Can “the community” be a job? Is there anyone who doesn’t want cookie banners to disappear? Where’s your traffic in the age of AI? What about the people behind open source? Anything to say about “the Matt thing”? How to survive when XCancel shuts down? All this in today’s newsletter.
🪡 “Bringing People Together”
I imagine that many of you on the other side have helped organize an event at some point in your lives. You might even be part of a community (whether it’s a WordPress community or a knitting group). There’s bound to be someone who considers themselves a “community manager”—not in the sense of “the person who updates Instagram,” but someone who actually manages a group of people with a shared interest. Maybe you even do that for a living, or you’re wondering right now if it could become a very valuable career, in a world where human connections are becoming increasingly necessary amid all this AI.
This excellent article by Francisco Opazo on Led by Community (in terms of both quality and length) explains“why the language of community managers needs to mature if we want a budget, influence, and job security.” The fact is, we often fall into the trap of saying, “My job is to bring people together and let things happen,” while overlooking the immense amount of effort that goes into it.
The work isn't just about creating a place where people can come together. It's about ensuring that this coming together generates value for the members and for the organization.
So the next time you think you’re just setting a date and a place for the community to show up, give it some thought and don’t sell yourself short. Doesn’t it sound much better to say , “I create the conditions that help the right people learn, contribute, trust one another, and create value together”? There’s no need to turn this into over-the-top LinkedIn jargon, but neither should we publicly downplay what we know takes so much dedication.
Take note. And follow Francisco because he creates a ton of amazing content on managing communities at a professional level—for companies, brands, and all kinds of projects.
🧐 Extra links, I'm rambling...
- This is wonderful: “Open Letter: Civil Society Coalition Urges the EU to Do Away with the Cookie Banner!”. When civil society organizations want to do away with the cookie banner once and for all, in favor of a single signal per browser or device, the tracking industry tells politicians that’s not a good idea. This just goes to show what we all know: that the goal has always been to confuse users into accepting things they don’t understand and probably don’t even want.
- Camilo Álvarez writes on the Wajari blog “You’ve Lost Traffic: How to Tell If It’s Due to AI Overviews, a Core Update, or Something You Did Wrong” about one of the most pressing concerns in web projects these days… where has all that traffic gone? Very interesting.
- James Garbutt writes “Humanity in Open Source” analyzing how the artificial intelligence boom is affecting open-source project maintainers and how to turn this world of contributors into a better place for humans, not machines.
🧙♂️ Published thanks to...
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And by the end of this month, they'll have some news that you're going to like.
If anyone was expecting to find an analysis today of this week’s big news in the WordPress world (“Automattic’s Board of Directors Forces Matt Mullenweg to Take a Temporary Leave of Absence and Appoints CFO Mark Davies as Interim CEO”), I don’t have much to contribute right now. Does anything change? Does everything change? Does nothing change? Right now, I only have questions, unfounded theories, and a lot of work because the wheel of community events isn’t going to stop at all. Maybe later there will be more to say.
And I'll leave you with this super-useful tool that my great friend JaviLopezG has created: yups.io. “YUPS is a lightweight, privacy-focused HTTP routing gateway that redirects web users to alternative, open-source, privacy-protecting interfaces for the most popular platforms (such as Twitter/X, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Medium, Imgur, Goodreads, ENS, and I2P), with general archiving options as an alternative.” It lets you share links without having to jump through the tech giants’ hoops and without worrying about whether they’ll shut down one service or another. Highly recommended.
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