#165 – Aaron D. Campbell Why Open Standards and WordPress Matter

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, why open standards matter, and how WordPress fits into an open web.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

[00:00:53] Nathan Wrigley: If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Aaron D. Campbell.

Aaron is an international speaker, open source advocate, and self-described outgoing introvert. He’s been a regular contributor to WordPress for more than a decade, and is currently director of product at A2 Hosting. His longstanding enthusiasm for WordPress stems from its role as a necessary counterbalance to closed web solutions, providing a vital, open source, alternative that fosters accountability among digital platforms. Aaron’s vision of WordPress’s importance has fueled his sustained commitment, and excitement for the platform matching his initial zeal from years ago.

Today we talk about a topic that’s integral to Aaron, and likely resonates with many of you listeners, the importance of the open web. With the advent of closed platforms, open standards and open source have become more crucial than ever.

Aaron shares his journey in the WordPress space, and how his commitment to the open web has kept him passionate about it over the years. We discussed the evolution of open web concepts, maintaining interoperability, and ensuring your digital creations remain under your control.

We compare this with the growing dominance of closed corporate platforms, and examine the impact of profit motives versus the more altruistic goals of open source. Aaron articulates why preserving the openness of the web is essential, not just for innovation, but for the entire fabric of global society.

If you’re curious about the role of open systems and the future they shape and why the open web matters now more than ever, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Aaron D. Campbell.

I am joined on the podcast by Aaron D. Campbell. Hello, Aaron.

[00:03:13] Aaron D. Campbell: Hey, thanks for having me.

[00:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I’m really pleased to talk to you today. This is a subject which is fairly close to my heart. We’re going to approach it, first of all, from the non WordPress angle, and then we’ll get into it from the WordPress angle. It’s all about open standards, open source.

I guess before we begin, Aaron, I’ll just explain that this is the first interview that I’ve done at WordCamp Asia, which is in Manila. How are you finding it here? Did you have a nice journey over.

[00:03:36] Aaron D. Campbell: You know, my journey over was smooth and uneventful, which is exactly how I like my journeys to these things to be. And I’m finding the place to be fantastic, and the time zone change to be very difficult.

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s exactly my experience as well. I think we’re both fairly tired at this point.

It’s the first day, it’s Contributor Day, so there’ll be all of that excitement later. Aaron’s doing a presentation at WordCamp Asia, and this is what we’re going to talk about. It’s called The Future, why Open Web Matters.

Before we get into that, Aaron, do you just want to give us your little potted bio? Tell us why you are here, who you work for, what it is that you do in the WordPress space.

[00:04:13] Aaron D. Campbell: Sure, yeah. What do I do in the WordPress space? Well, that has changed a lot over the years, but I’ve been pretty actively contributing to the WordPress project for about 18 or so years now. Done everything from leading releases and leading the security team to helping put on some of these events like WordCamp US. I work for A2 Hosting, focusing on our products and helping to align what we do with the kind of open web, WordPress ethos that I have at my core.

[00:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask you, if you’ve been in the project for as long as you have, which is pretty much the length of the whole project, I think, 18 years or so. But basically you’ve been in it since the beginning. So it’s nothing to do with the topic at hand. Are you as excited about WordPress as a thing in 2025 as you were all those years ago?

[00:05:04] Aaron D. Campbell: Yes. Yes I am. I think that the thing that has kept me around this long, it’s not easy to do a thing for, you know, going on almost 20 years and to stay excited about it. But I think that the thing that has kept me there is this whole open web concept, and that I see WordPress as a very important counterbalance to some of the closed solutions that exist on the web.

Having a viable alternative that is open helps keep those other platforms accountable, if you will. And so I think that what’s kept me around is really that kind of idealistic thing that I have around how important WordPress is. And so, yes, I’m just as excited about it as I was back then.

[00:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like, if we were to rewind the clock 18 years ago, it feels like open was more normal, perhaps than it is now. And I think the closed platforms have monetised their way into the web and have kind of become, in many ways, the default, especially for people who aren’t in the inner circle of open source projects.

