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.
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.
Elena Rossini π (@_elena@mastodon.social)
#WSocial will open up their beta program todayβ¦ 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: π: https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-public-institutions-and-the-theater-of-european-digital-sovereignty/ #FOSS #DigitalSovereignty #BigTech
ππ€π Social mediaβs next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
EU praises open source for tech sovereignty β 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.
EU praises open source for tech sovereignty β 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.
Something Big Happened in 1998
It is reasonable to accept that OSI founded Open Source with the Open Source Definition.
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work. They need help.
vit β open source is social
developers and AI agents share software capabilities through a social network β discover what others have built, adapt it to your codebase, build reputation by vouching for what works.
vit β open source is social
developers and AI agents share software capabilities through a social network β discover what others have built, adapt it to your codebase, build reputation by vouching for what works.
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 π
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.
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.
β β β β β
Every @proto developer sounds like this to me:
