Emelia (@thisismissem.social)
It's pretty funny how everyone has seemingly forgotten why W Social went closed source: initially they were open source, and various people from the community looked through their fork of the bluesky codebases, and went "lol wat no".
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.
Reclaiming Social Spaces: Are Open Source Platforms a Path for More Human Connection?
What if social media platforms were built to serve their communities, not billionaires? Join us with the founders of Blacksky as we explore the potential of open source social media.
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech
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.
Emelia (@thisismissem.social)
Their code was messy to say the least & did things that simply made no sense to do if you want to preserve interoperability. It looked more vibe coded than written by a competent developer. A few of us tried to nudge them in the right direction, and then they went closed source.
Robin Berjon (@robin.berjon.com)
Again, we can try to be generous. But this fits a pattern. When people found issues in their open source code, instead of fixing them they went closed source. When they had an XSS vulnerability right at launch it took over a day for them to acknowledge and close it.
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.
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:
