A recent post from the official WordPress.org X account has sparked widespread discussion within the WordPress community.
The account shared a remark about a user’s experience with the FAIR project that many interpreted as mocking in tone. The post quickly drew responses from several members of the community, who publicly expressed disapproval, highlighting concerns about the messaging from the project’s official social media channels.
The FAIR Project
FAIR, short for Federated and Independent Repositories, seeks to lessen dependence on the centralized WordPress.org infrastructure by introducing a distributed approach to handling core, plugins, and themes updates. The effort has backing from the Linux Foundation.
FAIR functions as a WordPress plugin that site owners and hosting companies can install to connect with decentralized repositories, enabling access to services that are traditionally delivered through WordPress.org. The project was unveiled at the Alt Ctrl Org event in Basel, Switzerland, held alongside WordCamp Europe 2025.
How the Situation Unfolded
Nicholas Garofalo (Director of Marketing at Automattic) reported an issue while testing the FAIR Connect plugin, saying that updating one of his sites appeared to break plugin and theme updates.
He later noted that the site became stuck in maintenance mode and that he had to use SFTP to perform a manual update after upgrading to version 1.2.1, adding that a patched release was subsequently made available, “ My bad for updating to 1.2.1 over the holiday break. Glad there’s a fix, but man, I haven’t had to SFTP into the server to do a manual update in ages.”
Garofalo said he was glad the issue occurred on a non-critical, “for fun” site, explaining that while he enjoys experimenting within the WordPress ecosystem, the setup felt too experimental, “Glad this was just a “for fun” site and not something critical. I like experimenting with stuff in the WordPress ecosystem, but this is a bit too experimental for my taste. Going back to stock updates, at least until 2.0.”
He added that the experience made him reconsider how he organizes his domains and sites, “This is making me rethink how I organize my domains and sites. Should probably just set up a sandbox for things like this, but then again… the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If it’s all locked away in a sandbox, I’ll forget to ever touch it. “
The controversy began after the official WordPress.org X account retweeted Garofalo’s post and added a remark, a move that led to broader community discussion about the tone and use of the project’s official social media channels.
Community Response
Jono Alderson expressed his view as, “ I love WordPress-the-software, but this kind of childish nonsense makes me ashamed and embarrassed to be associated with WordPress-the-brand.”
He also raised and discussed the same matter on the marketing channel on Slack, calling it, “Can we talk about how irresponsible and harmful this kind of childish messaging seems?“
Drate Berry voiced, “ There are a lot of reasons I left the WordPress world and they all involve petty BS like this. Matt seems to only like open source principles when they benefit him and strengthen his fiefdom.”
Jeff Chandler noted, “ Nothing positive is gained from using the WordPress social accounts like this. This is distasteful. This helps no one.”
Tom Willmot wrote, “ It’s dispiriting to see WordPress putting out this kind of energy.”
Ashley Rich remarked, “ There’s enough uncertainty in tech right now with AI reshaping everything. The last thing anyone needs is toxicity coming from a project’s leadership. Thankful to be on the Laravel side, where it’s nothing but love and encouragement from the top down.”.
Earle Davies said, “ @photomatt you’re an embarrassment to the open source community, you don’t deserve a voice in it when you do garbage like this. It’s why no one respects your opinion or cares what you think about Fizzy. You lost your way and don’t understand open source anymore.”
Christopher Smith expressed, “ I don’t plan on using FAIR any time soon, but this is pretty childish and definitely punching down. I never worked with a single Automattician who would’ve stooped this low. Whoever is driving the clown car needs to pull over and take a beat. You’re drunk.”
Arūnas Liuiza said, “ When one steals a plugin with 2 million+ active users and breaks updates for millions of sites, one shouldn’t try dunking on others. Looks very very silly.”