@jalefkowit spent some time looking at the 2007 screenshot in the Wikipedia page. Of course, many things seem off from a 2024 perspective (fonts, spacing, buttons) but the UI still is good with some great details and sense of UX. It must have been a nightmare with the CSS of this time and IE support.

@jalefkowit I was also right in the middle of it. The big spam boom of the time (and MT’s utter inability to deal with it), was definitely a factor.
As for which one was “better software”, I am undeniably biased (having helped code WP at the time, after a stint as an MT user), but I would contend MT was okay-ish software with a nice polish (and little to no room for a plug-in architecture). WP 1.x was lacking, but by 2, was heaps better.

@jalefkowit

Hypothesis I can't prove: the downfall of Movable Type was one of the examples of why low switching costs are great if you're a customer but bad if you're a vendor, which led to for-profit social media being the way it is now.

@jalefkowit and now Word Press is about to sell contibutors work to AI

@jalefkowit I can't say I’m surprised by the moves that WordPress is making. However, for me, what prompted me to get off of Wordpress was their move to the block theme editor. It was pushed too early and only made things more difficult.

I moved off of Wordpress back in 2022 and I don’t think I'll ever go back. This latest move just reinforces my decision to move off of the software..

@jalefkowit This is such good history to remember. I also made the switch at the time and now it looks like I'll be switching again.

@jalefkowit I actually know a blog that still runs MT.

The owners don't know how to turn commenting back on and they haven't noticed that it's been hacked to serve malware.

@jalefkowit @flargh I miss Movable Type. I’d say it’s still ahead of where Wordpress is today, at least in terms of ease of use, especially with the annoying block editor.

@jalefkowit I remember things slightly differently. I remember Movable Type had a search function, that, when abused (and this was trivial, anybody could, and did, write one-liners to exploit this), would sponge all resources on a server until bringing it down. I also remember hosting companies banning Movable Type on shared hosting and VPS environments, forcing MT users to either 1) switch to something else, or 2) fork out for big iron to save everyone else from you.

@jalefkowit

@soc

I spent my best years as webdev managing postnuke (and phpnuke) modules and Moodle.

Wordpress isn't the only game in town, and I've never really understood the appeal and ecosystem it seemed to command in the space.

I think it was more zietgiestz dujuour and timing combined with the average web Dev interest in understanding wider IT /Dev project ecosystem decreasing

@jalefkowit It's the Trust Thermocline at work:

https://scribe.rip/the-trust-thermocline-explains-how-companies-suddenly-lose-customers-and-employees-2657c9535e6a

@jalefkowit

So, now that everyone is going to bail on WP, is there a piece of software that is really friendly to math/science/computing discussions, and is ActivityPub native? Must haves are both LaTeX style math, and code fences, easy quoting, and both comment preview and editable comments.

I kinda want the usability of Discourse but oriented around a single long-form article with ActivityPub based discussion.

@jalefkowit did I miss something big? What’s going on with Wordpress? I can’t seem to find a good search keyword.

@jalefkowit Moveable Type slapped.

@jalefkowit I moved away from Substack after only being there a year and went back to WordPress, thinking it was safe and reliable. Now I'm gonna have to move again? I'll have to learn to self-host -- if they'll even give me back my urls. I hope there is an opt-out option. if there isn't, I'm gonna have to go back and re-tool everything and protect my photos and poems. Annoying AF.

@jalefkowit Ahhh Movable Type, Pivot, those were the days. 😄

It probably didn’t help either that it was around that time that platforms like Twitter and soon after Tumblr became more and more mainstream. Some people switched to those platforms instead of maintaining their own CMS.

@jalefkowit this was my experience too - thank you for reminding me

@jalefkowit I ran a huge multi site Movable Type system, and while WP eating its breakfast, lunch and dinner was kind of inevitable, I miss the quirky, sometimes groundbreaking nature of MT in the late 3.x days.

Multi-site was baked in way before WP had it.

And then there was all that glorious Perl.

MT used Perl CGI on the backend to build static HTML for the frontend. Sound ahead of its time??

The scripts could bring your server to its knees, but there was a lot of static HTML in there.

@jalefkowit and here I was thinking that the fact that many old school Drupal developers got their introduction to the GPL CMS when it was used to create DeanSpace; a distribution designed to help grassroots organization for Howard Dean's 2004 run for president. I had no idea that WP owed its early growth to a pricing misstep by the Trotts. Very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal#History

@jalefkowit Another Trust Thermocline instance. https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-biggest-hidden-risk-in-business

@jalefkowit

My blog platform history:

1998 - launched https://www.digittante.com w/ hand-coded HTML
2000 - became nomad-ish, "posting" via a PalmV handheld connected to a #Motorola #Timeport tri-band phone
2001 - moved to blogger (#PyraLabs #FTW)
2004 - moved to #Wordpress
2005 - attended first #Gnomedex
2024 - launched https://masto.digittante.com
Today - wondering if I need / want a blog at all anymore...

@jalefkowit I was so damn disappointed in MT. I stayed with them as long as I possibly could, but they made it clear they just didn't want regular bloggers.

I only have to make sure I don't have jetpack, so a bit lucky this time.

@jalefkowit Huh, I was around for this and I definitely followed the crowd from MT to WP, but I don't remember why. It just seemed like everyone was doing it so I followed suit. Thanks for the explainer.

@jalefkowit Is there a link out there that sums up whatever the hell WordPress is planning that I need to rip out of every site I've ever worked on?

@jalefkowit I find this really interesting, I did play around with having a MT blog at some point but I was put off it for one big reason :

The absolute shitshow SixApart did to LiveJournal and the swift backlash from the community that was so poorly handled.

It for me was very much a "you people have no idea what any of this is about do you ?" moment. I didn't realise there was a less "vibe" reason for the downfall of MT

@jalefkowit i had completely forgotten about this obscure piece of history. i moved from MT to WP in exactly the same year, and long forgot the reason why!

@jalefkowit One news item from one source and "everybody" is already leaving WP? Haven't we learned something in the last 20 years of the internet?

@jalefkowit good riddance to Perl. Glory to php! /s

@jalefkowit Oh wow, I remember. I was far from an influential blogger but known in my circle and I remember making the move from MT to WP (I still maintain a few blogs using self-hosted WordPress). It was really a thing!

@jalefkowit@octodon.social So as someone re-entering the space after a decade gone... what alts to the monolithic WP should I be considering?