W Social: a Broken Ghost Town?

⚠️A heads-up: the following article covers a major technical issue that W Social has been experiencing since June 22 (for 7 consecutive days). As I also discuss a possible solution to this problem, by the time you read this post the issue may have been resolved. But questions remain about how the situation has been handled by people in charge at W Social.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…