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my.WordPress.net as Private Workspace

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When WordPress recently announced my.WordPress.net on March 11, 2026, it immediately caught my attention as the next significant step in Playground’s evolution. I have been following WordPress Playground closely for a while now, as noted in my earlier post on WP Playground Blueprints. Though I use my Local app to do most of my development workflow, playground has been my handy go to tool for experimenting with new features as part of my block theme development workflow.

The idea of my.wordpress.net appears to be straightforward: WordPress now runs entirely and persistently in the browser. No sign-up, no hosting plan, no domain decision. Just open a tab at my.wordpress.net and you’re dropped directly into a complete, working WordPress environment. Built on the same WordPress Playground technology I wrote about previously, it takes what was essentially a temporary demo tool and turns it into something permanent and personal.

What’s actually inside

What makes this more than just another Playground instance is the App Catalog, a collection of pre-configured tools built with WordPress plugins, each installing with a single click. Here’s what currently ships with it:

  • Personal CRM: A private relationship manager that lets you organize contacts, add personal details, set reminders to reconnect with people, and even analyze communication patterns from imported chat data. Everything stored locally inside your own WordPress. I find this one particularly clever — it’s the kind of thing you’d normally reach for a third-party SaaS tool to do.
  • Personal RSS Reader: Built on the Friends plugin, this turns WordPress into a quiet, personal feed reader. You follow sites and read at your own pace, free from algorithmic timelines and engagement pressure. As someone who misses the old feed-reader era of the web, this one resonates.
  • Bookmarking Tool: A simple private tool for collecting and organizing links and resources, living entirely inside your WordPress rather than a browser extension or external service.
  • AI Workspace and Knowledge Base: This is the one I’m most curious about as a developer. Because the environment runs on Playground, an AI assistant can safely read and modify it directly, you can ask it to tweak a plugin, build a new one, or query the data you’ve stored in your WordPress over time. The assistant remembers what it touches. The vision here is WordPress becoming a personal knowledge base that AI can understand and actively work with. For block theme development, I can see this being useful for generating boilerplate code, experimenting with custom block variations, or prototyping plugin-based block extensions without touching a live site.

Key Features

  • Storage starts at roughly 100 MB, so it’s better suited for content and code work than media-heavy projects
  • The first launch takes a little longer while WordPress downloads and initializes in the browser
  • All data stays in your browser and is not uploaded anywhere, each device gets its own separate installation
  • Regular exports are wise, clearing browser data can wipe your environment, so treat it like any local setup and back up often

Early Reactions

The Repository captured some early reactions, including questions about how my.WordPress.net differs from WordPress Playground. Matt Medeiros of The WP Minute said the distinction between the two wasn’t immediately clear.

Addressing the early response, Matt Mullenweg wrote on his personal blog that my.WordPress.net is only the first step in a much broader vision. He described Playground-powered WordPress as a new, self-contained version of the software that is fully composable and version-controllable. The long-term roadmap includes features such as peer-to-peer syncing, version control integration, and cloud publishing, efforts aimed at growing WordPress from millions to billions of users.

How This Fits Into My Workflow

I already use Local by Flywheel as my primary local development environment for block theme work, and that isn’t changing. But my.WordPress.net fills a different gap, it’s definitely a handy tool when I want to quickly check how a block behaves in the latest version of WordPress, experiment with a theme.json idea without spinning up a full Local site, or explore a new Site Editor feature the moment it ships in core.

The official announcement quotes contributor Alex Kirk describing this as taking WordPress from democratizing publishing to democratizing digital sovereignty, your WordPress belongs entirely to you, with no hosting provider in the middle. That framing stuck with me. It’s a quiet but meaningful shift in how WordPress positions itself.

Acknowledgement: The original draft of this post was generated using AI writing tools as part of my AI Explorations process. For more information, please refer to the original articles listed below.

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