If you’re feeling a knot in your stomach every time you hear the words “new site,” you’re not alone, and you’re definitely not wrong to feel that way. Change is stressful, especially when it touches something you use every day—something that feels familiar, communal, and hard-fought.
A lot of you have spent years and even decades learning where things live on Daily Kos, how comments work, how to post, how to navigate, and the idea of that shifting—even a little—can feel like someone moved the furniture in the dark.
So before getting into timelines and tools, it’s important to say this plainly: My job here isn’t to chase novelty or fix what isn’t broken. It’s to make sure Daily Kos survives, improves where it genuinely needs to, and still feels like the site you know and love when you show up the next morning. That means being careful, not rushing major decisions, and making tradeoffs—accepting short-term disruption when necessary to protect the long-term health of the community, while keeping the core of what makes Daily Kos special intact.
Related | Why Daily Kos is moving to WordPress
It’s been a minute since the last update on the Daily Kos migration to WordPress. (For more on why we’re doing this at all, see here and here.) Between the holidays, a nonstop dumpster-fire news cycle, and uncertainty around new timelines, this update kept getting pushed back. But it’s time to bring everyone back into the loop.
Originally, the plan was to launch the new Daily Kos sometime in March, with a public beta in February so early adopters could kick the tires, surface bugs, and help us fix things before the full rollout. As often happens with large, complicated projects, that timeline slipped.
One big reason is comments. The initial schedule assumed we’d use Disqus, which plugs into WordPress relatively easily. After a lot of internal discussion and direct input from our Community Advisory Panel, we decided to go in a different direction and use an engagement platform called Viafoura instead. Viafoura is far more powerful in the long run, but it also requires significantly more custom work to integrate. The time spent making that decision, and then implementing it properly, pushed the schedule back.
There were also a couple of other mid-project decisions—like moving to a new advertising infrastructure—that added complexity and time. None of these choices were made lightly, and all of them were made with an eye toward stability and sustainability, not speed.
Here’s the updated schedule:
March 30: Public Beta
April 13-20: Launch (depending on what kind of bugs the beta uncovers)
I know that for many of you, the biggest source of anxiety is comments—and that makes sense. Comments are the heart of this site. Any change there is going to feel personal, disruptive, and, for some, downright alarming. So here’s exactly what’s going to happen.
Comments will allow a single image per comment. That’s not a technical limitation so much as a conscious design choice. Multi-image comments add real complexity to the interface—both visually and cognitively—and over time we’ve learned that complexity scares off casual and newer users. Most major social platforms have moved toward single-image posts for exactly this reason: it’s easier to understand, easier to use, and encourages more people to participate rather than freeze up at a wall of options.
If you want to share multiple images, you’ll still be able to do that through threaded replies, much like on Twitter/X, Bluesky, Threads, and similar platforms. Or you can post a story, which will have zero limitations. The goal isn’t to take expressive tools away, but to make the first step—posting something—feel less intimidating to people who aren’t already power users.
The first-ever blog post at Daily Kos on May 26, 2002. It reads: "Day 1: I am progressive. I am liberal. I make no apologies. I believe government has an obligation to create an even playing field for all of this country's citizens and immigrants alike. I am not a socialist. I do not seek enforced equality. However, there has to be equality of opportunity, and the private sector, left to its own devices, will never achieve this goal."
There’s a telling data point here: roughly 72% of Instagram posting now happens in Stories, which are single-image or single-video, rather than in grid posts that allow multiple images. People gravitate toward simpler, lower-friction ways to share, and we want Daily Kos to meet people where they are instead of demanding they learn a complicated interface before they feel welcome.
When we import old comments, only the top image will carry over. However—and this is a new change—we will include links to any additional images that were part of the original comment. It’s not perfect, but it preserves access to those images rather than losing them entirely, and that mattered to us when making this decision—one we made in response to your feedback.
Viafoura does not currently support social media embeds in comments. They’ve committed to adding that functionality shortly after launch, but I don’t have a firm date yet. I know this will be disruptive for some of you, especially those who rely on embeds as part of how you communicate here, and I would never minimize that.
This was one of the harder tradeoffs in the process. We ultimately decided that the long-term gains in stability and community tools outweighed a temporary loss in functionality. That doesn’t make the transition painless, but it does make it intentional. I wouldn’t have signed off on this if I didn’t believe the payoff was real.
And while you may never see this part directly, it matters a lot: Our moderators love Viafoura. Its moderation tools are vastly better, and that translates into a cleaner, less troll-ridden experience for everyone.
And before anyone panics about AI, humans remain fully in control. The tools can be tuned very precisely to filter out the garbage we don’t want, not squelch what makes our comments so fantastic.
For what it’s worth, Disqus was better than its (well-earned) reputation suggested, and it probably wouldn’t have been as bad as many of you might’ve feared. But it still fell short of what Viafoura can do, especially when it comes to moderation and future flexibility.
As for the rest of the site: The look and feel won’t change dramatically. Think tweaks, not a makeover. We do want to rethink the homepage, but that work will come after the WordPress launch. Right now, the focus is on simplifying things that have genuinely become a mess over time—like our top navigation:
If you mostly come here to read, your experience should feel only mildly different. If you’re an active user—posting, commenting, publishing, managing your profile—there will be more adjustment. Some tools will live in different places. The stream of people you follow will move. The publishing interface will change.
If you’re a power user who knows exactly where everything is today, I fully understand how annoying that will be. All I ask for is a little grace. The current site grew organically over many years, and while that served us well, it also left us with a convoluted experience that discourages newer users and leaves powerful features underused. Streamlining isn’t about dumbing things down: it’s about making sure more people can actually find and use what’s already there.
Please ask questions in the comments. A more comprehensive FAQ is coming next week, because I know a lot of you are carrying real anxiety about these changes. The goal here isn’t to rush you through it—it’s to bring you along, honestly and transparently, as we build the next version of Daily Kos together.
