#### Introduction

Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, a podcast about the role hosting plays in shaping the open web. I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. On this show, we go deeper than uptime and dashboards. We talk about hosting as infrastructure, about ownership, independence, and what it takes to build ethical, high-end WordPress hosting that actually serves creators, businesses, and the internet itself. Before we dive in, head to impressive.host. That’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and help shape future conversations. You’ll also find links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen.

For this week’s podcast, we’re going to do something a little bit different. I was asked to address the students at WordPress Campus Connect in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and I took the time to write them a speech and give them an update on what I think is happening with the open web, with WordPress, and how we can defend it, improve it, and the roles they’ll play. I wanted to take the time to share that presentation with you. So without further ado, here’s a recording from the event. I hope you enjoy.

I want to start with a question. Not a rhetorical one, a real one. Why WordPress? Of all the technologies you can learn, of all the communities you could belong to, of all the careers you could build, why this one?

I’ve been asking myself that question for over 20 years, and I’ve landed on an answer I want to share with you today. But first, I need to tell you something you may not have been told yet. You are not just learning a CMS. You’re picking up a torch. And to understand why that torch matters, you need to understand what’s at stake.

Cory Doctorow once said, the internet is the nervous system of the 21st century. Protect it as if your liberty depends on it, because it does.

Think about what the internet was supposed to be. A journalist in a war-torn country telling her story to the world. An impoverished community raising awareness where no voice existed before. An artist sharing something raw and human with strangers who feel less alone because of it. A table big enough for everyone. That’s what it was supposed to be.

Here’s what’s happening to it. Fewer companies control more of what you see, read, and hear. Algorithmic feeds don’t serve you content to enlighten you. They serve it to control you. Walled gardens have grown so high that we stand in the shadow of what was once a free and open web. It’s like a well that’s being poisoned, not by accident, deliberately, so that someone can filter it, bottle it, and sell it back to you at the cost of your privacy, your autonomy, your freedom.

WordPress is a critical part of the answer to that problem. 43% of the entire web runs on WordPress. 43%. That’s not a market share statistic. That’s a statement about what kind of internet is still possible, one where you can own your own influence. That’s a term I use deliberately. When you build on the open web, your own domain, your own platform, your own data, you own your audience. You have a direct connection with the people who follow you, trust you, buy from you. No algorithm deciding whether your content gets seen today. No platform that can be taken away tomorrow. You own the relationship, you own the reach, you own the influence.

That’s what you’re joining. That’s the fight you’re entering. I want you to understand the weight of it and the privilege of it. The people who’ve been fighting that fight are waiting to welcome you.

The WordPress community is one of the most remarkable things I’ve encountered in my professional career. This community gives things away. It shows up at WordCamps in cities you’ve never heard of to share knowledge with strangers for free, because it believes in the mission. It files responsible security disclosures and shares them openly so everyone gets safer. It builds plugins, contributes documentation, and translates the software into dozens of languages. Not for equity, not for bonuses, but because the community is the point.

There’s a concept I keep going back to, introduced by Jason Silva in a piece called Radical Openness. The idea is that ideas procreate. You share an idea with me, I take it, sit with it, turn it over, bring something back to you, and it’s become something neither of us could have made alone. That’s the WordPress community in action every single day.

I experienced this firsthand early in my career, right here in Rhode Island. Developers like Andrew Nacin, John James Jacoby, Jay Tripp, Jacob Goldman. People who were already accomplished and recognized gave their time. They didn’t have to, but they showed up. And together we built something real, a local community of students, professionals, and passionate amateurs who came together around Rhode Island WordCamp and our local WordPress meetups. People who had never met were learning from each other, building together, and contributing back to something larger than any of them.

That’s the culture of this community, built intentionally over decades by people who understood that the health of the platform and the health of the community are inseparable. And now it’s yours to carry forward.

Which brings me to what I actually need from you. Don’t just consume this community. Don’t just take the courses, get the certification, land the jobs, and move on. That’s not why this community exists and it’s not how the open web stays healthy. Find a way to give. File a bug report. Write documentation. Help a beginner in a forum. Speak at your own local WordCamp. Volunteer at a WordCamp. Help at a meetup. Contribute to an open-source plugin. Show up for someone the way that someone showed up for you.

The open web survives because people in rooms like this decide that it matters enough to protect. That starts now and that starts with you.

I know that’s a big ask, so let me tell you why I believe in it so completely. Rewind 20 years. I was early in my career, figuring it out, building a website for a client, and my former professor who had become a colleague, Hillary Mason, said to me, have you tried this thing called WordPress? I hadn’t. I tried it and something clicked.

What happened next is what I actually want to talk about, because WordPress didn’t just give me a skill. It gave me a door. And behind that door was another door, and another. I started as a developer. Then I became curious about why some sites felt right and others didn’t, and that pulled me into design. Design made me ask what users actually needed before they knew how to ask for it, and that pulled me into UX. UX made me think about why people buy things and how you communicate value, and that pulled me into marketing. Marketing pulled me into strategy. Strategy eventually pulled me into running companies.

