WT.Social, also known as WikiTribune Social or simply WT, is a

microblogging Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",. Retrieved June 5, 2014 which may be the major reason for ...

and social networking service on which users contribute to "subwikis". It was founded in October 2019 by

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

cofounder Jimmy Wales as an alternative to

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

. The service contains no advertisements and runs on donations. On launch it gained 400,000 registered users by 3 December 2019. Member growth was less rapid thereafter; the site had 508,980 users on 5 November 2022.

Creation and launch

Jimmy Wales created WT.Social (originally formatted as "WT:Social") after becoming frustrated with Facebook and Twitter for what he called their "clickbait nonsense". The format is meant to combat

fake news Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.Schlesinger, Robert (April 14, 2017)"Fake news in reality ...

by providing evidence-based news with links and clear sources. Users are able to edit and flag misleading links. WT.Social allows users to share links to news-sites with other users in "subwikis". Unlike its predecessor ( WikiTribune, which Wales co-founded with Orit Kopel), WT.Social was not crowdfunded. Wales was quoted as wanting to "keep a tight rein on the costs". In October 2019, Wales launched the site. When a new user signed up they would be placed on a waiting list with thousands of others. To skip the list and gain access to the site, users either had to make a donation or share a link with friends. By November 6, the site had 25,000 users. That number was claimed to be 200,000 by mid-November and 400,000 by December 3. However, this rapid growth was not sustained; the number of users reported as of 5 November 2022 was 508,980.

Subsequent development

Quoted in the '' Stanford Social Innovation Review'' for Summer 2020, Wales said: "We're not doing a good job of actually exposing the best stuff on the platform. So that's kind of our next phase in evolution." This approach involved highlighting contributions by public figures.

Software

As of launch, WT.Social runs on

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...

, rather than on

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

Mastodon A mastodon ( 'breast' + 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus ''Mammut'' (family Mammutidae). Mastodons inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of th ...

or any other

interoperable Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader def ...

software based on an open standard like the

fediverse The fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, wh ...

. However, as of November 7, 2019, Wales stated that he had just learnt about

ActivityPub ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delive ...

and was looking into it. Later, Wales stated that the code would be released under

GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

in the future.

References

External links

*{{Official website Internet properties established in 2019 British social networking websites Jimmy Wales