This was one of EmDash's first podcast interviews since launch. A few things that came up that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere:
- Kane confirmed Matthew Prince (Cloudflare CEO) directly asked "can we build the next WordPress?" — this was top-down, not a skunkworks project
- Their Q2 roadmap was literally a question mark. They didn't know if anyone would care. The community response changed that, and they're actively allocating resources
- Plugin sandboxing outside Cloudflare is being worked on by community contributors; Kane expects a Node implementation "next week"
- They want federated/distributed plugin marketplaces (looking at the FAIR proposal), not a centralized store
- Joost de Valk (Yoast creator) already has a merged PR improving SEO handling in core
- No marketplace monetization yet, but they explicitly want devs to build commercial businesses on it
First 37 minutes is the interview, rest is discussion of implications from a WordPress product perspective.
This is telling, though it already seems like it. It's just another vendor's lock-in.
I don't see this as any more vendor-locking than a .com account. It's still early days, so can't really judge it as a finished product, but the opening shot across the bow is a big one.
Top-down project directives are a signal the CEO is out of touch and becoming Elon-esc.
As a user, I want a container registry and managed kubernetes. These block my adoption of Cloudflare as a primary provider. This story around emdash tells me to stop considering CF effective immediately. I was already of this mind seeing how little they help developers on Discord and in their own forums.