[tehdely]

Ex-6aer here. TypePad began as a massively multiuser Movable Type but went through a full architectural transition a few years in that made it much more like a typical, scaled-out web app.

That being said, it still had as much tech debt as any other large application, not to mention being 100% Perl, which would have made sustaining engineering pretty difficult the last few years.

The biggest issue is that people have moved on from the sort of self-publishing that it made possible. Chronological blogs have been out of fashion for over a decade. I'm sad to see this happen but not surprised.

[garthwebb]

Small nit, I worked on TypePad directly and it was very influenced by Moveable Type (and maybe some copied code) but it wasn't an instance of Moveable Type. E.g. there was never a time where you could patch TypePad with a MoveableType update. The architecture transition was primarily to stop rebuilding pages after every edit, but that also ended up being a good excuse to try to clean up a bunch of other things too.

[tehdely]

100% correct, and there's no way I could possibly "well ackshyually" you on this, Garth.

I guess the way I look at it is TypePad began with MT's "publish-then-serve" design, but scaled way up. I agree it wasn't actually directly downstream of MT. Regardless, after Seismic and Phenotype/etc. it looked like a three-tier web app, if a bit idiosyncratic.

I do often wish we were living in 6a's (in retrospect) polly-anna view of a future where everyone self-published and built community, instead of whatever... this world is.