W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty
European public institutions are betting big on digital sovereignty and open source software. And yet they recently moved their Bluesky accounts to W Social, a private, for profit network owned by Swedish entrepreneurs that has quietly gone closed-source.
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
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What You Should Know When Joining Bluesky
Bluesky promises to rethink social media by focusing on openness and user control. But what does this actually mean for the millions of people joining the site?November was a good month for
W Social: a Broken Ghost Town?
W Social has been experiencing major technical problems for over a week: it is effectively a ghost town, filled with thousands of new accounts that cannot use the platform.
W Social uncovered: the reality behind the hype
An article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up.
Dot Social
Thanks to the open web, it’s more viable than ever for creators to take back ownership and control of their work, their audience, and their livelihood. No one knows this better than Molly White, a researcher, writer and software engineer. This episode was recorded live at SXSW 2025.
Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)
#WSocial will open up their beta program today… and I have a SCOOP for you: it appears that they have quietly gone closed-source! This is ironic, considering that the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu just unveiled their Tech Sovereignty Package, emphasizing the importance of #OpenSource. And yet they have migrated their main ATproto accounts to W Social - whose code can no longer be inspected! My full article - with a great analysis by @aral@mastodon.ar.al: 🔗: https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-public-institutions-and-the-theater-of-european-digital-sovereignty/ #FOSS #DigitalSovereignty #BigTech
W Social's Beta Is Live. The Problems Didn't Wait. - Ewan’s Blog
I am definitely not touching W.
W Social: Hello World!
It appears the w-social client has gone closed source. Any comment on this @janlindblad.bsky.social ? The article linked therein also poses another important question: Are all the components in W Social’s ATproto stack self-hosted in Europe? So, not just the PDS, but also the relay, AppView and moderation.
When Software Took the Word 'Social'
EU praises open source for tech sovereignty — then backs W, a private for-profit microblogging platform
To fundamentally understand why it's strange the EU Commission is throwing its weight behind this new for-profit social platform, you need to understand what lies beneath.
I can see a whole lot of people agreeing with this. Kinda the same with open source in general, but few open source projects are social protocols seeking widespread adoption. It's a particular flavor of narrative disconnection from reality we have to bridge out of to get out of our own way.
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Every @proto developer sounds like this to me:
I'll go against the discourse. 280 contributors to repo.npmx.dev in 100 days. We only used bluesky for social comms. We asked while welcoming folks, and most of them got involved after reading our bsky posts. Thanks for building and running bluesky. This network is a great place to do open source 💙
patak
Wild to see that @npmx.dev was the fastest-growing emerging open source organization by number of contributors in Q1 2026 according to osscar.dev. What is even more interesting: it was the only non-AI tool in the top 10.
