I’m all for exciting new social networks, but after spending a handful of minutes playing around with WordPress.com/Social, I simply don’t get it.

If you’ve been thinking about starting your own small, private social network with friends or family, or you want a space to post thoughts freely, or to import your historical posts from Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky without handing your words over to someone else’s platform, this one’s for you.

Ostensibly a theme with short-form updates, threaded replies and the kind of barebones functionality you expect from an early Twitter clone, it’s far, far less underneath.

Posting is done via the usual dialogue box on the front end, or you can drop into the standard WordPress backend and bypass the 500-character limit. Which I did by posting 809 words of generated Lorem Ipsum.

Being real here, as a theme, this is kind of cool – but if it’s supposed to be its own breakout network with its own signup page and importers from other social networks, then a lot more has to be done.

It needs its own UI distinct from WordPress. I SHOULDN’T be able to drop into the WordPress backend and mess around. I should ONLY be able to post from the webpage, and I would hope eventually from an app. And how about a timeline of posts from other people without having to go to WordPress reader to see who I’m subscribed to?

Yes, I get they are positioning this as a “timeline” for family and friends, but that makes the inability to post from a simple app, and the fact that they would have to signup or be invite like regular WordPress author (clunky AF) a bit much for easy adoption.

Didn’t they do something similar with a theme called P2 before, which evolved into a shared workspace?

It’s not like WordPress / Automattic have a shortage of skills, talent, resources or infrastructure to make this happen properly.

They’re supposed to be converting all of Tumblr to WordPress, but maybe stepping into social ala Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads is a better play?

There’s potential here, and a “WordPress Social Network” would have a massive user base it could already draw on. Let me associate it with my existing WordPress site and have them live together.

But, if this is a signal of intent to encroach on the social playing field, then this is a misstep – launched too early and too incomplete.