I mean if no single software fits your bill, maybe go for a combination of them? Post your blog posts in a Ghost installation, your podcasts in Castopod and have your community on a NodeBB forum? The Fediverse kinda includes the idea it's all one big network anyway. So you don't have to squeeze everything on a single server and one CMS.

Other than that: Wordpress is open-source. You could also wait for the enshittification to happen. We're fairly sure someone is going to fork it and maybe they'll provide a seemless migration. So if you're patient enough, you might be able to stick with your current setup. Just that you Wordpress will some day have a different name and developer community. These things happen all the time. I'll just switch from Firefox to LibreWolf once I'm unhappy with Mozilla's decisions. Solves the user-facing part of the issues, and there's almost no effort involved.

Some general thoughts. I have done multiple CMS transfers of large sites involving Wordpress, Drupal and Discourse. No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming. That's why the simplest option would be to stay as close to Wordpress as possible, using a fork for example to fix to the ethical problems you perceive. Otherwise you're almost certainly going to find it's much easier to archive and start afresh, with the compromises that implies.

If you do dump Wordpress, in your position I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo. So much simpler and more secure. But that's just my opinion.

I concur. Currently using 11ty for my sites with Directus on top for managing content with a gui.

Thanks for the suggestions! I realise preserving URLs is perhaps the tallest order here, and that we may have to set up redirection to the new ones.

Failing that, archiving (a static version of) the site could definitely be an option. Considering the long history of the site though, our first choice is continuity over an abrupt break.

maybe go for a combination of them

This is a very practical solution... until somebody (I suspect me) has to maintain three or more installs instead of one But you're right, this could very well be a way to solve the "one size fits none" conundrum.

As for using a WP fork — the point about the ActivityPub plugin breaking compatibility with ClassicPress makes me wary of this approach. And AFAICT ClassicPress is one of the more reliable WP forks out there? In the long term, I mean.

I'm fine with switching my personal browsers if/when one or the other FF fork turns to the dark side, but I wouldn't want to hop this site between different WP forks the same way...

Our first priority will be to migrate the site as fluently as possible to whatever CMS we transition to. Archiving it as HTML and starting from scratch with a new platform — that's a last ditch effort, I think.

[Edit: I tried to cover the WP fork subject here]

Hugo as a longterm solution isn't going to float with some of our users, I'm afraid. I can vividly imagine somebody turning the old site into a single "Hello world!" page given that kind of permissions.

We will need strictly limited access for contributors, and a clear, friendly input field for text...

Yes. I'm not very educated on the Worpress side of things... Kinda necessary, though, to keep compatibility with the Fediverse AND the No-AI people in my opinion. I mean the Fediverse is kind of the place for people to go if they don't want algorithms and bots to dominate the place?!

No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming.

I had a good experience with jekyll's wordpress->jekyll import tool. But see below.

I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo

Graybeard here, so it's probably just braindamage specific to me, but I've found ruby dependency setup and troubleshooting to be extremely frustrating. Hard for me to wrap my head around.

When jekyll is actually dead (right now it is "only mostly dead") I'll change to something that does not require ruby (eleventy?) or just go back to the nineties and do something barebones with gtml or whatever. Already playing with the latter.

Unless you are on a frantic hurry to make this change, I might be able to help. You'll need to migrate to Wagtail, and I have done some work on integration with Wagtail and the Fediverse via the Django ActivityPub Toolkit. But if you do consider this, you'd have to keep in mind that the ActivityPub side of things would be a ongoing experiment.

@hendrik@palaver.p3x.de fwiw NodeBB ended up being such a joy to author things in that we switched away from WordPress to NodeBB as our blog. We just blog on our forum.

Now, conflicts of interest are important... I wrote NodeBB, so I am obviously pretty biased <img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://activitypub.space/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f606.png?v=aa0c143f12c" title="" /> !