I’m sad to say that CSS-Tricks is stuck in limbo again. The site was acquired by Digital Ocean in 2022 and it continued to run under their ownership until February of 2023 when Digital Ocean fired the people working on it. The site stayed latent for a year before Digital Ocean re-hired lead editor Geoff Graham in June of 2024 who got the ship sailing again.
Now, CSS-Tricks sits inactive again. Its future is unclear, because there hasn’t been any communication. Digital Ocean largely just went silent. Digital Ocean is a big company, and it can be expected that things get missed, especially with staff turnover. However, management is a small part of a larger picture.
Only a few days ago, DigitalOcean pledged a $3,000,000 USD donation to Omarchy – a set of scripts and configurations atop Arch Linux and a range of other open-source software (much of which struggles greatly for funding). A set of scripts and configurations which are led by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). Previously of Ruby on Rails fame, but now of Omarchy notoriety and far-right, racist infamy.
This isn’t a matter of effort or time; it is a matter of care. As David Heinemeier Hansson wrote announcing DigitalOcean’s funding:
But the part of this patronage that really made me smile was how quickly it all came together. I reached out to Paddy Srinivasan, DigitalOcean’s CEO, on X on Wednesday. We had a call that same night. I sent a proposal on Saturday. By Sunday, we’d finalized everything.
I know Geoff has been trying to raise this for months, to no avail.
Atop of this, DigitalOcean has ceased the monthly $50 payments they previously gave to GNOME and Flathub infrastructure. Apparently it is a more pressing matter for them to donate to a collection of scripts and configuration files than to contribute to the projects they’re built upon or to pay the writers and editors of their own publication.
Yes, I’ve got skin in the game as someone who has written for the publication, but I’ve got more skin in the game as someone who wishes for a thriving ecosystem and who wants to read the quality work CSS-Tricks is known for publishing. There are very few quality publications about the web left, and it would be a major blow to lose another.