Decentralizing WordPress: The Fairness Initiative with Joost de Valk & Karim Marucchi | Open Source Summit NA 2025

Hey, everybody. We're back at the Open Source summit here in Denver, and we're talking about, well, WordPress. And there's this whole initiative called Fairness.

It's, um, I guess a package that we're gonna use to kind of bring the notion of open source more fully and deeply into that community. It's always been open source driven, but we have Yost and Kareem here, and they're gonna explain what's going on. Yost, what exactly is the fairness package and, and what are we trying to achieve here?

org. org to get updates of WordPress itself, themes, plugins, translations, whatever you get in your, in your site that is dynamic. org with another system, our federated and independent repositories, FAIR Fair.

Um, these repositories can be hosted by anyone, by a host, by a large company that wants it to run one internally by a university that wants to run one because they're, they wanna be nice to the world. Um, by doing that, we basically change how we distribute WordPress by getting it instead of from one source. We get it from a lot of sources.

And by federating those sources together, we make sure that if WordPress org were to decide to block a host from accessing WordPress do org, which unfortunately happened in the end of last year, we can then route around that and, and basically prevent that from happening. Kind of sounds like a peer network in some level. It it is very much like the internet.

It needs to route around anything that breaks. Yeah. Yeah.

Kareem, explain to the folks at home, what's the backstory and why do we need this? What's going on? 'cause not everybody is deeply immersed in the WordPress.

You'd be surprised. Yeah. So what a lot of people don't realize is WordPress is 22 years old and powers more than 40% of the websites on the internet.

So that is pretty long in the tooth. And what ends up happening is this infrastructure that Yos was just talking about serves so many things, not just updates, but also the things that extend WordPress. And over the last years, this system has been neglected and it hasn't been kept up to date as it should.

And it's a centralized one point of failure system that was already a technical problem that at some point it was gonna be needing to be addressed. org decided to block one of their major competitors from being able to get access to any of these updates. And to be clear, WordPress won't work long term without being able to be updated and without being able to have these extensions and themes plugged into it.

So that was already one spot where it's like, okay, maybe two commercial open source project companies are going to have a little bit of a commercial fight. Fine. org decided to actually replace one commercial module with another one and fork it replacing somebody else's code.

So you have a classic supply chain security issue. My day-to-day job is working with enterprise Fortune 50, fortune 500 clients, and those clients were saying, this is unacceptable. org didn't announce that they were gonna change out the code and just did it.

You'd have changes on 40% of the word, uh, of the possible internet without anybody knowing anything. No check and balance, no transparency. org, tried to see if we could work together, and they decided they wanted to sort of not work with us at the moment and see where they could go in a different direction.

Um, so a group of groups got together and started thinking about how to solve the second problem. And then the second problem is that the distribution for all of WordPress is done by hosting companies. org by putting up their own independent mayors, what ends up happening very quickly is architectural drift.

And then you have the entire ecosystem starting to segment and fall apart. Alright, so this was basically, we started writing code in January. This was a six month sprint to get out a proof of concept that could show that we could federate this like an old peer-to-peer network, so to speak, but using the at protocol and, and Blue Skies system because the Alternative would be The balkanization of WordPress then.

Is that what would happen? Well, it's not just Balkanization. I think there's a, that there are quite a few things that play into each other here.

On the one hand, we have one entity controlling WordPress, Oregon using it to how he sees fit and, and, and his whims. Um, on the other hand, we have a wider ecosystem that needs to rely on on that and actually needs to rely on it for corporates, but also for hosts wanting to install new WordPress sites. And if that site goes down for 10 minutes, then 10 minutes long, they can't sell any new WordPress sites.

It's as stupid as that. And this honestly happened too much and too many. And so a lot of people in the ecosystem were saying, okay, we're not happy with how all of this is going.

Let's fix that. And then we came up with fair and we started building. And then as we started building, we also realized that there was way more that we could do in what we were fixing.

So FAIR doesn't just federate these repositories and remove that supply chain security risk. It actually also adds more tech new technology to improve the security of the supply chain. So we've never had code signing in WordPress for plugins and themes, and now we do.

org. If they were hosted elsewhere, you could not find them by searching in the WP admin. Now you can.

So there is a lot that we can do for the betterment of the wider ecosystem that actually allows us to, to make the ecosystem more resilient, and it allows us to allow for more innovation and economic growth in that ecosystem. And all of that combined led us to, Hey, this, this feels like a very good idea. So we were talking it through and then we were like, okay, the next step is now we need governance for this idea because we are replacing one entity.

We can't replace him with one other entity. Um, and that's when we came to the Lennox Foundation. Mm-hmm.

And they were actually very helpful. WordPress has famously been very independent and in their own little community, and they haven't really, the entire community there hasn't really interacted with a lot of other open source projects. So the idea of how the Lennox Foundation creates checks and balances and has transparent governance is something that's new to the WordPress ecosystem.

