Moving house is an odd thing, even when that house turns out to be a virtual one. Usually, visual changes here are purely design changes as both my tastes and my design skills evolve. But, this time, many of the changes you see are connected to a migration (or move) of what and how this site functions.
I have been a WordPress user since 2003, on and off. Some of the earliest posts on this site were about that Cafelog/b2evolution/WordPress fork/split/whatever. I have even left WordPress a couple of times: once for Drupal, once for GaSP (which I wrote myself), and this time for a platform called Grav. And, this time, I am likely not going back to WordPress ever again.
Twenty two years is a very long time for a piece of software to hold a dominant position in any industry. And, whereas, I could sit here and list WordPress' many technical shortcomings, this departure has nothing to do with those, though I am glad to be rid of them. It has to do with a well founded lack of trust in the mental stability of the person leading the platform.
I remember when Matt Mullenweg first pulled together the community that would drive WordPress forward. I remember when, through his company Automattic, he adopted a similar business strategy to RedHat -- offering commercial support to larger clients while supporting and growing an open source platform. I remember when Longreads, Simplenote, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and Beeper, all became part of Automattic trying to live up to its tagline -- making the web a better place. But the fact that the CEO can pull a stupid stunt without reprecussions within his own company means that I can no longer judge WordPress on its code alone. I now need to assess the mental state of the head of the business behind it, and I find his behavior to be lacking.
Other software like Drupal, Vim, and even the Linux Operating System, are (or were) also driven by a single person. But Dries Buytaert has to answer to a Board of Directors before any changes can be made at Drupal or his company behind it, Acquia. Or, when Bram Moolenaar passed away, the Vim project didn't die with him, they had a process in place to handle the transition. And, many of the recent changes to Linux introduced by Linus Torvalds were done to encourage a new generation of developers to become part of advancing Linux as a platform long after he is gone.
I have no problem depending upon projects driven by passionate leaders. But Dries, Bram, and Linus understand (or understood) their own limitations and put in place structures that would enable the software/communities they built to move forward without them, while Matt seems to be in the process of destroying the community that he built over the last 22 years.
I have one website left that depends upon WordPress. Over the next few months, it will get migrated away as well, possibly to Grav but maybe to something else. This could have been a post about technical superiority but it isn't. It's about moral vacuity and the uncertainty that it breeds.