress.

Wes starts off by sharing some of the fascinating stories from the early web, when getting online meant stringing together modems and bulletin boards, and long-distance communication felt nothing short of miraculous. He talks about the evolution of the internet as a space for community, and how chance encounters in early online forums led to opportunities like writing for Netscape and shaping the very first JavaScript Developer Guides.

We then discuss the changing meaning of “community” across different eras of the internet, touching on the shift from closed, walled gardens like AOL, to the open source ethos that powers projects like WordPress and much else that we take for granted online. Wes describes how WordPress’s flexibility and openness allowed anyone, anywhere, to claim their own piece of the web without technical barriers, and how this has contributed to its rise as a cornerstone of global digital freedom and self-expression.

Our conversation also examines the challenges and potential missteps of the modern internet, from social loneliness to the commercial world of social media, and reflects on WordPress’s role in helping steer a path back to more positive, open, and empowering online experiences.

If you’re interested in how the history of the internet directly shaped WordPress, the open web, and the communities we build today, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Rapyd Cloud

DARPA

AOL

CompuServe

JavaScript Developers Guide written by Wes

PressConf

Worldwide Web Conference

Tim Burnes Lee

James Gosling

Laura Lemay

ASP

asp.net

DotNetNuke

MySpace

BuddyBoss

Bluesky

AT Protocol

Mastodon

ActivityPub protocol