They probably open sourced all the "safe" components everyone in the social media industry knows.

They most likely have some secret sauce that they don't release to public.

What competitors? Their moat is not tech based. A competitor can't outbuild them to compete.

Who? BlueSky...?

Plus they had done this before and no real competitor raised since last time they did it. So why not do it again.

The same reason many big corps open source their tech: goodwill/recruiting.

xAI likely needs both more than usual nowadays.

X algo is not that amazing for that to happen. We are not talking about Tiktok.

Nobody is competing in this loss making buisiness model.

Social media apps do not compete in terms of code quality, but user-capture. People go to X because their friends are on X or there is someone on X they want to follow. The sole valuable aspect of any social media company is how many people use it. That's why, when Musk bought Twitter, he discarded the branding, the software engineers, rewrote the backend, and ditched the moderation. The only valuable thing that he was interested in buying was the captive users of Twitter and the embedded value in their social relations and generated content.