W Social and the ancient art of neighbourliness

There's an old idea in British politics called " the good chap theory of government".

The premise is that constitutional order rests on the assumption that people in positions of power will behave responsibly because they understand that certain lines should not be crossed. The system relied on convention, restraint, respect for opponents, and mutual understanding. Many of its most important safeguards were never written down because the people operating within the system accepted and understood them implicitly.

The problem with unwritten rules is that they only work when everyone agrees to follow them. The moment someone decides that the rules don't apply to them, the system discovers how dependent it has become on good behaviour.

—

I learned recently that the Atmosphere has similar vulnerabilities in its culture.

Anyone can build anything they wish in the Atmosphere. They can launch a service. Run infrastructure. Form a community. Start a business. That openness is one of its greatest strengths. But openness alone does not create a healthy ecosystem. What makes a commons work is communal community-minded behaviour.

The Atmosphere operates according to an unwritten social contract: credit the people whose work made yours possible, contribute back where you can, be honest about your intentions, accept scrutiny, and treat community members as participants rather than obstacles or resources.

Some of this is legally enforceable through software licences, but very little of it is encoded into the protocol itself. Yet these norms are precisely what make great collaborations possible.

This is the ancient art of neighbourliness.

Not a governance framework. Not a terms-of-service agreement. A shared and assumed understanding that when people occupy the same spaces, they exist in a network of obligations and have some responsibilities to one another.

—

Neighbourliness is what transforms a collection of builders and users into a thriving, cohesive community.

Good neighbours understand that they inherit and occupy something they did not fully create. Every builder in the Atmosphere stands on foundations laid by others: protocols, infrastructure, moderation tools, repositories, documentation, research, testing and years of community effort.

W Social built its platform on ATProto infrastructure while initially presenting itself primarily as a new European social platform rather than as a participant in an existing open ecosystem. Only after independent researchers highlighted the ATProto foundations beneath the service did explicit references to the protocol become more visible in public communications.

The issue is not that W Social chose to build a business. The issue is that the community, the infrastructure and the ecosystem that made the project possible often appeared secondary, if at all, in its public stories.

Neighbourliness begins with acknowledging where value comes from. It means recognising that the roads, foundations and utilities were already there before you arrived and pitched up your tent.

The strongest builders in the Atmosphere understand that borrowing from the commons creates obligations as well as opportunities. Those obligations are more cultural rather than legal, but they matter all the same.

—

One of the easiest ways to understand a person is to watch what they talk about when they describe their success. Some people talk about the people who helped them. Others talk as though they appeared fully formed.

W Social belongs uncomfortably close to the second category. From the beginning, its public story centred on executives, institutions, European digital sovereignty and grand ambitions. The existing ecosystem beneath the platform often felt less like the foundation of the project and more like a detail waiting for the small print. That was always an odd choice.

ATProto is not an invisible utility. It is the product of years of engineering, experimentation and community effort. Thousands of people have invested their time, labour and credibility into making the ecosystem viable. Most of them will never appear on a Davos stage or sit on an advisory board. Yet without them, there is no platform to launch, no infrastructure to build upon and no story to tell.

The striking thing was how reluctant they seemed to discuss that until others began discussing it first.

Good neighbours understand that acknowledgement is not a concession or a weakness. When people build something valuable, generosity and recognition is the social fabric that holds the whole thing together. Remove it and relationships begin to look transactional. The commons becomes something to consume rather than something to participate in.

—

None of this is an argument against commerce.

The Atmosphere needs businesses. It needs founders willing to take risks, investors willing to fund ambitious visions, and builders willing to turn ideas into sustainable scalable organisations. Open ecosystems do not survive on goodwill alone. They require economic activity to remain healthy. Nor is there anything inherently suspicious about power, influence or profit. The question is whether those things are exercised openly.

Bluesky exists because investors believed there was value in building a different kind of social network. That arrangement is visible. People know who is involved, what the incentives are and where power sits.

What unsettles people is the wolf that insists it is something else. The danger is in the opacity. Claiming the moral authority of a community project while behaving like a private venture. Borrowing the language of openness while resisting the accountability it demands. Enjoying the trust of a commons while treating it primarily as something to extract from.

Communities can tolerate different business models. What they cannot tolerate is misrepresentation. Trust is not built by claiming alignment with a community. It is built by allowing the community to judge your intentions for itself.

—

One of the great strengths of the ATProto ecosystem is that users are not trapped. Identity is portable. Data is portable. Communities can move. Services can be replaced. No single organisation owns the entire ecosystem. That is a remarkable achievement, and one aspect that keeps me excited about the potential.

But portability only protects people after trust has already broken down. Culture protects communities before that happens. Software cannot reward honesty. Software cannot encourage reciprocity. Only we can distinguish between someone authentically participating in a community and those performing integrity.

Neighbourliness is not an outdated or sentimental idea: It is the immune system of our commons.

Now what?

Sign up to Eurosky or Blacksky or any of the authentic independent social internet providers out there in the atmosphere .

—

Disclaimer ⚠️

This article represents my personal opinions, commentary, and conclusions formed through independent research using publicly available sources. Any characterisations, interpretations, or inferences are presented as opinion, not as statements of objective fact. Readers are encouraged to review the referenced materials and draw their own conclusions.

—

Huge thanks to @elenarossini.com for her incredible journalism about W Social in recent weeks.

W Social - Elena Rossini

A series of articles about the controversial social network W Social, a for profit company set up by Swedish entrepreneurs, who openly admitted they want to help train European AI models with their users' data (amongst other things).

Elena Rossini ⁂ (@elenarossini.com)

Italian filmmaker, media critic and Fediverse + FOSS advocate living in Paris, France. Unwitting W Social expert: https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-social/ My main social media accounts are on the Fediverse; all my links: https://elena.social