4 ms·

I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team" was, so I clicked the link to the linked website in this story. I was surprised that it was in fact a

by skeeter2020 2y ago

I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team" was, so I clicked the link to the linked website in this story. I was surprised that it was in fact an initiative to do things like "have a dashboard that shows the climate impact of publishing" and "promote static publishing over..." I assume because serving this content (under someone's model) uses less electricity? Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.

markx2 2y ago
> Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too. This was costing Matt nothing. Zero. The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  So then nothing was actually cut and these weird people who are super passionate about the climate impact of WordPress of all things can continue to do.. whatever it was they were doing, for free as they were before? If the issue is having a slack channel in the WordPress org, they can just make their own discord server. No big deal.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    Mullenweg was the one who requested the creation of the Slack channel.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      If he can make the channel, he can delete the channel. If the people in that channel want a new place to chat, they can make one. So what's the problem?
      - miunau 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
      Its purpose was to be a greenwash figleaf. These activities are supposed to be toothless and accomplish nothing because that isn't why they exist.
- missinglugnut 2y ago
  > This was costing Matt nothing. Zero. These were salaried employees working on the sustainability team, correct? If not, how could Mullenweg shut it down?
  - aimazon 2y ago
    My sweet summer child. Matt has unilateral control over every aspect of Wordpress, including the open-source project and community. He exerts that control, whether that's closing Slack channels or banning members. https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/ https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      He cannot control how people choose to spend their own free time. If these people want to have a chatroom about WordPress sustainability which isn't hosted by Matt, there's nothing Matt can do to stop them. They can easily do this for free. This is a huge drama about nothing. Matt is being a baby and so is everybody else who's crying about it. There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for any of the involved parties to not simply walk away and stop associating with each other.
      - poincaredisk 2y ago
        >There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for (...) I assume volunteers working in the sustainability team for free primarily care about non-monetary things.
        lupusreal 2y ago
        There is literally nothing stopping them from continuing in another chatroom, not administered by Matt.
      - scarecrowbob 2y ago
        You can't force folks to contribute stuff, but you very much can prevent them from contributing things. That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable. And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc. Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content. So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.
- gibrown 2y ago
  > The work was being done, for free, by passionate people. The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.
jgalt212 2y ago
LLMs use about 1000X the resources of the most poorly designed WP site. The best thing that the WP Sustainability Team can do is retask itself to higher impact problems.
- throwawayqqq11 2y ago
  ... like raising public awareness about the broad issue? whatabout: retasking yourself on that issue instead of just commenting?
  - jgalt212 2y ago
    I am raising awareness around the energy wastefulness of LLMs.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  For every one LLM user, there are hundreds if not thousands of people visiting WordPress sites. WordPress is unimaginably ubiquitous. When you're that popular, making your software more energy efficient has an actual, real life impact (even if other things are using lots of energy). In aggregate it's still a massive amount of energy.
  - jgalt212 2y ago
    you can say that, but are big tech building new data centers and contracting with nuclear energy producers to support WP websites?
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      There are no nuclear energy producers being contracted, just upstarts that promise to deliver energy later, in exchange for a promise to buy that energy.
      - jgalt212 2y ago
        Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power Microsoft data centers > Three Mile Island, the power plant near Middletown, Pa., that was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, will reopen to power Microsoft's data centers https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...
jasonlotito 2y ago
> I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team" You still don't.
frereubu 2y ago
I agree in principle. It's the childish way in which it was done that's the issue for me.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  I disagree in principle. You can call it a pro-environment initiative or you can call it just... promoting good engineering. Making code more efficient benefits literally everyone from the people making it to the people using it to the planet upon which it is used, and who's resources it is dependent on. I wish efficiency was a more prioritized thing in basically every facet of the modern tech industry which, at present, is addicted to an absolutely stressful number of libraries that cause nearly every prominent tech product to be ludicrously bloated. Like, it's incredibly irritating to me that mobile browsers are practically unusable, not because mobile design isn't ubiquitous, but because every website now makes my phone hot because it's running 800 MB of fucking JavaScript to render text.
  - frereubu 2y ago
    Perhaps we're talking about different principles. I believe very much in good engineering and more efficient code / websites to reduce resource use. I just don't think it should be in core WordPress code.
    - immibis 2y ago
      You believe core WordPress code should be poorly engineered and less efficient to increase resource use?
      - frereubu 2y ago
        Have to admit, I'm kind of amazed by this question.
_fat_santa 2y ago
I found it kinda silly at first, like how would WP actually contribute to a reduction in climate change. But I think at the scale that WP is deployed at (millions upon millions of sites), changing something like static output by default could contribute to a non-negligable reduction in electricity spent on hosting.
silexia 2y ago
"Sustainability" is a garbage buzzword that at best means money being wasted on people writing pointless reports and usually means pushing a far left agenda.

