Unpacking my.WordPress.net

It’s built on WordPress Playground, which already allows you to instantly launch a temporary WordPress environment in a browser, without having to worry about hosting. The pitch for my.Wordpress.net is that it’s a personal workspace, rather than a traditional publishing platform. Sites are private by default, and all data stays entirely within your browser – nothing is publicly accessible. Storage starts at 100MB and sites come with access to a small catalogue of pre-configured tools

The idea seems to be to change the dynamic from WordPress as a publishing platform, to also being something you might use regularly as a kind of notebook, scratchpad, or throwaway development environment – a place you can use to think, organise and tinker, without having to worry too much about setup and configuration.

According to Brandon Payton on the official announcement post.

“What makes this approach meaningful is not just where WordPress runs, but how it changes the relationship between people and the software itself. By removing the need to sign up or make early decisions about hosting and visibility, my.WordPress.net reframes WordPress as a space you can enter and work within, rather than a service you have to configure before you begin.”

WordPress are trying to frame this as something that puts you in control of your own little section of the internet, with project lead Alex Kirk quoted as saying:

“This takes WordPress from being framed as something that is democratizing publishing to democratizing digital sovereignty.”

At this stage, it’s not really clear how my.WordPress.net achieves that goal in any meaningful way. Yes, it gives you a quick way of getting a WordPress space up and running, but with limited configuration options, and no public access to your digital space, what are the benefits?

A follow up post from WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg shed some light on the vision – this is just the first step in a plan to make WordPress sites easier and more accessible to everyone:

“These WordPress Playground containers are fully composable and atomic. You can track and roll back any change. Undo for everything. Stop thinking of WordPress as just on a web host and worrying about maintenance and management, and more as a self-contained unit of open source goodness, a fun little package where you own and control the code and data and can run it however you like.

“How perfect is that for AI to work with? Playground makes WordPress local, fast, and trivial to spin up multiple instances, test code changes, and save them.”

Coming next, Mullenweg says, are more features that aim to bring the vision closer to reality: peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing, which will at last make your playground-based site accessible to other people.

It’s a worthy goal, and these days where we seem to be living with an increasingly Dead Internet, anything that makes it easier for real people to publish what they want in spaces that aren’t owned and controlled by huge corporations, has got to be worth supporting.