GeezerVison

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Wordpress.com is a blog hosting service that runs the WordPress open source software.

Why

Wordpress.com provides a free tier for blogs hosted at *.wordpress.com URLs with a variety of great services and options.

There are for-pay options (most for just $5/mo total):

• use your own custom domain name
• remove advertising
• add plugins or purchase other themes

These addition services can run anywhere from $3/month to over $25/month depending on the level of additional services supplied.

Alternatives

Depending on the features you'd like to have, be aware that it may be cheaper or potentially even easier to use shared hosting, a managed host, VPS, or other hosting options to run your WordPress-based website.

How to setup

(this section is a stub outline - please help fill it out)

Free Tier options

• h-card / Identity
• rel-me

Theme recommendations

1. Sempress
2. Independent Publisher

Webmention via Brid.gy

• Include caveats about how this works

Upgrades

Blogger $3/month

Personal $5/month

Premium $8/month

Business $25/month

E-Commerce $45/month

Alternate options for Managed Hosting

WordPress.com beyond the free tier can become more expensive depending on your needs and desired functionality and a variety of other managed hosting options are available for those who don't want/need to deal with the maintenance tasks involved with using WordPress.org versions of the software.

see also: https://www.wpbeginner.com/managed-wordpress-hosting/

IndieWeb Examples

• Ryan Barrett has hosted snarfed.org on wordpress.com since 2024-11-13.

IndieWeb Features

Built-in POSSE provided by Jetpack Publicize

Jetpack Publicize is available on every WordPress.com blog and can POSSE to a variety of silos with minimal configuration requred. It also has excessive and clear documentation.

It's dashboard can be found under https://wordpress.com/sharing/[your wordpress.com domain]:

Built-in import from external sources

Both WordPress and WordPress.com provide built-in importers to move content into it easily.

WebSub

Supports WebSub as a publisher on all Atom feeds hosted on wordpress.com since 2010-03-03. More detail here.

• Note: Bridgy's Webmentions for blogs gets real-time updates from wordpress.com in order to send webmentions on their behalf.

Criticism

comment silo

When commenting on other blogs hosted on Wordpress.com, (even blogs with a custom domain such as gigaom.com), it makes you sign in using your Wordpress.com account.

There is a section on your logged-in view, "comments I made" which is supposed to show you comments you made on other wordpress.com blogs. However it did not show the latest comment I made on a gigaom.com post, despite it forcing me to log in to my Wordpress.com account to make the comment. Aaron Parecki 14:38, 13 January 2015 (PST)

WordPress.com is a blog hosting service with impressive importing and export features. See for details:

• http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/26/wordpress-com-has-imported-15m-posts-in-the-last-30-days-remains-a-top-safe-haven-for-nomad-bloggers/

Hosted themes

WordPress.com provides themes to change the HTML/CSS/JS and general appearance of a user's site. While users can pay for a feature to write custom CSS, they can't change their theme markup. Which means amongst other things, a user cannot specify some markup in a post to show on a permanlink page and not in the post when it's a part of a feed. For example,

webmention

WordPress.com doesn't have built in support for webmentions, but Bridgy can send, receive, and display webmentions for WordPress.com blogs. You can also receive webmentions with webmention.io and maybe webmention.herokuapp.com.

cURL Problem

On 2014-05-06 it was reported that http://indiewebify.me returned an empty result when attempting to check gabrielscheer.com. That domain is hosted on wordpress.com and it appears that wordpress.com is blocking some cURL requests based on the User-Agent. At a minimum, it appears that wordpress.com is blocking cURL requests with the Guzzle User-Agent.

This issue was previously reported on Github on 2013-05-19 [1]

Examples

• curl -i -H 'User-agent: Guzzle' http://gabrielscheer.com/ -- fails
• curl -i -H 'User-agent: indiewebify.me' http://gabrielscheer.com/ -- works
• curl -i -H 'User-agent: curl' http://gabrielscheer.com/ -- works

Unsafe Third Party Advertisements

Based on Wordpress.com Terms of Service,"Automattic reserves the right to display advertisements on your blog unless you have purchased a plan that includes the removal of ads," and Automatic, based on their privacy policy uses cookies to deliver targeted advertisements.

These targeted advertisements are hard to remove without upgrading to a paid plan. In fact, based on the privacy policy," Automattic does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services ."

