
P2 powers internal collaboration at WordPress.com, and is now free - sochanger
https://wordpress.com/blog/2020/08/06/improve-your-remote-collaboration-with-p2/
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noahtallen
I work at Automattic, and p2 is (in my mind) _the_ thing that makes our
remote-only culture work. We don't really use email that much or other forms
of async chat. When synchronous chat (like Slack) gets to be too in-depth, our
motto is "p2 or it didn't happen." p2 has the widest visibility in the company
-- anyone can search for a p2 post, or cross-post to other teams and
divisions. Since many teams are spread across the globe, async conversations
are crucial to staying aligned. That's why any kind of in-depth conversation,
technical analysis, or decision making happens on p2.

Company culture is also important to making it work, in my mind. p2 is viewed
as the source of truth for many conversations (including meeting notes and
summaries of slack conversations), which is part of how it works.
Additionally, anyone across the company is empowered to post on any p2 to
start conversations, ask questions, or kickstart lengthy, technical
discussions.

In response to another commenter, Automattic has been using p2 as its main
form of async internal communication for years before it even hit 1k
employees, so it's not the kind of thing which requires a ton of people to
work. Once a few hundred people using it as the main form of async
conversation, there is certainly more content than any one person can consume.
:)

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vasco
We use discourse for this. Any type of forum-like product is very effective as
a complement to email and instant messages for the reasons you describe. For
effective remote I think it's indispensable to have: Instant messaging, email,
forum, wiki. Looks like p2 might also serve as a sort of "company directory"
thing, which we also use another product for, but I don't get much as value
out of that.

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twic
In 2000 I worked at a company that used an NNTP server for an internal forum.
Back then it was common for mail clients to speak NNTP, so you could flip back
and forth between correspondence and discussion in the same tool, easily reply
to or forward posts by email, etc. That was the smoothest and most productive
application of this idea I've seen.

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cloudmike
I used to work at WordPress.com (Automattic) after they acquired our startup
Simplenote. P2 was great.

Now I'm at one of the big tech companies that is suddenly all-remote. I miss
P2. It gives you a place where ideas can "stick" much better than with async
chat, email, or wikis. At the top-level (per-team or per-project) P2s feel
like much more than just another wiki aggregation page. You actually want to
visit them to catch up on the latest.

The per-post threaded conversations promote more thoughtful, ongoing
discussion. These naturally fade over time as new posts are made, a bit like
HN or reddit. Generally this is a useful, organic default, and complements
(rather than replaces) async chat.

It can be overwhelming once you're interested in tracking many P2s. But you
can address this with discipline, culture, and more tools.

~~~
bartvk
SimpleNote is awesome. Reliably, natively on all platforms, and: for years and
years now.

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user5994461
There is a live demo here
[https://p2customers.p2.blog/](https://p2customers.p2.blog/)

I don't get it. Looks like a regular news wall with endless scrolling and
comments expanded.

Except anybody can post an announcement on top? and the previous ones
disappear under the constant flow?

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tootie
The idea here (I think) is that this is meant for use within an enterprise.
Like a corporate wiki, but organized more like an aggregator site. I've seen a
few similar products that were like enterprise facebook or enterprise twitter.
They are sorta useful, but it's hard to get enough engagement to be
worthwhile. Your company needs at least a few thousand people in order for
them to generate enough content to keep people interested.

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georgestephanis
For context, a8c started using a prior version of p2 like eleven or twelve
years ago, when we were positively dozens of people. We have smaller p2s for
teams of three to four people.

tl;dr: nah, doesn't need thousands of people to be useful.

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vosper
"a8c" is Automattic (makers of Wordpress) for anyone who was confused.

Obligatory "Mean Girls" ;) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pubd-
spHN-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pubd-spHN-0)

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katzgrau
I contracted at Automattic and P2 was critical, but boy do you spend a lot of
time reading and writing. You really don't want to half-ass a P2 post for a
lot of reasons (a good thing), so what you get is very thoughtful but fairly
verbose and voluminous posts and corresponding conversation.

Reading P2 tends to happen in between tasks, like email, but it's a little
harder to keep track of what you did and didn't read, or be aware of an
important comment that got by you.

It fixes a lot of things for async work that email falls short of, but
probably still needs a few more tweaks to make it slightly more manageable
given its nature.

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easton
This looks really neat! Can anyone shine a light on what makes this
different/better than Basecamp (other than being custom built for the way
Automattic works, which is obviously a selling point for them). My
understanding is that Basecamp does a lot of these things, although it’s not
self-hosted.

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kennydude
I'm sure this used to be a theme for WordPress at one point? Either way, it's
really unusual how Automattic haven't released it to the public

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folkhack
> Can I self-host my P2? Not at the moment, but we plan to offer this option
> in the future.

Yea - I see it as weird too. The _only_ reason I'm still an advocate for
WordPress are the self-host-ability/full customization aspects. Otherwise,
you're just another Medium that's going to take my data and use it against me.

Honestly, I wouldn't touch this until Automattic publishes the code. To a old-
timer who's been leveraging WP for well over a decade: ew.