So for example, the way to carry out messaging online is to go to a closed platform. The way to communicate via email is to use close, well, the protocol’s open, but you know, the system that you might use may be closed, and so on and so forth. So that seems to be the default.

However, let me just read the blurb from your presentation so we’ll get a flavor of what it is that Aaron will be talking about out. So we’re talking about why the open web matters. And the blurb that went with that goes as follows.

The internet has revolutionised how we share information, enabling unprecedented collaboration, and accelerating human progress in ways once unimaginable. However, this powerful tool is now at a crossroads. In this talk, Aaron will explore the critical role that open systems and the open web play in shaping our future. He will delve into the potential consequences of a closed digital ecosystem, and argue why preserving the openness of the web is essential, not only for innovation, but the very fabric of our global society. Discover why the open web matters more now than ever, and what’s at stake if we lose it.

So there’s some fairly powerful words in there, you know, the future of society and so on. However, underpinning it all is this phrase, open web. And it occurs to me that, dear listener, you may not know what that means. So my opening gambit to you Aaron, what is the open web? What does that even mean?

[00:07:20] Aaron D. Campbell: Honestly, you were talking a little bit about how we see more of these closed platforms now, and maybe it was more the standard 18, 20 years ago, and it’s true. When the web started around 1991, it was open in that information flowed easily and freely back and forth. And the things that we used to interact with the web, HTTP, HTML, all these things that we use were these open standards that could be implemented by anyone. You could implement them in some sort of closed web browser. You could implement them in an open source web browser. Either way, they were open standards that you could implement.

And I think that that, where we started is kind of the core of this open that I’m talking about. It’s the interoperability, the ability for things to work together for different companies to be able to give you that same experience that you might want to have with their flavor. But if you then choose to leave that company, you can go somewhere else and still have whatever it is that you built, or created, or were using.

And so open, while I love open source and a lot of what I do is around open source, I don’t think that open source in and of itself is the open web. It’s more about this freedom to be able to own your stuff and take it wherever you want to take it. It’s that interoperability that’s really at the core of open when I’m talking about the open web.

[00:08:48] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s kind of the ability to pick up your data from one spot. Let’s say that you’ve got, well, in the case of WordPress, you’ve got a blog, you’ve got content that you’ve created, text, images and so on. The ability to say, you know what? I’m fed up with my CMS of choice. I want to move it elsewhere.

But the same would be the case for, okay, I’ve got a bunch of messages that I’ve written to some clients and to some friends. I want to be able to drop that platform and move it over here. So I guess email might be a good example there. You know, there’s the protocol behind the email, that’s completely open. It would be crazy if you could only email people who are using the same service that you had. And so you can move providers all the time, but you may not be able to move your email address. So it’s a sort of complicated picture, but transportability, yeah. Is that possibly it?

[00:09:30] Aaron D. Campbell: Yeah. I think that your example of, I’m fed up with my CMS, so I want to go somewhere else. That’s valid, I guess. But I look at it more from, let’s say that you’re a company that sells leather goods, and wherever you have your website has decided that they no longer allow you to sell leather goods on their platform.

You need to go somewhere else for your own livelihood. You need to be able to go somewhere else. Can you? And if your site is WordPress, and it’s your host that says, we no longer allow leather goods, you can just move somewhere else. But if your site is on Facebook, and Facebook says that you can’t do that anymore, you can’t just take what you have and move somewhere else.

And that’s a big difference because that’s a thing that is key to you continuing to, you know, I don’t know, run your business, make your money, put food on your table. And so it’s not just like, I got sick of this tool and wanted to move to another one. I think that part of it is like, who has control, and what are your options if what they want no longer aligns with what you want?

[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: So it really boils down, in your case, to the ability for you to choose where things end. Yeah, choice. A choice. Okay.

I really haven’t ever read a history of the internet, but the bits and pieces, the impression that I’ve got over the years when I’ve been reading around how the internet began, CERN and ARPANET and those kind of things. When the internet began, I don’t really know what the enterprise was to begin the whole thing.

But it felt like it was more or less a service to provide the capability for academics to communicate with each other. There was never this intention that, okay, we’ll be buying and selling goods online. We’ll all be communicating through messaging platforms online. We’ll be sending photos online. So how did the internet begin? Do you know?