Along the way, I became a professor. I taught at two universities for 10 years. I wrote three books, including the Web Designer’s Guide to WordPress, part of the New Riders Voices That Matter series. I built a podcast, Impressive Hosting, at impressive.host. I’ve spoken at South by Southwest in front of thousands. I was once invited behind the scenes at LEGO, the actual factory, because they wanted me to consult on real-time personalization.

None of that was a plan. Every one of those doors opened because I walked through the one before it with curiosity.

Then I co-founded Brute Protect. It was a cloud-powered, brute-force protection service that did something no one had done before. It brought attack data and threat vectors together across competing companies, competing hosts, into a shared blacklist that protected every site in real time. For the first time, hosts that were rivals were collaborating, because the threat to WordPress was bigger than any competitive dynamic between them.

That work introduced me to the hosting world and taught me something I carry into everything I do now. Hosts have a responsibility to WordPress that most people don’t talk about. A user doesn’t try six different hosting companies. They try one. If the experience is slow, confusing, or broken, they don’t blame the host. They blame WordPress, and then they leave. They go to Shopify, they go to Squarespace, and the open web loses another person who might have owned their influence instead of renting it from a closed platform.

That’s why I run WP Cloud at Automattic today, to democratize access to fast, secure, always-on WordPress infrastructure, distributed through hosts, because the first WordPress experience should never be someone’s last.

Matt Mullenweg acquired Brute Protect, and saw something in me. Not because I was the best developer in the room, but because I had depth across many disciplines and I knew how to sit with executives, to listen, to make them excited, to translate technical reality into business language.

Here’s what happened. Early in my career, even as a developer, I would walk into sales meetings, executive roundtables, product discussions, creative standups, rooms I wasn’t always invited to, but rooms I made sure to be present in. I absorbed every conversation, every objection a client raised, every way a leader framed a problem. I filed it away.

If you take one thing away today, take this. Every room you walk into is a classroom, if you decide to treat it that way. The ceiling is wherever your curiosity stops, and right now your curiosity has never had more to work with.

Artificial intelligence is going to be the most powerful tool your generation of WordPress developers has ever had access to. The developers who go deepest with it, who truly understand it rather than just use it, are going to be doing extraordinary things. On my team, AI has already transformed how we build. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Workflows that required five people can be initiated by one. The barrier to building on the open web is lower than it has ever been in the history of the internet.

Here’s the thing about powerful tools. They amplify the person holding them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I call fair-trade marketing. The idea is this: AI makes it possible to personalize the web at a scale we’ve never seen before. Imagine a bespoke web where every visitor gets an experience built around them, their preferences, their context, their needs. Not creepy, not surveillance. Genuinely useful. That’s the promise. But fair trade means you have to give back. For every signal, every data point, every moment of someone’s attention you take, you owe them a better experience than they expected. Not a manipulated one, not an extracted one, but a genuinely better one.

That’s the standard. That’s what separates the open web at its best from the walled gardens at their worst. The WordPress developers who learn to use AI with that philosophy, who understand how to direct it, evaluate its output, and still bring the human judgment that makes the work meaningful, those people are going to define what the open web looks like for the next generation.

I want to leave you with a picture of what we’re actually protecting. I recently received the i2 Coalition Impact Award. The i2 Coalition brings together the companies and advocates who fight for a free, safe, and open internet. Being recognized by that community meant a great deal to me, and in my remarks I said something I want to bring to this room.

The internet at its best is like a well. It’s life-giving, consumable by all, powerful in all forms. The water is how we pour ourselves into the open web. It flows, it takes the shape of its container, the shape of us. It should be free and accessible to everyone, even when it’s a little murky, because that’s what freedom looks like. Unfiltered, unpolished, profoundly human.

The well is being threatened. Deliberate poisoning, consolidation, walled gardens, forces that want to filter the water, bottle it, and sell it back on their terms. The answer, our answer, is to strengthen the open web. To build on platforms like WordPress. To own your influence. To contribute to communities like this one. To protect the table and keep the water flowing.

You are not just learning a skill today. You’re joining a cause that has been fought by thousands of people before you. Developers, designers, advocates, entrepreneurs, professors, and students who believe that the internet should belong to everyone. The table is big enough for all of you. Pull up a chair, do great work, give back, and protect what matters.

Thank you.

Jesse Friedman: Thanks for joining us on another episode of Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. Do you have a follow-up question for today’s guest, a thought or comment on anything we talked about, a future guest suggestion, a hosting horror story, or thoughts on what makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them at impressive.host. We also appreciate you following us on social media and subscribing to the podcast on your favorite platform. Finally, check out our list of open-source projects that need support at impressive.host. Whether it’s code, community, or cash, you can make a difference. See you next time.