These targeted advertisements, presented by third-party ad networks, often reflect a bias in our society. For example, there is evidence of engendered sexism with women being targeted with ads about weight loss and body shaming at a far greater rate than men. Keywords such as anxiety, mental health, diet, and exercise can serve up advertisements, on site registered to females, that may act as a trigger for vulnerable populations.

In one documented instance Automattic repeatedly displays, through their third-party vendors, fat shaming advertisements on a blog about overcoming eating disorders.

Limit Likes

In addition to the fact that their built-in like functionality is done in a way that doesn't let the user own their own likes, it is apparently either rate limited or limited in some ways to prevent spammy or malicious behavior as indicated in this post: I Ran Out of Likes! Wtf?.

Each like sends a notification to the site owner, a process that can potentially be viewed as spam notifications if they're unwanted or egregious. It is unknown how many likes will cause the initiating user to "run out".

sponsored posts on free tier

WordPress.com has begun testing Sponsored Posts on free WordPress.com sites. These sponsored posts promote WordPress.com content, other Automattic products, and brands for the purpose of driving traffic and sales for users and advertisers. [...] Today, like with all advertising on free sites, we offer no controls for Sponsored Posts.

Native Sponsored Posts

POSSE to hosted

It is possible to manually POSSE articles to Wordpress.com.

IndieWeb POSSE Examples

Shane Becker

Shane Becker is manually POSSEing his articles to Wordpress.com.

• http://veganstraightedge.com/articles/2010/11/07/no-more-sharecropping
  • POSSE copy: https://veganstraightedge.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/no-more-sharecropping

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich automatically POSSEs (mostly articles) from his self-hosted WordPress install to his WordPress.com account using WordPress Crosspost. This allows people who were following his old blog to continue to get updates without needing to migrate.

Micropub

It is possible to use Micropub clients like Quill to post to blogs on Wordpress.com using Feverdream as a bridge.

See Also

• WordPress
• Criticism rootprivileges.net/2022/04/03/what-are-you-doing-wordpress-com/
• ^^^ CEO response https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30896807
  • "Howdy. My name is Dave Martin. I'm the CEO of WordPress.com.
    VM (Sorry, I don't know your full name) thank you for sharing your concerns. Comments aren't open on your blog, so I'll weigh in with a few thoughts below. I'm happy to chat more about any of this in the comments below, or you can reach out to me directly via email dave.martin (at) automattic.com.
    You're right to call us out. I did a poor job of sharing context around why we are making change, so I can see how they could come as a shock. I'm sorry! That's on me.
    Yes, as of this week we've gone from 5 plans down to just 2. That said, we're not done making changes. This was the first of a couple of phases of changes.
    Those 5 older plans that you mentioned were the culmination of like 10 years worth of plans and features sort of haphazardly being added to WordPress.com with no real strategy. With those older plans, it was really hard for customers to see at-a-glance why they should choose one plan over another.
    Let me address a couple of the things you mentioned in your post:
    - No older sites/blogs have been affected by these new price changes. If your site is on an older plan, there should have been no changes to your billing.
    - As you pointed out, we have historically adjusted our subscription plan prices in a number of regional areas to ensure that WordPress.com stays affordable for folks in those areas. We will continue to do so. Looks like we forgot to do this for the new Pro plan. Thanks for calling this to our attention! We will get this updated ASAP.
    - Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying.
    - Our mission still remains to democratize publishing. We have no intention of ever removing older sites from WordPress.com. Even if you had a custom domain that expired, your site will always have a default WordPress.com sub-domain and your content isn't going anywhere.
    - The Pro plan you see now (at $15/mo) is essentially the the exact same plan as the old Business plan (which used to cost $25/mo). The only difference being the default storage that is available and a cost savings to customers of $10/mo.
    - We will be announcing affordable add-ons for both the free plan and the Pro plan to extend both your traffic and your storage as needed. In fact, we plan to also add a handful of affordable add-ons to the free plan to make it easy for customers to pick and choose which additional functionality they want, without needing to upgrade to the Pro plan.
    Again, thank you for sharing. I'm sorry that I did a poor job of publicly sharing context around these changes, prior to making them. Please let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns." @startlaunch April 3, 2022
• feedback thread for ^^^ instead of promised blog post with some clarifications https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/pricing-feedback/
• Setting up Activity Pub for a WP.com blog

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