is w for winning?
W Social was launched in Brussels and has been praised by European Politicians. So, just how big is it? Here it is, side by side with staff from those institutions. More from Elena Rossini about this
W Social vs. the people EU institutions staff employ
1: Every account
36,059all accounts
That’s about the same as the staff of the European Commission (32,871 employees).
2: Accounts that ever posted
3,343accounts that have posted
That’s about the same as the staff of the European Central Bank (3,500 employees).
3: Accounts active in the last 31 days
2,208accounts active in the last 31 days
That’s 1.3× as many as the staff of the Europol (1,700 employees).
4: W Social: accounts with at least 10 posts
991accounts with more than 10 posts
That’s about the same as the staff of the European Medicines Agency (901 employees).
Direct comparison
The technical bit
How this works
W Social is built on the AT Protocol (the same technology as Bluesky). Every account lives in a public data repository on W Social's server (a “PDS”). Everything here is read straight from that PDS and simply counted:
- All accounts — paging through the public
com.atproto.sync.listReposendpoint and adding up the repositories. - Posting activity — for each account, its post records are read directly from the PDS (
com.atproto.repo.listRecords). That one request yields who has ever posted, who has posted in the last 31 days (from the newest post's date), and who has more than 10 posts. “Posts” includes replies. - Institution staff numbers come once from Wikidata (open knowledge base, property “number of employees”) and are cached.
W Social data refreshed weekly. Last account snapshot: 2026-09-12 04:37 UTC. Institution figures cached: 2026-07-10 21:21 UTC.