A not-quite Silver Jubilee

On April 22, 2025, Matt Mullenweg posted a curious post to the WordPress.org News blog, entitled “WordPress Jubilee”:

As I said, we’re dropping all the human blocks. Community guidelines, directory guidelines, and such will need to be followed going forward, but whatever blocks were in place before are now cleared. It may take a few days, but any pre-existing blocks are considered bugs to be fixed.

That’s it. That’s the entirety of the post. Even now, no context has been added to the post.

If you arrived at the post via your WordPress Dashboard—which includes the WordPress.org News blog within the default WordPress Events and News widget—you’d be forgiven for having literally no idea what this post is referencing. What are “human blocks”? Does this refer to blocks within the WordPress.org Pattern Library, which were created by humans (as opposed to AI)? Are these now considered “bugs”? Where did Mullenweg say whatever he “said”?

From title alone, you might think that this post had details about WordPress’ upcoming Silver Jubilee, its 25-year anniversary coming in just three short years. Maybe you misremembered—maybe the Jubilee is this year? Reading the post would confuse you further. On April 22 or April 23, perhaps you’d visit Mullenweg’s blog, looking for additional context. There, you’d see the most recent post was focused on recirculation, linking to Mullenweg’s self-published and self-defined “greatest hits.”

If you’re loosely keyed into the WordPress community, this might be the point where you’d check Mullenweg’s Twitter account. There, you’ll discover a tweet regarding “blocks”, posted a day earlier:

I tried to unblock all accounts today, but the X interface is broken. I'll figure out how to unblock everyone. I'm removing all my blocks; it may take a few days. Any block that remains is a bug, not a statement.

Context within that Twitter thread later implies that “all of” the blocks, including those on WordPress.org, would be removed.

You made it—you finally understand what that WordPress.org News post was about, though it took significantly more effort than most people would spend. 

For my part, it would be incredibly easy for me to stop here and head into a thoughtful piece about communication channels to WordPress users and community members alike—how, perhaps, posts on the WordPress.org News blog should be well-formed and consider the millions of potential global readers, providing context and background to ensure everyone can easily participate in the community. But, that’s not this post.

Instead, I’d like to fast forward to a post from Mullenweg two days later.

Reflecting on forgiveness and death

On April 23 at 8:30pm UTC, Mullenweg posted the following on his ma.tt blog (reprinted in full):

I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from.

The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so many ways, inspiring me and drawing me back to the Catholic faith I grew up with, with an emphasis on service, compassion, and humility. His passing on Easter Monday, a holiday about rebirth, feels historic. Moments like that invite reflection—not just on personal choices, but on the broader systems we’re a part of.

My life, which was primarily about generative creative work that was free for everyone to use, has been subsumed by legal battles. From the start, I’ve said this: after many rounds of negotiation that I approached in good faith, WPE chose to sue. In hindsight, those conversations weren’t held in the same spirit, and that’s unfortunate.

But we can’t rewrite the past. What we can do is decide how we move forward.

The maker-taker problem, at the heart of what we’ve been wrestling with, doesn’t disappear by avoiding it. If we’re serious about contributing to the future of open source, and about preserving the legacy of what we’ve built together, we need space to reset. That can’t happen under the weight of ongoing litigation. The cards are in WPE hands, a fight they’ve started and refuse to end.

So I’m asking for a moment of reflection for us all as stewards of a shared ecosystem. Let’s not lose sight of that.

We’ll come back to the timing of this post, but let’s consider some of its content first.

The implication within this post is that the passing of Pope Francis has caused Mullenweg to reflect on his actions within the shared WordPress ecosystem. While Mullenweg does not specifically mention actions to take as a result of his requested moment of reflection, in context with his then-recent tweets and post on WordPress.org, readers may believe that these two things are related. The post on WordPress.org is even titled with the term “Jubilee”, which has a biblical meaning, a time when “debts would be forgiven”, among other things.

(A quick parenthetical: I find it telling that, instead of proposing actions to take within this “Jubilee,” Mullenweg repeats seemingly false talking points around pre-lawsuit discussions with WP Engine and that WP Engine “started” the war. As always, Mullenweg is careful about his word choice here. It is a fact that WP Engine started litigation against Automattic and Mullenweg, which is what Mullenweg parrots in this post and elsewhere. However, it is also a fact that WP Engine’s litigation was in response to public actions taken by Mullenweg—these actions started the war, not WP Engine’s litigation.)

However, the implication that unblocking accounts has anything to do with the pope’s death is demonstrably wrong.

Let’s look closer at the timeline.