Mm-hmm. So how much of this is about, uh, money and commercialization, and how much of this is about egos? And, and, and So I, I think on our side, it is very much about wanting to make sure that WordPress is, remains the best c open source CMS available for the next 20 years.

Yeah. Um, I've founded a company myself, uh, called Yost, uh, Yost, SEO plugin for WordPress sold that in 2021, I've made my money. I feel sort of ob obligated to the community to make sure that I help keep it alive and, and, and help it stay healthy.

Um, And there's a, there's a history in open source of content management systems, e-commerce systems of them starting out in the best possible idea of open source. But then the companies behind them get into the same old necessary bell curve of funding where they have to start privatizing certain things and creating choke points. And we're at a point with the WordPress ecosystem with 40% of the web, with how many, what, 20,000 new sites a day that we're at a point where it needs to evolve to be truly open source, where not any one company can steer it, because that's gonna just end up killing it.

Like I can name five other CMSs or e-commerce systems that have died in the last 10 years because of the same trajectory. Can a federation succeed? 'cause there are those folks who say, you know, by definition, open source requires a benevolent dictator.

I don't believe that for a minute. Mm-hmm. Um, one of the things that surprised me as we went into this process was we were talking to all these hosts and I was asking of them, why aren't you contributing to the WordPress project more?

And their reply was because nobody asked us. And turns out that most of them are very willing. I've started drawing the comparison to I can, where pretty much all hosts do a lot of work for and, and pay pay for I can.

And WordPress is just as important to their business, and they're very willing to do things there. They just don't know how. They just, they don't even know that it's necessary.

There's no process and There's no process. And I think we can fix that. And, and then actually, yes, I do believe that we can make this federation work.

Mm-hmm. Full disclosure, all of the techstrong sites are running on WordPress. Um, and we're in that almost every day, and we all go home with the same feeling.

We enjoy the CMS and it does what it does, but sure, it feels manual and it feels like there's a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of, and a lot, a lot more could be automated. So, you know, for all the people out there who work in WordPress every day, what can we look forward to to kind of streamline this experience? Well, that's, that's one of the big things that needs to be worked on.

Next is onboarding and the ease for the end and the end users. It's been a little bit of a inside baseball, sort of WordPress centric, um, way of thinking of what the roadmap could be. And frankly, it's been only planned a year at a time besides the, the block editor that they've been working on for the last seven years.

3 and we've already got code in that changes how you're looking at your plugin repository. I what plugins you have in your site. We're looking at making sure that you can see which plugins, um, no longer being updated.

We like, there's no automation, there's no, there's no notification. And WordPress, if somebody's abandoned a plugin you're using, and that needs to be fixed because the last thing you and your sites wanna do is spend your time trying to figure out why something isn't working any longer and what happened to that plugin. We also used Yost, by the way.

Um, one of the other questions that comes up though is a lot of people have built their careers around WordPress and, and, and they are cautious about any kind of dissension. Or they'll look at it and they'll go, is, is is the thing I based my career on fragmenting underneath my feet? Or can they continue to do what they do?

But all of this will be happening in a way that is transparent to them. I, we did this, the way we did it precisely for that, for that group because we didn't want to fragment a community and because we wanted to offer them an, a view of what could be and also offer a path forward for everybody, including automatic WP engine, all the, all the people that are, that are sometimes at war, um, where we could all together move forward. Whether we succeed at that, I dunno, I honestly dunno.

I would like to, to hope so, but it's gonna be a, a challenge. But I, but the whole, the whole plan is to bring all of those people along and to make it easy for everyone to see that this can happen and do it transparently for the end, for the end user. Because honestly, if we installed fair in your site, if you looked at your plugin screen, you'd see it and otherwise you probably wouldn't see it This morning.

Um, during the keynotes, Steven from, uh, I believe Harvard Business School, the Economist was saying on his way to MIT Yeah. On his way to MIT, um, was saying that we need to focus on collaborating on the core and competing around the edges In the WordPress ecosystem, the core has been the domain of one company and one individual. And you could volunteer your time as long as you did it around that roadmap and around the edges where we should all be competing.

It was basically trying to figure out what's going to be next. This is an opportunity to collaborate on the core and then be able to focus on creating a wider edge, because we've got 70,000 plugins that are for free in the repository right now. There's at least five, 10,000 plugins that are paid that are very good out there.

And the ecosystem has a space to evolve with the, the latest, hottest trends of AI and anything else you wanna talk about in technology. But we need to create the room for that ecosystem to evolve and grow. Folks, I'm not gonna tell you who's right or who's wrong, but I will tell you this.

I have noticed a trend over the years. Anytime there's more companies than entities contributing to something, the pace of innovation's a whole lot faster. Gentlemen, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thanks again.