markx2 2y ago

> Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too. This was costing Matt nothing. Zero. The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.

lupusreal 2y ago
So then nothing was actually cut and these weird people who are super passionate about the climate impact of WordPress of all things can continue to do.. whatever it was they were doing, for free as they were before? If the issue is having a slack channel in the WordPress org, they can just make their own discord server. No big deal.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  Mullenweg was the one who requested the creation of the Slack channel.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    If he can make the channel, he can delete the channel. If the people in that channel want a new place to chat, they can make one. So what's the problem?
    - miunau 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    Its purpose was to be a greenwash figleaf. These activities are supposed to be toothless and accomplish nothing because that isn't why they exist.
missinglugnut 2y ago
> This was costing Matt nothing. Zero. These were salaried employees working on the sustainability team, correct? If not, how could Mullenweg shut it down?
- aimazon 2y ago
  My sweet summer child. Matt has unilateral control over every aspect of Wordpress, including the open-source project and community. He exerts that control, whether that's closing Slack channels or banning members. https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/ https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    He cannot control how people choose to spend their own free time. If these people want to have a chatroom about WordPress sustainability which isn't hosted by Matt, there's nothing Matt can do to stop them. They can easily do this for free. This is a huge drama about nothing. Matt is being a baby and so is everybody else who's crying about it. There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for any of the involved parties to not simply walk away and stop associating with each other.
    - poincaredisk 2y ago
      >There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for (...) I assume volunteers working in the sustainability team for free primarily care about non-monetary things.
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        There is literally nothing stopping them from continuing in another chatroom, not administered by Matt.
    - scarecrowbob 2y ago
      You can't force folks to contribute stuff, but you very much can prevent them from contributing things. That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable. And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc. Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content. So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.
gibrown 2y ago
> The work was being done, for free, by passionate people. The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.

jgalt212 2y ago

LLMs use about 1000X the resources of the most poorly designed WP site. The best thing that the WP Sustainability Team can do is retask itself to higher impact problems.

throwawayqqq11 2y ago
... like raising public awareness about the broad issue? whatabout: retasking yourself on that issue instead of just commenting?
- jgalt212 2y ago
  I am raising awareness around the energy wastefulness of LLMs.
bastawhiz 2y ago
For every one LLM user, there are hundreds if not thousands of people visiting WordPress sites. WordPress is unimaginably ubiquitous. When you're that popular, making your software more energy efficient has an actual, real life impact (even if other things are using lots of energy). In aggregate it's still a massive amount of energy.
- jgalt212 2y ago
  you can say that, but are big tech building new data centers and contracting with nuclear energy producers to support WP websites?
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    There are no nuclear energy producers being contracted, just upstarts that promise to deliver energy later, in exchange for a promise to buy that energy.
    - jgalt212 2y ago
      Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power Microsoft data centers > Three Mile Island, the power plant near Middletown, Pa., that was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, will reopen to power Microsoft's data centers https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...

jasonlotito 2y ago

> I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team" You still don't.

frereubu 2y ago

I agree in principle. It's the childish way in which it was done that's the issue for me.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
I disagree in principle. You can call it a pro-environment initiative or you can call it just... promoting good engineering. Making code more efficient benefits literally everyone from the people making it to the people using it to the planet upon which it is used, and who's resources it is dependent on. I wish efficiency was a more prioritized thing in basically every facet of the modern tech industry which, at present, is addicted to an absolutely stressful number of libraries that cause nearly every prominent tech product to be ludicrously bloated. Like, it's incredibly irritating to me that mobile browsers are practically unusable, not because mobile design isn't ubiquitous, but because every website now makes my phone hot because it's running 800 MB of fucking JavaScript to render text.
- frereubu 2y ago
  Perhaps we're talking about different principles. I believe very much in good engineering and more efficient code / websites to reduce resource use. I just don't think it should be in core WordPress code.
  - immibis 2y ago
    You believe core WordPress code should be poorly engineered and less efficient to increase resource use?
    - frereubu 2y ago
      Have to admit, I'm kind of amazed by this question.

_fat_santa 2y ago

I found it kinda silly at first, like how would WP actually contribute to a reduction in climate change. But I think at the scale that WP is deployed at (millions upon millions of sites), changing something like static output by default could contribute to a non-negligable reduction in electricity spent on hosting.

silexia 2y ago

"Sustainability" is a garbage buzzword that at best means money being wasted on people writing pointless reports and usually means pushing a far left agenda.