Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).

I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding.

My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)

WordPress.com isn't self-hosted, it's the freemium cloud version comparable to Wix and Squarespace.

Automattic isn't making any money on the open-source version that can be hosted anywhere.

You’re right, that distinction’s very important. I’d never recommend WordPress.com, I’m just a fan of Wordpress the OSS.

In the past I would have argued against you, but the WP block editor has taken away most of the advantage that Wix/SquareSpace had. I've done the same as you now. You can buy a $3/mo Hetzner ARM box and run 100 WP sites on it.

Static HTML is even cheaper. I don't understand how some people can't think outside of CMS land

Because you need either to write your own html or to use a static site generator, none of which are accessible solutions to normal people. WordPress (.com) is accessible to my grandmother.

In my case it's because sometimes my clients like to publish or make edits without my intervention.

My own personal site is static HTML mirrored against Cloudflare, I do definitely see the advantage when it's there :)

Maybe.

It seems automattic is realizing that there is value in being "the established service that does what the giants are doing but isn't the giants". Personally and I think the HN crowd would agree with me, I see the value proposition in using Tumblr, beeper, WordPress over their competitors, simply because automattic has amassed a lot of consumer trust in not running things into the ground and making interesting things out of software that seems like it shouldn't be there.

Automattic does like $200~$300M in revenue.

And profits?

That doesn't sound much considering they employ like 2k people, that's $100k per worker and considering they're tech workers that would just cover their pay

As long as they can sustain themselves and/or grow without profits, who cares ?

Also they hire all around the world where $100k/yr is the exception and not the norm.

I've been pretty impressed with their Pocket Casts acquisition from NPR to date, they open sourced the apps which was a great bit of community service.

IMO hidden APIs are not quite safe to use. As a user, you are susceptible to be banned by the service when they find out that you have another active session in another country or city.

Some users on Reddit reported that they get suspended by Instagram because of Beeper.