Tweets From Téa Smith  ## Metadata - Author: [[@tealou on Twitter]] - Full Title: Tweets From Téa Smith - Category: #tweets - URL: https://twitter.com/tealou ## Document Notes ## Highlights - I just want to say that as appealing as a hard fork of #wordpress appears, from a PM/Biz Dev POV, devs and OSS people vastly underestimate what is involved. Forks usually become splinters, and the industry is just not set up for those splinters to succeed. Wordpress is a particular beast, because there is a lot of legacy, people are entrenched in the ecosystem, and there are a lot of people who stand to lose their businesses from it if something breaks. Agencies will be on the hook/liable for any solution they back and it has to succeed. Clients won't get it, nor will they care. They'll ask why you moved away from something stable and portable to something less stable and less portable etc. Wordpress goes back to being the hard sell it used to be 10 years ago. You gotta learn to sell that, manage clients and get that shit in your contracts and proposals. For example, look at this platform (X). We all want to move, it's gotten bad, but now its user base fractured across a bunch of different places. Most people stay out of sunk costs, habit and better the devil you know. it is really, really difficult to get people to care about any of this stuff outside of a small niche of tech people. Most people will just rebuild in Drupal or Ghost or Astro etc. Also, most of the mid-level agencies and enterprise are looking at WP alternatives since v5 anyway and are looking at opportunities to move away. Wordpress is more than your single WP dev freelancer. They can fork. But again, what happens when clients move? The biggest selling point of Wordpress is portability and always has been. Anyone who has inherited a butchered Whitelabel pluginception mess... well it's an absolute shitshow, and we'll no doubt see more of that now. Any forks of Wordpress will need backing from a major player. This is a fact. Getting users to switch will be hard, painful, frustrating, and technically difficult. First, people will need to agree on governance. Then how much it will deviate (good luck). There will need to be a plugin that makes it easy to update to the forked version and move repos for a start. No agency is going to do more than that. If you're considering this, please choose one project and back that one. Get corporate backing, eg [Cloudflare](https://twitter.com/Cloudflare) [envato](https://twitter.com/envato) or other somewhat neutral players. I don't think it's a good idea for [wpengine](https://twitter.com/wpengine) to be running a fork right now, but I'd hope they'd still help. I still think a fork is a last resort, almost impossible to pull off, and if there is anything I can do for either side to help de-escalate this and get back to core etc, then I am around. More than happy to advise/help with your specific business. This was my bread and butter for 20 years... :-) Love to all - I will try to make a video on this today, because I just bought Descript and want to see how it goes to make a faster workflow. heh. ([View Tweet](https://twitter.com/tealou/status/1843090626272973081))