[00:11:20] Aaron D. Campbell: It began open and it began specifically for the purposes of sharing information. The commercial internet exchange was trying to connect all these big networks that had tons of information in them at places like universities, governmental agencies, right? That were these silos of information.

They wanted to interconnect those networks, make the internet, be able to share data back and forth for the purposes of being able to learn from each other. It was very much an academic pursuit.

I think that that’s kind of how we grow our knowledge as people, right? We learn from what other people have learned, and then we learn some more on top of that. And they saw the value of having this kind of connected digital network to share information. And it was only useful if it was open, and that information could flow back and forth freely. And so, yes, you’re right, it wasn’t meant to be a commercial endeavor. It was meant to be a knowledge sharing endeavor.

[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of a really altruistic enterprise when you say it in those terms. It really feels like it’s for the betterment of humanity. But I’m sure all of us can imagine scenarios where we think about our use of the internet, and the words, betterment of humanity are just not, well, they’re just an anathema.

Because, you know, the internet has undoubtedly caused harms in various ways, and there’s misinformation being spread and all sorts of things like that, problems that we’ve got online.

But I’m wondering, well, if we were talking about open on all levels of the internet, so for example, the internet that I’m using, I’m using a CMS, a web browser. It’s HTTPS, CSS, JavaScript, those kind of things. But underpinning it all, here’s my Mac, and the Mac presumably talks to the TCP IP stack, and there’s a bunch of routers and all of those kind of things going on, holding the internet together. Does all of that stack need to be open, or is it okay for some bits and pieces holding the infrastructure together to be closed?

Because I’m not sure that you’d kind of want the hardware layer, if you know what I mean, some of those bits and pieces. Maybe they need to be, well, maybe they need to be proprietary and closed. I don’t know. What are your thoughts?

[00:13:27] Aaron D. Campbell: That’s a really intriguing question, and I think that for the purposes of just being able to use and enjoy and leverage the internet, no, all those layers do not need to be open. For the purposes of preserving the internet as this information sharing kind of altruistic tool, I think that there needs to be openness at every one of those levels.

I think that, for example, you were talking about the routers that shift all the information around, and they’re largely these hardware things, although they do have some software on them. But do all of those need to be open? No. But if one company is the only one that’s capable of shifting information around the web, then it becomes a problem. So as long as there are viable open alternatives, and some are closed and some are open, great.

But I don’t want any company, no matter who it is, you know, in this case maybe a, Cisco is maybe the biggest router company, right? I don’t want them to be the only one in control of what information can be sent back and forth across the world.

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think our conversation is probably going to dwell on the information layer, the bit at the top. So the text that we send and, you know, the images, and the CMS and so on. Now, in the beginning of your presentation, there was a phrase which stuck out because you said, we’re in a time of unprecedented collaboration, and accelerating human progress is what the internet is kind of all about. It’s a fairly lofty phrase and I was wondering what you meant by that.

[00:14:59] Aaron D. Campbell: So first of all, the internet allows for a kind of collaboration that we’ve never seen before in history, right? Like, collaboration, we all hop on these Zoom calls all the time and think nothing of the fact that I am in an instant virtual video call with people in eight different countries. But that’s possible. I literally do that almost every single day. People on my team are in the UK, they’re in Bulgaria, that’s normal. That was not normal 20 years ago. It was certainly not normal, I guess, what, 40 years ago, pre-internet.

There is a level of collaboration that can happen now that just never was able to before. And we see that in tons of places. My wife’s neurologist, I think I gave you this example in some notes that I sent over. She collaborates with neurologists all over the world, live, almost daily. And that’s mind boggling. But the fact that a neurologist can immediately learn from other specialists, like that is fantastic. That’s so amazing.

And so, yeah, it sounds lofty when you put it into words, but the truth is, this is our normal every day, and maybe we’ve gotten a little used to it. But if you take a step back and look, it’s amazing what the internet has enabled.

[00:16:22] Nathan Wrigley: I occasionally, and it really is an example of how quickly you can become, something that is extraordinary becomes completely normal, and you don’t really expect what’s going on. But occasionally I have the thought that, I’ll be looking at my computer, on my phone, and I think what I’m doing, to my 10-year-old self, was the realm of Star Trek. It was science fiction that there was a device in somebody’s hand which enabled you to communicate.

There was a screen which held images on it, and it was all encapsulated in your hand, you know? And obviously Star Trek, well, we’ve still got a long way to go. We can’t transport each other across the universe and so on. But it’s incredibly profound. And the mere fact, just take a look and think about it for a moment. You’re probably listening to this on a phone, dear listener, and I don’t know, you’ve probably got a pair of Bluetooth headphones or something like that.

This incredible stack of technology, which is now completely normal. You and I collaborating for this episode on a Google Doc. The world has utterly changed, and it really does behoove everyone, once in a while, to take a step back and think, wow, I’m really lucky.

[00:17:31] Aaron D. Campbell: I mean, when I was in school, my teacher very specifically would not let us use calculators on tests because, quote, you will not always have a calculator in your pocket. You need to know how to do this. Well, they were wrong. I have a calculator in my pocket, which is actually also a computer connected to every other computer in the world. It’s astounding how much things have changed.

[00:17:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable. I mean, I guess the next point that I want to raise is that the web, despite the fact that it’s marvelous in all these ways that we’ve just described, I think it’s, well, we’ve had an era over the last, let’s say, decade, maybe more, where it feels like the internet has been taken over largely by closed corporate platforms.

I mean, not to throw any aspersions out there, and not to name only these ones, but the ones which come to mind in my life are Google, dominating search, for example. You know, I basically have outsourced my brain most of the time to Google. I don’t really think I just Google something, and then trust that what Google gives me back is going to be credible and accurate. And I really give it a hundred percent of that. You know, I don’t question what it gives back. I assume that the algorithm is doing me justice and doing me a favor.

And equally things like Facebook over the years, I’ve invested large amounts of time into that. But it feels like in the last year, so we’re in 2025, most people have got a slightly different relationship. There’s maybe a bit more skepticism coming in. We can see the harms that maybe some of these companies are doing. And so this really does feel like a moment where open platforms, WordPress in particular, it’s an important moment to step up. So really there’s no question there. It’s more like, do you have any thoughts about proprietary platforms and their growing dominance?

[00:19:17] Aaron D. Campbell: Yeah. First of all, I hope that you are right and that in 2025 we’re seeing some of that, kind of, questioning of whether these closed, for-profit platforms are really doing what’s best for us. Because I know that they’re doing what’s best for them. The question is whether that is also what’s best for us. Companies like Facebook, like Google, they’re looking out for themselves. The question is, does that help us?

You’re right, we’ve all outsourced our brain to Google in many ways. I mean, when you talk about, I don’t know, researching a thing, you don’t even say, I’m going to go research it. You say, I’m going to go Google it. That’s what that means in our vernacular. And I think that, I hope that, people are really starting to realise, not that that’s bad because I don’t think it is, I am actually super thankful that Google makes it so easy for me to learn so many things. I love that.

But I hope that they, everyone’s starting to understand some of the potential risks there. Is it good that you don’t even question whether what Google fed back to you is the right thing? Does Google get to decide what we’re able to learn or not learn now? Is that healthy for us?

I would love if people are asking those kinds of questions, because it pushes toward having more alternatives. How do you go check, if you decide that you’re not sure if Google’s really looking out for you, how do you go check that? What do you use to make sure that Google’s still giving you what you ought to get? And if you go looking for that, that’s good. Going and looking for those alternatives, ensuring that there is a choice keeps us from being locked in, in a way that becomes unhealthy.

[00:21:11] Nathan Wrigley: I think my intuition is that increasingly these platforms seem to be tied up in profit motives, and so, the example that comes to mind in my head is the algorithmic feed in your social network of choice, really. Insert whichever platform you want there. But the idea that it will maximize engagement at any cost.

So if it can keep your eyes glued to the screen for another minute, that’s a win, regardless of whether or not that information that’s being given to you is good. And I’m doing air quotes. And so if that were to creep into, for example, Google search, okay, can we keep you on our platform? I know that’s a silly example because that’s not really the point of Google, but you get the point.

And what I’m wondering is, is profit really kind of the enemy here? Does everything have to be freely done by volunteers for it to be open? Because there’s this feeling, it feels that there’s a bit of that in the open source community. You know, if it’s done by volunteers, if it’s done for free, if you can access it completely for free, if the platform’s code is verifiable and open on the web, is that better? So, yeah, sorry there’s a lot there.

[00:22:18] Aaron D. Campbell: Well, first of all, I’ll go ahead and plant my flag on this one. And it’s maybe not the most popular opinion amongst the hardcore open source people that I honestly spend a lot of time with and work with regularly. But I don’t think profit is bad. I don’t. But if that is the core motive and that becomes the only tool that you have is one that is focused on profiting off of you, then yeah, there are concerns.

If Facebook, you’re right, or any of these social networks, they want to keep you around as long as they can because that’s their profit model. However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t profit off of open, and I am fine with profit as long as there is open. There are many companies in our space that make really good profit implementing WordPress solutions. That is open. The companies that they are implementing those solutions for own their own data. They can move it wherever they want. That’s great, even if there’s profit there.

And so I don’t think that profit alone is the enemy, but it does seem like most of these kind of closed solutions, yeah, are by for profit companies that are just looking to profit. And again, I think it comes down to choice. As long as there are enough options out there, you’re not beholden to just the one model from the one company. You know, social networks is a good example. If there’s something that’s a problem with you and Facebook, you can go to some other social network. There are other options. It’s when it’s a for-profit and just one option that it really starts to become a problem.

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s really a difficult thread to get right in our community. Because the WordPress community in particular does seem to have two sides. There’s the real for-profit side, and obviously we’re here at WordCamp Asia, and if we were to walk into any of the sponsor booths, there’s a bunch of companies here. And I imagine the fact that they can sponsor, they’re making a healthy profit. You know, they’re sending staff here and they’ve got a booth and so on.

But then there’s also the more, and again, I’m doing air quotes here, there’s the more community side, which seem to see that as a bit of a trade off. We’ve got to have these people here, but on some level it would be better if they weren’t here. If we could just do the whole thing more non-profit, that would be better. So I feel that the community we’ve got, that’s a difficult tightrope to tread.

[00:24:48] Aaron D. Campbell: It’s a very difficult tightrope to tread. The way that I thread it, I get the altruistic, if we could do everything just volunteer, but we could also have diverse volunteers and many volunteers with different points of view, and different sort of technical backgrounds, right? So that we could build a thing that works for everyone, that would be great.

But that’s really difficult because you see many open source projects that had that and built up and then failed and have sort of disappeared, because it’s very difficult to have longevity in that. To have people that stay around long enough.

And so I think that what the for-profit side does in our WordPress space is it helps ensure the longevity because those companies, hosts, for example, are hosting many, many thousands, or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of WordPress sites, they’re making money off of that. And so they have a vested interest in making sure that WordPress continues.

And so, yeah, there’s this fine balance between, they’re actually investing in a way that helps keep the platform going, keep the platform being built, keep the platform improving. But does that also mean that they want some influence in the platform? And I think that that’s that line you have to tread where profit helps with longevity. It does, it keeps people around. But it also leads towards a desire to influence. And are we watching out for that?

It is been a question that the WordPress project has been struggling with since its very beginning. I think that we’ve got it right at times. I think we’ve got it wrong at times. But I think that by and large, for 20 plus years, we have successfully brought those two things together, in a way that’s built something pretty amazing.

[00:26:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And also if you think about it in the long march of history, the internet is still in its infancy. And these open source platforms, this idea of volunteering your time for a global project is quite a new thing. We are just figuring it out.

And so whilst you and I are inside the baseball, we hear the arguments from both sides all the time, give it another a hundred years and no doubt things will have bedded down and the arguments would’ve been done this way and that way, and hopefully things figured out. So to me, it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve even got 20 years under our belt. Yeah, there’s going to be some disagreements along the way.

[00:27:15] Aaron D. Campbell: The internet sort of, as we know, it’s about 34 years old. It’s not been around long when you take a more, sort of, broader historical view alright.

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: Over the last period of time, I’m going to say 12, 15 years, something like that, the internet feels like it’s become a sort of platform. So a good example of that would be social media, so X, Twitter and all the other ones, LinkedIn, and the multitude of ones that have come in to existence and even gone away in some cases. They’ve obviously got their proprietary technology stack, but it feels to me what you are proposing is that the internet shouldn’t be a place of platforms, it should be more a place of protocols. And what I mean by that is the underpinning technology.

So as an example, we could swap out X for something like ActivityPub or the AT Protocol. And then a variety of different platforms can build on top of that, change the UI, change the UX, change the experience for everybody. But we’d all be able to communicate using that same thing. Have I kind of got that right? Is that what you are hoping for?

[00:28:14] Aaron D. Campbell: I would love to see more of the platforms on the internet having open standards, open protocols, open data standards at their core. It would be fantastic if something like Twitter, X, whatever it is now, built on top of an open standard. And that was, like they built their own custom experience on top of it. They brought a lot of people together and gave a good experience, but that you could, other companies could also implement that protocol. And again, then you would have choice and options.

I think that at its core, like the easiest way to sum this up for somebody experiencing it is that, I really think that lock-in is unhealthy. If you can just choose to go somewhere else and you’re not locked in, then that company needs to keep you around by just serving you better, having a better experience for you, delivering more value to you. Rather than keeping you around because you’re locked in, and you’ve built a following there and you can’t get it anywhere else, et cetera.

And so, yes, I love all these varieties of platforms focusing in on specific things, you know, like LinkedIn on jobs and professional connections. I wish that more of them shared open standards at their core that could be implemented by others.

[00:29:35] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think there’s a realistic chance that these companies will move towards these more open protocols? Because obviously, you know, they weren’t, they weren’t there at the beginning. They developed their own code base and soon discovered, gosh, there’s a real economic lever here. If we can keep eyeballs on our platform, if we can lock data inside the platform so that they can’t go away, you know, users of LinkedIn, it’s just, you’re in LinkedIn, you can’t get stuff out of LinkedIn, it’s in there.

Is there any incentive for them to move to an open protocol? Apart from the fact that it’s just a morally good position to be in. Because it feels like if we were talking to the executives of LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera, they would maybe make the right noises, but then they turn around and say, huh, we’re not going anywhere near that. We want to lock people in. We want everybody to be locked inside our silo.

[00:30:21] Aaron D. Campbell: Unfortunately, I think that there’s not a lot of, there’s not a good enough reason yet for them to move that way. So I don’t see a lot of the current platforms moving that way, at least not in the short term. I hope that some of these new platforms that are spinning up now, and that will in the near future, that might make use of that. We might be able to see new ones coming on with open standards, but I think it’s less likely to see existing ones move to that.

If I were talking to those executives though, and trying to talk about what the benefits would be to them, I think that the main things that I would try to focus on is, if there’s a chunk of your code, your system that many people are working on and improving, and you don’t have to fund every single worker on it, that there can be shared benefit from that.

I talk about this with WordPress and hosts all the time. Yeah, build some of your own custom cool stuff on top of WordPress, but also help improve WordPress itself. Yes, that improves it, the experience at other hosts as well. But if every host is doing that, then everyone’s getting shared benefit as WordPress gets better across the board. And so these existing platforms could benefit from that, not having to be the only one working on improving the protocols or whatever it is.

And the other thing is, if you are really confident that you’re building something great, if you really think you have a great product, then if you have shared protocols, that means you should be able to bring people in from those other companies that have those shared protocols. Because it means it’s easier to bring people from other places to you. They all tend to focus on the, saving what we have, preventing people from leaving. But if you really think that you can offer the best, then you can also win people in that way. And that’s sort of the approach that I take when I talk to them, but it’s difficult.

[00:32:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I wonder what the age demographic of these debates is. And what I mean by that is, when it comes to events like WordCamps, if I’m looking around and being honest, I’m not really seeing many young people. And I don’t really know what I mean by young, but it seems like the average age here is not really anywhere near 18.

And I wonder if the ship has sailed in terms of, let’s take a typical child in the UK, a 16-year-old child, something like that. The excitement is all around things like TikTok and Instagram. I would imagine that the typical 16-year-old doesn’t even know that there’s such a thing as an open protocol. It’s just more, I want to use that service.

And I wonder if, well, where we need people to be going with these debates is skewing it more towards young people because they’re going to be the future. Like you and I, we, well, we’re a bit older, and we probably understand that a little bit more. I don’t know where the younger people sit around in all of this, and whether or not their semi addiction to technology is something that we can get in the way of. Or if there’s an argument to be had, if we need to be going out and talking about these things in schools, encouraging it. Curriculums in colleges and what have you, to be talking about this more.

[00:33:30] Aaron D. Campbell: I think that you’re right, that it skews towards the older crowd a little bit. As a parent, I kind of draw a parallel here, right? You can tell a kid, don’t touch that it’s hot, don’t touch that it’s hot, don’t touch that it’s hot. But it’s when they touch that and get burned, hopefully not too badly, but that’s when they’re like, oh, it’s hot. I need to pay attention to that.

And I think that that’s the same kind of struggle that I have conveying this kind of thing to youths right now is. Yeah, they’re super into all these platforms, but what they haven’t experienced yet is spending a lot of time building a thing on a platform and then it going away, and them having to start all over.

And people like you and I, people our age, we probably have. We may have experienced that many times over and, sort of, you can tell them what the risks are, but if they haven’t felt it yet, maybe they don’t quite get the importance of it. And I wish that there was an easier way to help them learn from my painful experiences rather than make them experience it themselves. But I definitely struggle with figuring out how to properly convey that in a way that they grasp the levity. I do think it’s important if we can.

[00:34:43] Nathan Wrigley: We shared some show notes when we were arranging this episode, and the question that I think hit you, the question that hit home the most was one that I wrote and it went like this. How do we get open, in quotes, to be the default given the market forces that we’re working against?

And so again, the example of Facebook, Google, et cetera. You know, they’ve got deep pockets, an incredible amount of money to spend on ads. They can occupy all the app stores, and they’ve got incredible lobby groups and so on.

And you thought, well, I think you thought that that was the question in this interview that was going to be the most interest to you. So how do we get open to be the default given the power of these massive platforms?

[00:35:22] Aaron D. Campbell: It’s so difficult, right? I think that I said that this is the billion dollar question. I think that this is kind of the core of what we need to look at and figure out. And I do think that there are some people in our space, in the open space, but even specifically in WordPress, that are trying to figure this out.

WordPress is amazing in that it’s put together by volunteers all over the world, and there’s contributors in every walk of life. But it’s not coordinated in a way that a company like a Google or a Meta or whatever, it can be coordinated to funnel all of their funds together and invest in, whether it’s lobbying or advertising or whatever it is.

We need to bring all this variety of companies, and people in our space together in a coordinated way like that, and that’s so much more difficult when each one of these companies is their own entity. But you’re starting to see some groups like the Scale Consortium, some of the enterprise WordPress agencies in our space have formed this consortium to work together to put out this kind of like enterprise level marketing for WordPress at that level.

And I would love to see more of that kind of thing happening. I think that groups working together is kind of our only chance of trying to compete with some of these companies.

[00:36:50] Nathan Wrigley: What was the organisation called? The Scale Consortium? Yeah, the Scale Consortium. Okay. And do you have a URL for that?

[00:36:56] Aaron D. Campbell: I think it’s scaleconsortium.com.

[00:36:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I’ll include that in the show notes. But is this something that you are involved with personally? Does A2 Hosting, or are you involved?

[00:37:06] Aaron D. Campbell: No. So in my past life, I guess, before I really got into hosting, I ran an agency for many years including working in the enterprise space. And so I’m just still close to a lot of the other agency folks, agencies that are a part of this or people like Crowd Favorite and Human Made and 10up. They’re forming this Scale Consortium, and it’s fantastic. I talk to them about it. Every time I can see them and talk to them I want to talk to them about this thing they’re doing.

[00:37:32] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting and it’s fairly unique, I think, open source. The capacity of rivals, and again, I’m using air quotes. Yes, we can get together because, well, you know, Microsoft Bing getting together with Google, that seems really strange. I mean, maybe there’s a few web interoperability things that those companies, those proprietary companies get together on. But you know, they’re commercial rivals.

But in the WordPress space, that kind of thing’s possible. And in the open source space, that kind of thing is possible, because it’s more a case of a rising tide carries all boats. So not a case of, well yeah, we’ve got to kill the competition, kill the opposition. And that’s curious. And maybe that is the key to its success.

[00:38:08] Aaron D. Campbell: I think that you’re right about the rising tide lifting all ships. I think that in our space, WordPress especially, we have this amazing like coopetition thing where it’s cooperative competitors working together. And I think that that’s because, as long as we grow the open web, as long as we grow the people, the companies, the websites that are building on top of these open platforms, literally the pie is growing. So you don’t have to take away somebody else’s slice of the pie. As the pie grows, you can just have more and more and more of the pie.

And I think that companies in our space have really realised that. The more that they can get these enterprise level customers be building on us instead of Adobe’s platform, the more the pie has grown, and their piece of it grows. And so if they all work together, they can grow the pie better. And I think that that’s, honestly, that just makes it a more friendly, more fun area of the internet to work in.

[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think WordPress encapsulates a more or less perfect example of the open web? I mean, obviously we’ve got our own problems, but generally speaking, would you hold up WordPress as a really fine example of the open web or would you say there’s, I don’t know, room for improvement?

[00:39:25] Aaron D. Campbell: I think that there’s always room for improvement. I would hold up WordPress as a pillar of paving the way, right? Like, we’ve gotten it wrong a number of times, but we have pushed so hard toward building this open platform that really is truly open.

I think that there are single points of failure and stuff, even in how we have things set up. But by and large, I think we’ve done it right. I’m not going to say we’re perfect. That would be silly, because I think that we should continue to push to grow and improve. And if you think you’re perfect, you’re not motivated to do that. But, yeah, I think that we’ve done a really good job in WordPress of focusing on that.

[00:40:05] Nathan Wrigley: Well, hopefully people listening to this podcast, by the time this comes out, maybe Aaron’s talk will be out on WordPress TV. We’ll have to see. It’s a really interesting subject. It speaks to so many of the reasons why I enjoy the internet, and why I’ve skewed towards open source as opposed to proprietary.

There’s just something profoundly meaningful there for me. And let’s hope that if we would have this conversation in, oh, I don’t know, 10 years time or something like that, the arguments that you are portraying here, the powerful reasons for going open and not closed, let’s hope they win.

[00:40:36] Aaron D. Campbell: Let’s. That’s one of the most exciting things I could imagine.

[00:40:39] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Aaron, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:40:44] Aaron D. Campbell: Thank you for having me. This was fantastic.

On the podcast today we have Aaron D. Campbell.

Aaron is an international speaker, open source advocate, and self-described outgoing introvert. He’s been a regular contributor to WordPress for more than a decade, and is currently Director of Product at A2 Hosting.

His long-standing enthusiasm for WordPress stems from its role as a necessary counterbalance to closed web solutions, providing a vital open-source alternative that fosters accountability among digital platforms. Aaron’s vision of WordPress’s importance has fuelled his sustained commitment and excitement for the platform, matching his initial zeal from years ago.

Today we talk about a topic that’s integral to Aaron, and likely resonates with many of you listeners, the importance of the open web. With the advent of closed platforms, open standards, and open source have become more crucial than ever.

Aaron shares his journey in the WordPress space, and how his commitment to the open web has kept him passionate about it over the years. We discuss the evolution of open web concepts, maintaining interoperability, and ensuring your digital creations remain under your control.

We compare this with the growing dominance of closed corporate platforms, and examine the impact of profit motives, versus the more altruistic goals of open source. Aaron articulates why preserving the openness of the web is essential, not just for innovation but for the entire fabric of global society.

If you’re curious about the role of open systems and the future they shape, and why the open web matters now more than ever, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Aaron’s presentation at WordCamp Asia 2025 – The Future: Why the Open Web Matters

A2 Hosting

ActivityPub

AT Protocol

Scale Consortium