~~~
georgestephanis
Further context from a friend: [https://wptavern.com/automattic-
relaunches-p2-self-hosted-ve...](https://wptavern.com/automattic-
relaunches-p2-self-hosted-version-on-the-roadmap#comment-337091)

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theNJR
Lots of comments on 1,000+ people teams.

What about sub 100?

We are fully distributed. Lots of Slack and Zoom. Trying to create a central
source of truth in Notion but that feels very static.

Any smaller teams using this?

~~~
lukethomas
Any wiki software suffers from the problem that only a small percentage of the
company uses it. It's essentially a tax on the most productive people. If
someone asks you for the same thing 8x, you will write it down and share it
via a wiki.

I've spend years trying to solve the problem - how do you get the average
person writing more at work? What I've come up with resembles a company
"journal", but helps you automate any routine communication or update (daily
standup, weekly update, retros, etc).

Would love any/all feedback on the idea, here's the website
([https://www.friday.app/](https://www.friday.app/)). You can use it as an
individual, team, or with the entire org.

~~~
galaxyLogic
> how do you get the average person writing more at work?

Some people have many answers, but other people have many questions. So I
think encouraging people to ask more (even stupid) questions might be a way to
get the discussion going.

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sandGorgon
It looks very similar to Zulip.

Can anybody contrast both ? Zulip would bring the best of slack and p2 right?

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lathiat
We recently adopted Mattermost at Canonical to replace IRC. While it's a great
IRC replacement I am very much missing the ability to thread into sub-topics
like Zulip. And creating whole new channels is hard for other team members to
discover.

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arrty88
Anyone remember forums? I have been floating the idea in my org that forums
are so much better than slack/discord, and we have regressed in our
communication abilities.

Topics. Sub forums. View unread, link to posts, quoting, attachments. Voting.
Reply by email. So many great things came from forums.

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jagannathtech
Forums were great. Unfortunately the realtime chat eclipsed it. Then everyone
went to Facebook groups.

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Naushad
I have known P2 since it was a theme. What i dislike is that now, WordPress
has stopped development on the orignal p2 theme which could be self hosted.
How much of the hosted p2 is different than the theme ? No idea.
[https://wordpress.org/themes/p2/](https://wordpress.org/themes/p2/)

This is what i believe goes against the open principles evangelized by
WordPress.

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haolez
I'd like to use some alternative to Teams, but the Office 365 and videochat
integration is so convenient that my not-tech-savy staff would have a lot of
trouble working with anything else. Microsoft has done a great job on vendor
lock-in with Teams.

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armandososa
I used P2 back in ~2012 when Onswipe and Automattic were working together on a
joint plugin for WordPress.com. It was a long time ago, but I remember it
being… weird? Maybe it was the culture clash, but at the time it felt
disorienting.

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bachmeier
I could imagine this becoming popular for college classes and research teams.
Simple, clean, and powerful.

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renewiltord
No pricing information if I want to use P2 for my company internally? Even as
a SaaS?

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jonathanburke
This version is free but there will be premium versions.

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renewiltord
All right! Can't wait to see your paid solutions!

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sneak
SaaS advertising for a closed source/proprietary, hosted, PHP app. No mention
of end to end crypto, so third party doctrine applies to all your
communications, including DMs. Your chatops are only as secure as their hosted
auth system, which you can’t review or audit.

I don’t think the world needs more things like this.

Give me something open source that I can hack on, or run on my own machine,
ideally in a modern language.

This feels like too little, too late, in a world already cluttered by shiny,
hosted tools that offer you zero privacy from the hosting provider (which you
can’t change).

A company that does things like this can’t really be said to have a commitment
to free software. Free software is like veganism or respect for the rule of
law in society: it’s not something you do sometimes, when you feel like it.
Either you believe in software freedom, or you do not.

You should not be writing source code that you expect your customers to use
but not be able to read and modify.

