#182 – Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers on the story of .com and .org

Transcript

[00:00:19] 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 the long complex story of how WordPress came to have a.com and.org variety.

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 and paste that URL into most podcast players.

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 Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Michelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status, and program director for WP Includes. She’s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.

Jonathan is a WordPress Core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress Core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.

If you’ve ever searched for WordPress online, you’ve probably found both wordpress.com and wordpress.org at the top of your results, and like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.

Today, Michelle and Jonathan helped clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

They talk about how these two flavors of WordPress came to be, why they’ve both been key to WordPress’s growth and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetization.

Michelle shares her perspectives as a longtime user and advocate, with experience across both.com and.org sites. While Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his Core contributor vantage point.

They also explore whether the naming conventions of .com and.org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress communities open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.

Along the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the projects seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, 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 Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.

I am joined on the podcast by two guests today. I’m joined by Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello.

[00:03:48] Michelle Frechette: Hello.

[00:03:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, how’s it going?

[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good thank you. We’re going to talk today a little bit about a subject, which I confess confuses me greatly. It’s the differences, the similarities between WordPresses variance, .com and.org.

Before we get into that, I know it’s a terribly generic thing to do, but nevertheless, we’re going to do it anyway because we have a new audience member each time this podcast airs. So I’m going to ask you both to give us your little potted bio. Tell us who you are. So let’s start with Michelle.

[00:04:14] Michelle Frechette: Hi, I am Michelle Frechette. I do a lot of freelancing type work in WordPress, and I also am the Executive Director of Post Status, and the Program Director for WP Includes. I have a couple podcasts, a couple different things that I do, lots of different projects I’ve started, none of which are relevant today.

[00:04:31] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, I am Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a WordPress Core committer since 2018. I’ve been contributing to the project in some way since 2013, and I am partially sponsored by Bluehost to be a contributor to the project.

And so for me, a lot of that results in, some people call it invisible work, but I’m behind the scenes just making sure people are supported properly, they have the resources they need, they’re not blocked.

I also do a lot with our build tools. So making sure our tests keep running and our different build processes to build the software that’s eventually shipped to the world is working in order. Yeah, you’ll find me a little bit everywhere. I’m a generalist. I have my hands in a lot of different things.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for joining me and also for giving us your credentials there. That’s great. So we’re going to get into this strange topic.

Now, I just carried out a typical search. I went onto a search engine. It wasn’t Google, by the way, but nevertheless, I went to a search engine, and I typed in one word, and that word was WordPress.

And I’m now confronted by a result at the top, which says wordpress.com. That came in at number one. The second result for me was wordpress.org. And I’ll just give you the headlines. It says wordpress.com, this is the first result, wordpress.com, everything you need to build your website. And then the second result, download wordpress.org.

And both of you know the difference. I know the difference, on a very high level, I understand the difference, but when we get into the weeds, I quickly start to misunderstand what the difference is. But they are different. These two things are radically different in their intention, in the relationship they have with their users, the way that they’re monetised, and so on and so forth.

So let’s, first of all, just clear that up. Let’s rewind the clock, if you like. How did this all start? What’s the history of wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And then we can get into what the heck they are and how they’re different a bit later. So, I don’t know who wants to answer that.

[00:06:28] Michelle Frechette: I’ll give a quick start. Then I’m going to let Jonathan get into the more technical aspects of things.

Back in the nineties, blogging became a thing, and lots of people were establishing blogs online through things like Blogger, Blogspot and all those things. And then WordPress was one of the blogging platforms that you could create your blog on. All of them were free. I think I still have a Blogspot out there somewhere with really angsty poetry on it. So if you ever really want to find that out, sure, I could send you a link. But the idea was that, you know, you could get online and you could do the blogging things with it.

And then it was like, well, is it just for blogging or could it be used for other things? And so there are still people today that when you say, oh, I could build you a WordPress website, say, isn’t that just a blog? And to which I say, look at all of these websites that are built on, like the White House and NASA and all of these other things that are not just blogging, and are building their websites on WordPress.

But that’s different necessarily from wordpress.com where I do have a blog, right? I actually, it’s actually a website, wptrailbuddies.wordpress.com. I’m using the free .com to create a very quick, very simple, very easy way for people to sign up for one program.

But I also have several websites built on the .org idea, right, which is self-hosted. Find a host, download the software, or have the one button install, which is much more common now.

And then also I have a paid plan on wordpress.com as well, which takes away any ad space, and also allows me to have plugins and themes within that website.

So that’s what I know at the surface level, what are the differences. I know that Jonathan knows much more about the software itself.

[00:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’ve highlighted some of the top level items, so we’ll circle back to those in a moment. But first, let’s get Jonathan’s take on that. So it’s the history question, really. What’s the history of these two different things?

[00:08:24] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, so WordPress started as a project in 2003, and it’s what we call a fork. And so you probably know if you listen to this, that WordPress is open source software. And basically that means, it’s licensed under the GPL, and you have the right to download it, make modifications, see how it works. We distribute, all those things are your right to do with the software that is published.

And so it was forked from a project called b2 where a couple people were not really happy with the development that was happening on that, bugs weren’t being fixed to their liking, and so they decided to fork it. And so that was Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. And that was in 2003, and they called it WordPress. And so that was the beginning of the WordPress project that we know today that is now over 22 years old.

A few years later, Automattic just turned 20 years old, so in 2005, Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-creators of WordPress, co-founders of WordPress, decided to create a company. And so he created a company called Automattic. And the company’s bread and butter was obviously WordPress, because he knew it very well. And so that’s how wordpress.com came about.

And in many ways it was the first true managed WordPress hosting platform, because you could sign up, you could get a blog for free, and you still can, and your URL will be, you know, nathanssite.wordpress.com, or johnssite.wordpress.com. And you can pay for additional things such as, the subscription plans allow you to have a custom domain name, and that’s evolved. The features that you can pay for has evolved significantly over the years.

But along with this is the WordPress software that I mentioned earlier. And so the WordPress software is available for anyone to download and run, as I mentioned. And Automattic has a hosting setup that runs the open source software. And so many of the hosts that you have today, you all run that same software at the core of it, and it’s just a matter of what services are surrounded with it. What do they allow you to do within their environment? And how they support you in your journey to have an online presence.

[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: So the .com side of things was a very early move. So really, more or less as, I mean we’re into sort of the 20 plus years of history of WordPress, but right back near the beginning it was made easier to install. And nowadays, if you go to more or less any host that’s got any association with WordPress, they will offer some kind of one click solution, which makes it trivially easy, within a couple of moments, really, and a few buttons, you’ll have a version of WordPress. And I’m talking there about the .org side of things. So you’ll have a .org install of WordPress. Really straightforward.

However, if you rewind the clock right back to the beginning when .com started, I’m guessing it was a much more painful process. There weren’t these managed hosts where you could do that, and so it made sense, I guess, into the market to put something where you didn’t need to install anything. You simply sign up, create an account, be it free or paid, we’ll get into that in a moment as well, and you’ve got yourself the software.

And so I guess that’s an important part to remember. It was much more difficult back then to do the .org thing than it is now. So many tools now making it relatively straightforward. I guess that’s a part of the success of .com, that it was just the first mover made it more straightforward.

[00:11:51] Jonathan Desrosiers: The WordPress project has several philosophies that we use to guide our decisions and how we choose what makes it into the software and what shape that takes. And some of those, for example, are design for the majority, decisions not options, clean, lean, and mean, striving for simplicity, out of the box software.

And so you see this in the setup process in the five minute install. We really aim to make the installation as simple as possible for the software itself. But that doesn’t mean the surrounding database set up and server set up and uploading, getting the files on the server, doesn’t mean that that’s easy as a part of that.

And so WordPress could be two clicks to install. Could be really simple, email and password and installs it for you, but it doesn’t really, can only contribute so much to that cohesive experience, that all encompassing experience of what a website is, of what hosting is.

[00:12:42] Michelle Frechette: I think back to, again, the early days of blogging where that was the goal. You could change the colors behind it, you were limited to the theming that was provided with whatever platform you were choosing from. And the way that we’ve grown from just like, here are your five options, kind of like a MySpace idea, right? You’re kind of limited with what you could do back in those days as well, to where you can do a lot more now.

And so even with .com, with the free plan, you have a lot more options than you did 20 years ago, 23 years ago. And if you upgrade to a business plan, then you have all the options basically that you have with the install, the .org install for yourself, self-hosted.

One of the things I love about it is that I don’t have to worry about security, I don’t have to worry about traffic, and I don’t have to worry about upgrades. I don’t get a message that my PHP version is outdated. On some other sites where I’m self-hosting, I have to make sure that everything’s up to date all the time. With the .com. It’s one of those things that I don’t have to do.

And so for me, that is one of the benefits. Of course, I have only one site there, but I’m loving the fact I can walk away from it and not be having to check it on a regular basis. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things for people who are not tech savvy, because they can get in and do the things like they would in one of the competitors.

[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: So a lot of this conversation is going to be done through the prism of history, you know, and decisions that were made which now perhaps people have got opinions about, maybe they think poor decisions were made, or brilliant decisions were made, they were made at a different time.

And I’m going to allude to what I said right at the top of this episode, which was that if you do a Google search, for just simply for the word WordPress, and that probably is the word that you’ve heard. You probably have no familiarity with whatever WordPress is. You just, somebody told you, you know, you were in a bar somewhere and somebody said, oh, you want a website? WordPress can do that.

So you end up at a search engine and in it goes, WordPress, and up come these slightly conflicting things. And I guess that’s maybe where some problems for end users begin. We’re in the inside of it all, so we’ve totally got a grip on this. We might not understand the intricacies of all of the bits and pieces, but we understand what .com is and we understand the difference.

This is a question you don’t have to answer in a binary way. It doesn’t have to be a yes or a no. But, do you think with the benefit of hindsight, it would’ve been a good idea to call these different versions different things? So for example, WordPress could have been the .com or the .org, and it would’ve had a different name for something else. And that’s purely from a, keeping it obvious what the two different things are. So again, you can obfuscate or you know, dodge that question if you like.

[00:15:18] Michelle Frechette: I’m reminded of George Foreman, whose children are all named George.

[00:15:23] Jonathan Desrosiers: Most confusing household ever. Without getting into the nuances of the agreements and all, how the permissions work, Automattic just has special permission to use the WordPress trademark. And so that’s why it’s called wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And while there are some, there is some confusion that comes from that. In many ways, it also has contributed to the success of the project, because in the early days, it was very easy to get a site spun up on WordPress, on wordpress.com, and people started using WordPress.

And so there are definitely people out there that solely started using WordPress because they got to wordpress.com and they were able to get a site. And now more and more hosting companies are much more capable, and we all have our own, like I said, I work at Bluehost, so for example, we have our own special sauce of onboarding, where we ask you a couple questions and we help you. We find that the thing people struggle with a lot is where to start.

You get dumped into WordPress, right? And you don’t know where to start. What do I need on my site? What do I make it look like? What do I need to do? And so using these onboarding questions to produce a starting point for you, that’s contextual to what you’re trying to do. And so that’s one of the things that we take pride in is our onboarding process that we’re working on and is available if you want to try it out.

But all that to say is that, you know, in the early days it was definitely a benefit. And now as the project has grown to over 40% of the internet, that confusion gets magnified in some ways. And a lot of times that takes the form of, as you said, Googling and finding conflicting resources as people not accurately describing the differences.

We get a lot of tickets on Trac, which is the bug tracking software for WordPress, for the software itself, that incorrectly is saying there’s a bug, but it’s actually intended behavior, but it’s on .com and not in the .org software. The support forums are full of people that are not sure of the difference.

And so it’s just important as community members that we keep this in mind, that it’s not always easy to understand, but a lot of times people just need a push in the right direction. And in some ways it returns to our philosophies of making it simple because the majority of WordPress users are not technically minded and so they probably don’t care about the difference, right? They just want their WordPress site. I have a site, I need it up, I need it to not go down. I need customers. And so keeping that lens in mind as well is helpful to get through this.

[00:17:40] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting, I’ve been using the internet more or less from the beginning and although these boundaries have got really blurred, back in the day, anything which ended .org had a real kind of community, charity, non-profit kind of focus to it. I don’t know if you both remember that as well, but anything ended .org, it felt like there was a philanthropic purpose to it. And anything which was .com, that wasn’t the case.

[00:18:11] Michelle Frechette: It was commerce.

[00:18:12] Jonathan Desrosiers: Commercial. Yeah, it for commercial.

[00:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there go. So commercial, company, along those lines. And I don’t know when that was, but that just ceased to be a thing at some point. But back when .com began, naming it .org maybe was a bigger signpost than it now appears to be, if you know what I mean. Oh, look, it’s WordPress, it’s .org. It speaks for itself. It’s a philanthropic version or what have you. And that is maybe a part of the jigsaw puzzle.

And again, rewinding history, when the split happened between.com and .org, I’m presuming that nobody had any intuition that any of this was going to be successful in any way, shape, or form. .com, you know, the commercial wing could have been an absolute failure. The whole project could have collapsed within a couple of years. . org, again, nobody took any interest in it. It just didn’t work out. And it became, well, another b2, the annals of history. And it didn’t work out that way.

But I guess once you’ve started down the path, you are going to stick with it. There would be no point 3 years in in saying, you know what? Everybody’s confused about .com, .org, we should upend the whole thing. I guess that’s off the table a bit at that point as well.

[00:19:20] Michelle Frechette: Well, I think that the generic web user who’s not a techie still doesn’t necessarily have an idea that the .org and .com were originally intended for different audiences, right? So I think that, I mean there are, definitely are some savvy people who understand that, but I think that the majority of people still, it doesn’t matter if it’s a .io, we have so many extensions now that I think it’s kind of blurred what those actually mean. And if you actually go to register a .org, it’ll say, do you want the .com and the dot net, and the dot whatever else too? So that you’re kind of getting all of your traffic driven to the same place.

I think that that is something that, yes, we understand that now. And I think that we would’ve always understood that, the three of us, but I don’t know that that was such a huge distinction back in the day.

I also think that it was one of those things where, you know, you have light versions of something or, you know, you have free versions of other things in life that aren’t software related that you can upgrade to or that, you know, free gifts with purchase.

And so I think the idea of, you could have this free one, or you can upgrade to these other things, or you could take it and run with it and do it your own thing, I think is something that made sense at the beginning, but again, can be slightly confusing now.

Because I do see people come to my meetup and they’re asking questions, and we all try to troubleshoot. We get them to log in, and we’re like, oh, okay, now I see, you’re using the free version, so you don’t have the ability to add this plugin or change your theme this way, or use CSS, you know, and those kinds of things, as you can with the paid version or with the self-hosted. And so I think that there is an opportunity for us to make that distinction in different places.

I will say one of the benefits, however, even if you start on the free .com, you can upgrade to paid and get that, or you can port that over to your own self-hosted as well. Other competitors don’t necessarily let you, like take your whole version of your website that you’ve built on their platform and bring it into a self-hosted situation like WordPress can.

And so even if you made the decision to go with wordpress.com, and halfway through a build, or a year later, realise that you really wish you had done something different, we make it easy for you to be able to take that and move it someplace else, like Bluehost or you know, SiteGround or other places like that. So we make it easy for you. We’re not trying to shove you into one box and make you stay there and say look at all those people over there doing things you wish you could do.

[00:21:43] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I think that the underlying motivations was just fueled by the open source ideals, and the software belongs to the people and not so much specific companies or corporations. And so by putting it in .org, it was just more about being open and available and for the community, right?

Matt and Mike, when they forked b2, the intention was to get more people to work on it with them, right? And ensure that the software that they were running their website with survived and continued to grow and didn’t have bugs. And so I think that that was just part of the motivation where, I just looked it up, and the .org domains were intended to only be used by organisations. And it seems like the intention was to require documentation at some point, but it was never enforced.

I mean, when I got, in the late two thousands when I got involved, there was always the perception in my mind that you had to be an organisation to get one of those right? But that’s not actually the case. At least my early perception was that I needed it in order to do that. And so I wonder if that persists with other people as well.

And so I think that what Michelle also said resonates well is that, you know, no matter where you WordPress, you’re going to be able to take your site with you and go somewhere else. And that’s what makes WordPress great. And maybe you’re not even taking your site somewhere else, maybe you’re just taking out your content and, I don’t know, maybe feeding it into AI, or creating a book of all your posts, like a historical reference or something.

[00:23:07] Michelle Frechette: I did that.

[00:23:07] Jonathan Desrosiers: That sounds kind of cool actually, yeah. And so being able to take your content with you and you are the true owner of your content, and you have the rights to it, is not something that’s true for other platforms. You know, not to name names, but there’s a lot of other website platforms where it’s difficult to impossible to extract out your content if you need to move somewhere else.

[00:23:27] Michelle Frechette: It’s a lot of copy, paste at that point.

[00:23:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, or like finding someone that knows how to create a browser extension, or a scraper or something like that. And so that’s always something that I tell someone looking to get started with a website where, you know, it might be easier to get started with this other service now, and it might be okay with your needs now, but if you outgrow that website or that service, it’s more difficult to bring it elsewhere later.

We’re working on different ways with the data liberation initiative where we’re looking at ways to make our data more portable from other platforms to other platforms. And so I really feel strongly about that.

Like, that’s the strongest point, one of the strongest points of WordPress is that you own your content, you control it, there’s no algorithm changes, you know, on Facebook where all of a sudden people aren’t seeing your content. They change a feature, right? People can’t react a certain way to your content anymore, and it affects your traffic to your site.

And so I always strongly emphasise that to people, because people don’t think about that. They think I just need a website, right? But they don’t think about, what happens if I need to make changes and this software doesn’t work, or this service doesn’t help me anymore?

[00:24:36] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve definitely moved as a community, and by community I don’t mean the WordPress community, I mean the community of online users. We’ve definitely moved towards more gatekeeping and siloed consent repositories. You know, you think of things like social media, and essentially anything where there’s a, you know, a username and a password and a paywall. We seem to be more at peace with that.

And that brings me to the next thing actually. And I’m sorry if this comment lands badly, dear listener, but I think there is something quite curious about our community. I think we are full of people who are very well intentioned, who have extremely benevolent motives, and often, I think, regard commercial things sometimes as something to be viewed with a little bit of suspicion. I don’t know if you’ve detected this kind of thing as well.

All of those things are things which drew me in. They didn’t alienate me. They were exactly the kind of people that I wanted to be around. But I do wonder if WordPress’ history, so the .com, .org history over the last, let’s say 15 years or so, I do wonder if the flavor, the colour of the community, if you like, that we’ve got meant that we were going to have problems about this .com, .org split.

Because on the one side, fierce, fierce open source advocacy people. You must own your own content. You’ve got to be able to download the software. This is terribly important, you want to be able to fork it at a moment’s notice.

And then on the other hand, a bunch of people are, well, that’s great you do that, but I’m happy over here. I’ll pay my fee for the premium version of wordpress.com. That’s fine with me. I’m okay with that. I don’t need all the bells and whistles that you seem to have. I don’t need it to be this version and that version. I don’t need this plugin or that thing.

But I do wonder if the community that we’ve got is a part of that. In the mix somewhere is just what we’ve got. The people that are drawn to open source are going to view the .com side of things with a little bit of suspicion, and maybe see that, you know, that’s something which, gosh, we should not have that.

[00:26:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: The only thing I’d challenge you on there is that I don’t think it’s fair to say that people on the .com side don’t also care about the open source ideals. I think that many of them, if not all of them, do care about the underlying principles there. I think that, you always hear, you have to look after your own, right? You have to make sure you can pay your bills and you have a business and you. I’m US based, the American dream, right? Of creating a business and growing that into something sizable that can help people and benefit many.

And so that’s my only pushback there is that they do. It’s not a binary thing. It’s definitely an overlap. And I like to think that there’s more overlap than we think. And that might be a little naive, but I do tend to think that it overlaps pretty heavily in that section there.

[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: I think you are right, and I think what you’ve done there is uncovered the poor way that I phrased what I was saying. I think when I was trying to describe that I was, although I didn’t say it, I was trying to describe things from the .org point of view only. And so the nature of that community is fiercely protective of the open source values there and what have you. So yeah, you’re quite right. It felt, with a bit of hindsight, it felt like that question was coming from both sides and it really wasn’t. So thank you for picking me up on that.

[00:28:01] Jonathan Desrosiers: It’s normal to be skeptical of other people, right? Especially when you see all these horror stories of this big business, you know, draining these businesses out there that are draining money out of everybody and raising prices and profits are through the roof, right? So it’s normal to have this skepticism towards commercial entities, and that they’re trying to do the right things and things of that nature.

But to that, I just say to look at how the company and the space is contributing back and how they are ensuring that they do get their fair share of the WordPress pie, that is billions of dollars, on the last publishing that I saw, last report that I saw. But also making sure that that ecosystem is still strong, and supportive of everybody in the pool. To make sure that we can all compete to, you know, there’s definitely competition. We’re all going to compete together to make sure we’re trying to get more of the pie, right? And try to prove that our service or our products are the best.

But, yeah, so I think a little level of skepticism is healthy. You always hear, assume good intent. I think that’s very important, and to obviously judge people by their actions and what they do to help grow that open source community while they’re living in that .com commercial space.

Yeah, I don’t know, Michelle, if you have anything to add there. You probably have a different lens as the non-developer background.

[00:29:19] Michelle Frechette: Definitely the non-developer background here. So you used the word community when you talked about that when you first started the question, and I think we have to think about the fact that the community, although it does encompass both .com users and anybody who’s self-hosted through .org. It really is the lion’s share of that community comes from that self-hosted .org side. Comes from the people who go to Meetups. Comes from the people who attend WordCamps. And most importantly, it comes from the people who contribute to the ecosystem.

Whether that’s by volunteering through the .org and Make WordPress, whether that’s selling a product, or having a podcast or any of the things, a newsletter, any of the things that contribute to the success of WordPress overall, it applies across the board. But when you look at all of the volunteerism, and all of the unsponsored people, and even sponsored people who are creating, right? So Jonathan is a developer, he’s in the weeds with it. He’s got a sense of pride with what the community creates for each other.

And when you have a sense of pride in what you do, you have a loyalty to that as well. And so we are part of a group of people, a huge group of people, a multimillion group of people worldwide who are this .org community with some .com community peppered in. So of course there’s going to be skew, one direction versus the other.

I don’t think it’s necessarily derision. That I don’t think people like necessarily look at .com and go, ugh, what do they say? The redheaded stepchild of, you know, .org or whatever. I think it’s more along the lines of, we know this, we use this. We want other people to use this too. This is our community and this is what we’ve built this community around.

But I think that democratising publishing is used by both, right? So if you look at .org and .com, we talk about democratising publishing. And the free .com allows people in incredibly socioeconomically depressed areas, and who have very little side income to be able to start a website. The ability to do that, whether it’s a website to talk about a service that they offer. Whether it’s a website just to blog. Whether they’re trying to monetize or not, there’s opportunities for people around the world to create a free, absolutely free website on .com.

And have it say, you know, michellefrechette.wordpress.com, because that’s what I could afford at the time. And then when I can, I either upgrade to paid, or I port that over to a self-hosted situation. So I think that both of them really have an amazing place in our ecosystem, but we tend not to see that when we sit squarely in one side or the other.

[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That’s a really interesting point, and one I cannot believe I’ve never thought about that. Over all these many years of thinking about WordPress and all of its different flavors and things, wordpress.org carries the word free around with it in my head. I’m thinking wordpress.org, free. I’m struggling to imagine a scenario where it is entirely free to deploy.

[00:32:25] Michelle Frechette: I used to say WordPress is free like a free puppy. A free puppy, you still have to take to the vet, and buy food, and get their nails trimmed, and buy the leash, and all of the things that go along with a free puppy. WordPress.org is like that. It’s a free puppy. You still have to pay for hosting and pay for themes, and I mean, you couldn’t do it fairly inexpensively, but not a hundred percent free.

[00:32:44] Jonathan Desrosiers: I was just going to add in, likewise, it’s not free to get to the point where it’s published. And another thing that you brought up, Michelle, that made me think is, I mentioned about judging companies based on how they contribute and the ideals they follow. But that also is true for the individuals that spend their personal time, or self sponsor, to contribute to the software.

And so they are not looking, most likely, not looking for your business. They may be if they’re a freelancer type thing. But in most cases they’re looking for just recognition, or maybe a job, or maybe sponsorship, so that they could continue to help the software grow.

And so there’s multiple lenses to that commercial side of things, right? Where we talked about .org versus .com, and commercial versus, open source. But within that, there’s also other layers of that as well where you’re contributing to make sure the software grows, so that your company continues to do good. But also maybe you just really enjoy the software and believe in it and want to contribute on your own to ensure that that same thing happens.

[00:33:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting. I’m just going to finish off my thought from previously there. So the free to download bit, I think where I was going with that was that there’s a minimum of hosting. In order to get that free version of the software, the zip file that you download. In order to make it meaningful, you’ve got to at least do the hosting. The other bit, well, I suppose you could host it on your own computer, but good luck with that if you’re a newbie.

[00:34:09] Jonathan Desrosiers: I challenge that too, not necessarily, right? Like a website is only as good as who can access it, if they find what they’re looking for. But you could very easily just run WordPress on a Raspberry Pie somewhere in your basement that, you know, you use it to send requests to, to turn on your lights or something like that, or sync up your garage door. You know, you could theoretically use WordPress to do all these types of things.

So I would also challenge you to think outside the box a little bit on that. I’m not saying it’s a good idea and I’m not saying I might grunt at you when you come with your really weird obscure edge case in Trac, but that’s part of the great thing about WordPress.

[00:34:45] Michelle Frechette: But it’s possible.

[00:34:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: You can use WordPress in many different ways, with many different combinations of plugins and themes. And that makes WordPress great, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to maintain and ensure that backwards compatibility, which is one of our main pillars, is sustained release to release.

[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: It’s fascinating. Yeah, what insight that was. That’s remarkable.

The commercial side, so the .com side where you’re paying a subscription if you want the different tiers and the abilities that you get for doing that, I don’t know if any of this data is available, whether it’s been published, whether it’s easy to access, I’m not sure. But I’m guessing that there is some through line between the profitability of the .com business side of things, and the open source project.

We all know that many, many, many volunteers contribute to .org in every conceivable way. Whether that’s to the code, to events, to whatever it may be. But I’m imagining there is some connection. Maybe it’s attenuating a little bit more now. Maybe it was more in the past than it is now. But I’m imagining that there is a connection between sales, unit sales of the .com out into the open world, and people being paid, seconded, and what have you, to work on the .org side.

I actually don’t know if there’s any truth in that, if there’s anything there, but I’m imagining there is. If the .com business pays for the .org side to be as successful as it is essentially is what I’m trying to say.

[00:36:18] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I mean, historically Automattic has been the most sizable contributor to the project. There’s something called the Five for the Future Project, which is basically a challenge to companies, or individuals, making a living on WordPress to contribute 5% of their time back to the project. It’s a great initiative. That’s something that I was hired to participate in, so I’m very thankful for that because I’m able to have employment to work on open source software because of it.

But there are some flaws with it in that 5% isn’t right for everyone. It’s a goal, right? It’s, I’ve talked about this at WordCamps in the past, but time is not necessarily a good measure because it doesn’t measure the impact you have, or the productivity, or the efficiency that you have, right? So you could spend one hour working on this one bug fix that could fix screen reader software for millions of people accessing sites across the world. That’s very meaningful and that has a very strong impact. But that’s very hard to measure. And hours is certainly not the way that you can measure that.

So it’s a good idea. I like that a lot of people rallied behind that, and that it’s a very strong program. There’s a lot of participants. I’m looking forward to the next iteration of that, which a lot of community members are discussing and, you know, I’m sure leadership is always thinking about that as well. Like, how can we improve this and encourage more people to contribute and give back?

And so I guess all that to say that, you know, I guess .com and Automattic have contributed a sizable amount to the project over its history, and many other companies as well have historically contributed a lot back too.

[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: So another thing that I wanted to discuss, which we haven’t discussed so far is the sort of different feature set that you get, and the evolution of that over time. So if I was to get a .com site back, I don’t know, 12 years ago, the things that I could do with that would be different to what I can do now.

Obviously with the .org side, all bets are off. You can do what you wish with that. It’s yours. You can do anything you like. But on the .com side, it was limited in certain ways. The software was designed presumably to facilitate whatever it was that their agenda items were, whether that was profitability, growth, simplicity to use, whatever those metrics were.

Where are we at at the moment? Because it kind of feels like the two are coalescing, especially from a UI point of view. It feels like there’s moves at the moment to make the .com side be brought in line with the .org side. So the .org UI it feels like is going to be made available or pushed into the .com side.

And that kind of feels curious to me. It always felt that the UI was a big differentiator, like, you know, it looks different, you can immediately see that’s a .com website. Maybe in the future it won’t be. So let’s just talk around that. What are the differences in what you can do with the platforms? And then maybe we can get onto the UI and the UX.

[00:39:08] Michelle Frechette: So the free .com versus the upgraded paid plans have very different things that you can do within them. And then the paid plans are almost identical to what you can do with self-hosted. And so the difference really is you’re looking at the free plan versus any upgraded paid plan.

And with the free plan, you’re very limited into plugins and themes. There are very few that you can choose from. There’s more now than there were 10 or 15 years ago for sure. And I think my experience with logging into a free .com site looks different now than it did 10 or 12 years ago as well. But it still looks different than it does on a self-hosted WordPress installation.

That does change with an upgrade plan, because now you have a lot more features that you can add, you can bring in plugins, you can change a lot of the way that things look through CSS or through customisation. And so, yes, I think that the paid plan and the self-hosted are very much in sync with one another.

But the free plan still looks, to me at least, a lot different. And when I tried to add CSS to what it said, oh, you need to upgrade to do that, which I understand, right? So if they gave away everything, then there would be no money coming into the company to be able to operate and to pay the employees that actually work at Automattic. So yeah, I think there is still a difference. And I know that Jonathan probably knows a lot more about the technical differences than I do, but that’s my experiential difference.

[00:40:38] Jonathan Desrosiers: Well, one interesting fact is that wordpress.com is just one multi-site. So when you create a site, it’s just all in the same instance of WordPress. You just have your own space on that install.

[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: That is truly remarkable by the way. That is a quite numbing thought when you actually ponder that for a moment.

[00:40:54] Jonathan Desrosiers: For anyone that’s worked with multi-site, you know how challenging it is to have 10 sites, nevermind millions of sites. So it’s definitely impressive and interesting.

I’d also add that, you know, Michelle has talked a lot about more the personal style plans, right? Where we mentioned you get a free site if you have your site at nathan.wordpress.com. You can pay, you know, to get a domain, like I mentioned is the next plan. And then you can pay for more things like different plugins and different backups, whatever the features are that they offer.

But after you get past that, there’s additional tiers for people like agencies. There’s very, very high level, reliable hosting for companies that run Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 10 companies, whatever it is that they need more handholding. They need you to help them with engineering maybe with their team. There’s tiers all the way up to that level at Automattic. And I think it’s fair to say that any, you know, they have plans that compete with any different tier that may be out there.

There’s e-commerce plans and all of that. And, you know, at Bluehost we have e-commerce plans. We have managed plans just like they do. And like I said, before, we’re all trying to have our special sauce to make our home the best place to WordPress and for you to come and want to set up your site and make a living on us.

[00:42:09] Nathan Wrigley: So then back to the question of the, what feels like an endeavor to make the .com look a lot like the .org. Now that was something that I caught sight of not that long ago. It was probably, maybe, I want to say about eight weeks ago, something like that. I don’t know if either of you caught that piece of news, and whether or not that’s in fact moving forward. But the idea is to make a default version of .org basically identical in terms of look and feel.

I found that curious. I wondered what the intention was there. Was it purely just to have, I don’t know, one base of software that could be relied upon for both, or whether it was to make it easier to do a migration in either direction? I don’t know. So, I don’t know if either of you do.

[00:42:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: So a little, I guess a little history is that wordpress.com used to use the same dashboard as .org. And a while ago there was a project called Calypso, and that is basically the dashboard that you know probably from the last five years or so. And I can’t confirm this, but I believe that it was an exploration on what the dashboard, what a new WordPress dashboard could be. And I think that they’ve realised that having your own dashboard that’s different than .org is not really the best path.

And there’s a few reasons for that. One is that we mentioned you have millions of sites on .com, right? That’s all very valuable feedback from using the software. And if they’re using a different dashboard than everybody that’s not on wordpress.com, that’s basically lost opportunities to receive feedback on the software that we’re building. And so that’s one aspect.

And the other aspect is that, if you have a different dashboard, you have to have people maintaining that different dashboard, and making sure it works with all the new features that are added to wordpress.org. Make sure it’s sustainable and performant and all of this requires resources. But if you could adapt your products to use the same dashboard that everybody else has, then maybe you could take some of those resources and put them back to the .org software, instead of the internal Calypso project.

I should correct that, it wasn’t an internal project, it was used internally. It is open source and, especially initially there was a lot of encouragement for community members to participate in that. And so it’s not like it was a closed thing where they shut everybody out and they wanted, you know, it to be their own thing. It wasn’t trade secret type stuff. It was open source.

So, yeah, those are just two things that stand out to me as reasons why you would want to use the same experience that everybody else has, as it just contributes to the greater good of the software and the health of the ecosystem.

[00:44:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting, and again, something I hadn’t really thought about. The heuristics that would come out of .com. Well, for a start, it’s incredibly cohesive. That data set is going to be enormous, whereas trying to gather that from all the other versions of WordPress, you would obviously have to opt people into that to begin with. But also, it would be very difficult to gather all of that, whereas presumably the .com side of things has got that completely sealed up. So yeah, again, really interesting.

It is curious. I don’t really know if we’ll ever overcome in people’s heads the, well, for some people I think it’s a chasm. You know, it’s a really big divide, the difference between .org and .com. But I think we’ve done a fairly good job of explaining what the history is, why the things have been done in the way that they’ve been done, maybe a little bit into the future and how things are going to look.

I don’t know if there’s any salient point that you think we missed there, but if not, I think we’ll round it up. So I’ll just ask Michelle first. Anything you wanted to get across about that before we knock it on the head?

[00:45:43] Michelle Frechette: I think that we often talk about .org versus .com as though they were adversarial, but it’s really just a comparison as opposed to one being better than the other. I think you choose the option that’s best for you and your goals, and there’s nothing wrong with choosing any of those options.

[00:46:02] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I’d just add that with any technology or anything, knowledge is not always binary, right? It’s a spectrum. And so how can we better expose people to the concepts, better explain them to people so that it’s easier to understand and get up to speed on what different concepts are. Technical concepts, brand concepts, whatever that may be, software, and strive for simplicity, right? That’s our, one of our philosophies. And so how can we make things more simple so that more people are able to better understand and be empowered to have a better online presence by having a greater understanding.

[00:46:37] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for picking that puzzle apart with me. That’s been really interesting. So Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers, thank you both for joining me today. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:46:46] Michelle Frechette: Thanks for having us.

[00:46:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: Always a pleasure. Thank you Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.

Michelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status and program director for WP Includes. She’s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.

Jonathan is a WordPress core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes, supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.

If you’ve ever searched for “WordPress” online, you’ve probably found both WordPress.com and WordPress.org at the top of your results, and, like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.

Today, Michelle and Jonathan help clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. They talk about how these two flavours of WordPress came to be, why they’ve both been key to WordPress’ growth, and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetisation.

Michelle shares her perspective as a long-time user and advocate, with experience across both .com and .org sites, while Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his core contributor vantage point.

They also explore whether the naming conventions .com and .org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress community’s open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.

Along the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the project seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Blogger

Michelle’s WP Trail Buddies on WordPress.com

The story of forking b2

Bluehost

Data Liberation

Five for the Future

Calypso