During my research into W Social last week I came upon something strange: a website I routinely use to keep track of how many users the network has - clearsky.app - has had its counter stuck at 1858 for days. Yet, other sites that share information about the ATproto network showed user numbers going up for W Social, well past 5000. One discovery led to another, I got in touch with developers with expertise in ATproto and had the biggest realization of all: W Social’s onboarding of new users may have caused the entire network to be rate throttled by Bluesky PBC, breaking all functionalities for its 3000+ new users. This problem has been going on for 7 days now; W Social is effectively a ghost town, filled with thousands of profiles that cannot post. The company hasn't publicly addressed this problem. This begs the question: are developers and managers aware of the issue? And are they doing anything to fix it?
Let’s unpack my discovery and see what experienced ATproto developers had to say about it.
Something broke on June 22
W Social is built on an open protocol - AT protocol - where everything is public by design: usernames, join dates, posts, lists, who one blocks, who one is blocked by… everything. There are websites like clearsky.app and atproto.at that allow anyone to look up information about the entire ATproto network, its servers and users.
I had been curious to observe the rate of growth of W Social and a developer friend built a tool for me to allow me to easily visualize public information for any ATproto PDS, showing usernames, join dates, number of followers, number of follows, number of posts and account status (true/false, to see if an account is active) for every user. All of this is perfectly legal and authorized by the protocol. As I said earlier, everything is public by design on ATproto.
Something strange happened for account information starting on June 22nd: the number of posts, followers and follows was completely blank for new users; even if they had never posted anything, the actual field should have read "0". (Note: to respect users' privacy, I have blurred usernames and DIDs).
Interestingly, the problems started with two test accounts.
Now, if I enter the username of someone who registered on W Social up to June 21st, I can find them on bsky.app or mu.social, but that is no longer the case for new accounts who registered later. Every single new username returns the message “user not found” when looking them up in the Atmosphere:
This problem is affecting over 3000 new accounts. When I pick a username at random, for someone who created an account recently, they are nowhere to be found. However, accounts that registered up to June 21st work as expected.
New W Social users share complaints
A trusted source found some W Social user complaints on X and shared them with me. Sabine published a post on Friday night - June 26th - asking:
Has anyone already joined #WSocial registered? I have a verified account, but nothing works. Can't edit my profile, follow anyone, or write anything. Not a good start.
(source)
Because I can easily visualize information for W Social’s entire PDS, I was able to quickly find Sabine while looking up the username she uses on X: “BineAlarm.” Sure enough, there was a binealarm.wsocial.eu that registered an account on W Social on June 23 at 8:49am. Sabine is W Social user number 2083: thus a recent account affected by the technical problem that started on June 22.
There are other similar complaints. Jan (derjanni on X) described W Social as “more like Early Alpha than Public Beta.”
(source)
Negative reviews in Google's Play Store
My source gave me another tip: that Germany's Google Play Store has numerous negative reviews of W Social; the average app rating for W Social is 1.5 stars out of 5, with 139 reviews (as of this morning).
If you are outside of Germany, you may need to use a VPN to pretend you are located there in order to read these reviews - or follow this link while in incognito mode, which brings you directly to the German Play Store:
W Social
A recent review - written in English - by "Patrick" said:
I've installed the app and created my account plus verification (that wasn't easy). I've the problem now, that the app says that my profile doesn't exist. I can't change my profile description nor can I comment or like a post. I can deactivate my account but I can't delete it. I've contacted the support three days before but they've never contacted me. I've the feeling, that W doesn't really want to help users. Sadly this beta has failed.
Just below Patrick's review there is a similarly negative assessment by "Sascha K." - written in German. Here is the translation:
Can someone please explain to me what’s wrong with my handle? My handle isn’t offensive or anything like that. I can’t edit my profile, even though I’ve been successfully verified. It’s day 3 and still no reply from support. ‘Profile not found’ – I can’t leave comments or make posts. And what’s W Social doing instead of replying? Cheerfully welcoming some politicians to W instead of dealing with support tickets.
left: a screenshot of W Social's app page on the German Google Play Store showing 136 reviews with an average rating of 1.5/5; right: screenshots of the negative reviews I quoted above
Insights from ATproto developers: a problem that could have easily been avoided
While I am very familiar with the Fediverse and even self-hosting my own social media accounts, the world of ATproto is pretty foreign to me. I am lucky to have two brilliant ATproto developers in a group chat on Signal, who generously answer all my newbie questions.
I told them about the strange missing W Social PDS information that started on June 22 and asked them to explain it to me; their feedback has been illuminating. In order to preserve their anonymity, I will refer to them as "Dev 1" and "Dev 2."
Dev 1 recommended I look up any new W Social account using a debug tool, in order to see what is going on: debug.hose.cam.
I put the username of a random W Social account created after June 21 and shared screenshots of the debugging with the two devs.
Dev 1: "Okay so what that means is that account is currently throttled (rate-limited) by Bluesky's relay. Usually this happens when an account posts a ton, sometimes it can happen to entire servers. But that's usually only the case in spam attacks on open registration PDSs. Or like someone attempting to import thousands of records in from other places (not migration)."
Dev 2: “That relay throttle is something that could've been avoided if they talked more to the community. You need to tell relay operators: 'Hey, we're getting a lot of accounts, please bump the limit for our PDS.' Now they learned the hard way.”
Dev 1: "All it takes is an @ mention of one of the two dev rels… the point is that it's stupidly simple to fix. You just contact the relay operator and ask for a rate limit increase."
Dev 2 clarified that it is impossible to diagnose from the outside with exact certitude what is going on: "While I'm pretty (99%) sure that the issue is throttling related we cannot be 100% sure. It could be that they have tried talking to Bluesky and Bluesky hasn't reacted yet (unlikely). Could also be some tech mess-up on W Social's side."
W Social’s beta program launched 12 days ago. For the past 7 days all new users have had broken, non-functional accounts.
Some new users have reached out to W Social in the Atmosphere to get help:
but the company hasn’t replied yet.
Dev 2 commented: “they‘re basically running a website that receives all its data from the Bluesky server. W Social walks around telling everyone how all the data is stored in Europe and how they’re this 'European network.' They rely on Bluesky for everything at the moment - except for account hosting.”
Rate limiting is common; what is puzzling is that a major problem has been affecting thousands of users - with no fix - for over a week
I mentioned earlier that I am more familiar with the Fediverse than the world of ATproto and that I know how to self-host my own social media accounts.
I have personally experienced this very same issue - rate limiting - with my self-hosted microblogging account powered by the software GoToSocial. As my account has grown in popularity, I have occasionally experienced broken federation (as in: my messages being published locally but not on the Fediverse). The instance I am running only has ONE user - me - and I found it incredibly frustrating to have my messages not federate. So I tweaked my DNSmasq settings and created a cron job to restart dnsmasq every 6 hours. I am no longer experiencing rate limiting on that self-hosted account - even when one of my messages goes viral (it happens every week). Do keep in mind that I am not a developer and yet I have managed to fix this problem myself.
What is unconscionable to me is to witness a for-profit social network with a team of dozens of people and over 2.5 million Euros in funding be frozen for all new users for over a week because of a technical problem - with no public communication about it.
I remember that Eurosky experienced a similar problem in March: their server was rate-limited but the issue was fixed in a little over one hour. Crucially, the Eurosky team was transparent about it and in constant communication with its users:
By contrast, W Social has been completely unusable for over 3000 new users for a week. That's more than 168 hours - with complete radio silence from their official account.
To me this incident calls into question the professionalism of the entire enterprise. And to think that the crème de la crème of European public institutions have moved their accounts from Bluesky to W Social, when the initiative is still in early beta. It’s truly puzzling.
More ironic: European institutions moved their accounts to W Social in order to have their data "hosted in Europe" but aside from their PDS, everything affecting their accounts is still relying on American infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC. At least when they had their accounts on Bluesky, they were on an open network whose code can be inspected. By moving to W Social, European institutions migrated their accounts from an open to a closed-source network whose infrastructure remains virtually the same, relying on Bluesky PBC's appview and relay.
W Social, let me help you out
I'd like to be of service to W Social, helping them out with this issue. So if you are reading this, Paul or Jim at Bluesky, can you please increase W Social’s rate limit, thus helping out their 3000+ new users? Thanks!
I realize the problem could be something else, but with W Social's code now being closed-source, it is impossible to tell. Asking to increase the rate limit would be the first thing I'd try.
I will update this article if new information surfaces.
Thanks for being here.
Elena
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