I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time. Months. Probably even longer. The reason I haven’t is, ironically, the exact thing I want to write about.

There’s a particular kind of silence that exists in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s not the silence of having nothing to say. It’s the silence of having something to say and deciding that saying it isn’t worth the risk. I know this silence well, because I’ve been living in it off and on myself.

My own silence

I’ve been part of the WordPress ecosystem for almost twenty years. I was one of the first developers on the WooCommerce team. I’ve contributed to core. I’ve spoken at events. I’ve built my career, to a significant extent, on WordPress.

That history is what makes speaking up feel so loaded. When you’ve invested two decades into an ecosystem, the stakes of criticising it don’t feel abstract. They feel personal. There’s a voice in the back of your head that says: you’re going to burn bridges. You’re going to be the difficult one. You’re going to be the person who can’t just be grateful for what the community has given you.

That voice kept me quiet for a long time. When the dispute between Automattic and WP Engine unfolded, I had opinions from the start. It took quite a while to put them into writing. When the hostile takeover of Advanced Custom Fields happened, I felt something shift inside me. A line being crossed that I couldn’t stay silent about.

I did publish, before I went quiet again. Because the internal pull towards silence is strong and it doesn’t go away just because you’ve spoken up once. Even then, I spent a lot of time debating whether I should leave those posts online.

The cost of staying quiet

I’ve thought a lot about why I default to silence, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really about fear of consequences. It’s something more insidious than that. It’s the belief that my voice doesn’t matter enough to justify the discomfort of using it.

That’s a seductive thought, because it lets you off the hook without having to admit that you’re afraid. You’re not being a coward. You’re just being realistic. You’re just a single developer. You don’t run a multi-million dollar company. You’re not influential enough for your opinion to make a difference. So why bother?

I’ve told myself this story for years. And I’ve watched other people tell themselves the same story. And the result is an ecosystem where the only voices that get heard are the ones with enough power or influence to feel safe speaking up. Or the ones who’ve reached a point where they simply don’t care anymore.

That’s not a healthy dynamic. It means the conversation is shaped not by the best ideas, but by who has the least to lose.

The ecosystem has a conformity problem

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t about any single incident or any single person. It’s about a culture that has developed over many years, in which disagreeing with the direction of the WordPress project, publicly with your name attached, feels like a career risk.

That might sound dramatic. But talk to developers who depend on WordPress for their livelihood and you’ll hear the same thing over and over. People have opinions. Strong ones. About governance, about leadership, about decisions that affect their businesses and their communities. And most of them keep those opinions to themselves.

The reasons vary. Some people worry about losing access to the plugin directory. Some worry about being perceived as troublemakers. Some worry about damaging professional relationships that are intertwined with the WordPress world. Some have simply watched what happens to people who speak up and decided it’s not worth it.

And those fears aren’t unfounded. When several prominent community members publicly called for governance reform (proposing a foundation with a diverse board, transparent structures, shared ownership of community assets) their WordPress.org accounts were deactivated within hours. Not for forking the project. Not for sabotage. For suggesting that the project should be led differently.

Years of contributions, and you can go from valued community member to persona non grata overnight. That’s the calculation I described earlier. And it’s one that keeps the ecosystem quieter than it should be.

Why this matters beyond my own experience

I don’t think I’m unusual. I think there are a lot of people in the WordPress ecosystem who feel the same way. Developers, agency owners, plugin authors. People who have legitimate concerns about the direction of the project but who have made the rational calculation that voicing those concerns carries more risk than reward.

And that should worry all of us. Because an ecosystem where people are afraid to voice dissent is an ecosystem that has lost one of its most important feedback mechanisms.

Open source communities are supposed to be places where ideas are challenged, where decisions are questioned, where the people who contribute have a voice in how the project is governed. When that culture of open discourse erodes. When the default response to disagreement is silence. The project suffers. Not immediately, but inevitably.

As I’m writing this, WP Engine just announced the acquisition of WPackagist. A free Composer mirror that millions of developers depend on. They’ve committed to keeping it free. The response from the official WordPress account? Calling WP Engine “a parasite” and “cancer” (which I called the reason why the WordPress ecosystem has trust issues).

To be fair, the dispute between WordPress and WP Engine has legitimate dimensions that go beyond what I can cover here. I’ve written about it before. But my concern has never been about whether leadership has the right to disagree with a company. It’s about how that power is wielded. Publicly calling a company “a parasite” and “cancer” for acquiring free developer infrastructure sets a tone. And if that’s how leadership responds to a company, how do you think they’d respond to an individual developer voicing disagreement?

We’ve already seen the answer to that question. Community members who proposed governance reform had their accounts deactivated overnight. The pattern is consistent: dissent is met with disproportionate force.

That’s the climate we’re operating in. And that’s why so many people choose silence.

The decisions get worse because they go unchallenged. The governance becomes more insular because there’s no external pressure. The gap between leadership and community widens because not many people are willing to stand in the middle and say: I think we’re heading in the wrong direction.

What I’ve learned

I don’t have a solution to this. I can’t fix the culture of an entire ecosystem with a blog post. But I can do something about my own behaviour.

I’ve been writing more recently. Not because I suddenly feel brave, but because I realised that staying quiet was costing me more than speaking up ever could. I become a dull version of myself when I keep thoughts inside for too long. The ideas stagnate. The frustration builds. And worst of all, I lose respect for myself. Mostly because I know I have things worth saying, and I’m choosing not to say them.

So I’m making a deliberate choice to use my voice more. Even when it’s the unpopular opinion. Even when it’s the weird one, or the outlier. Even when there’s a voice in the back of my head telling me to just keep my head down and keep building.

The building part isn’t going away. I’ll always be a builder first. But I’ve come to accept that building in silence means the thinking behind the work never reaches the people who might benefit from it. Or challenge it. Or build on it.

A gentle challenge

If any of this resonates with you, I want to offer a gentle challenge. If you’re someone in the WordPress ecosystem who has opinions you’ve been keeping to yourself, I’d encourage you to ask yourself why.

You don’t have to write a manifesto. You don’t have to pick a fight. You don’t have to risk everything on a single blog post. But consider this: the ecosystem is shaped by the voices that show up. And right now, a lot of the most thoughtful voices are sitting on the sidelines.

That’s our loss. All of ours.

I have more thoughts on the state of WordPress. Some of it might be uncomfortable. Some of it might be unpopular. I’d rather be the person who said the uncomfortable thing than the person who stayed quiet and watched.