npmx: converging communities
March 03, 2026
It is hard to convey how much has changed during the last month. npmx went from an idea to a fully fledged modern browser for the npm registry. The npmx community is now looking forward and having conversations about what’s next. There is so much hope in the air as we discuss new ideas, find alignment with others, and reach out to get to know the humans who got involved in building npmx as a community. This month was transformational for a lot of us. We’ve started walking towards what may be one of our most significant open source adventures. Read on. Let me tell you an open source story.
Our ever expanding Network
The paths of many people and communities converged into npmx. Our section of the social graph has been working together for the past five years. I met many of my closest open-source allies during the explosion of connections that built the vite ecosystem. You can read about my role during that time in my retrospective of my first years working on open source full-time. Vite was also the convergence of a multitude of open-source projects with a common need. Frontend frameworks that would normally be competitors found themselves building a common shared base. We learned so much from each other while building together. We made long-lasting friendships. We found so many others that shared our values. We gained each other’s trust. When we set out to build Vitest, we seeded the community from this densely connected group of folks. And once more, this network of builders kept expanding with new powerful allies from the frontend testing world.
While building tools for ourselves, we keep expanding our communities and discovering how many people align with our values. How generous they are with their time, and how they can teach us. And we start dreaming of more adventures. Could we move our comms to open-source networks? We’re so tightly connected that it isn’t hard to beat the network effects for our section of the graph. We decided to try Mastodon. And we naturally end up building a browser for the Mastodon servers to fit our needs: elk.zone. Once more, our communities merged efforts with others. We met folks working on open networks and got to build and learn with them. We dreamed of a more open social web, where our communities could scale even further. The experience was really valuable, even if Mastodon didn’t work for a lot of us. Two years later, we were trying again. A large section of our graph joined bluesky while we kept exploring better tools for working together. The e18e community is a great example of how well bluesky allowed us to connect. A great group grown organically in part thanks to it. We kept making alliances with other communities that have been building comms tooling for decades. We started by seeing how many bridges connected all these diverse groups. We felt part of something much bigger than our initial origins in frontend tooling.
Downward spirals
Vite and Vitest kept evolving, and their ecosystems grew to reach the entire frontend community. The same happened to our friends from other communities. But the energy was changing. Many of us started to feel the ghosts of burnout. Our communities have achieved incredible milestones, but the sustainability story for our open source projects hasn’t progressed at the same pace. There were beacons of light, but the world around us was becoming much more complex and daunting for many people. The money was now flowing into new technologies that promised to make processes more efficient, making everyone obsolete. Our shared mindshare was colonized and morphed from “what are we building together“ into “how fast each of us can build everything alone”. It became hard to keep dreaming. It got harder to connect with others. Our long-term shared commons were losing ground to a sea of software made just in time, only fitting a single individual’s needs.
Some of us end up falling into a downward spiral that steals our hope. In my case, I was also living through a difficult year for our family. I was worried about our open-source communities, and my participation would no longer give me the energy it had before. I fall into depression, and I was unable to continue working on open source. It was a hard year for so many people. I’m lucky to have my family and friends who supported me and gave me the space to recover and get back on my feet. When I couldn’t go on and had to take a hard break, the open source community was understanding and supportive, which made it much easier to take care of myself.
With a little help from my Open Source Friends
In the distance, my open-source friends were always there, patiently keeping the doors open for me. And a lot of them kept building. Despite everything, they kept trying. They kept connecting with others, finding common ground, and working together. I felt their hope was still intact. They were not giving up. And when I was able to have the rest I needed, their energy was once more contagious. I wanted to help them. I slowly started to reconnect with them. I learned I was not alone, and that many others had lost hope, too. Something was changing again. We could feel it brewing; we were finding each other again. And that Saturday morning, daniel sent me an unexpected DM.
After months from our last DM, he reached out and showed me how much he trusted me. I remembered once more our wonderful adventures working together to have a good Nuxt and Vite story, building elk with the community, and all our conversations about open-source philosophy and sustainability. It was the last nudge I needed to get out of the spiral and start dreaming of shared adventures with my open-source friends. Still in recovery mode, I took the first steps to start walking with them again.
The npmx community
That was one month ago. And this turned out to be one of the most intense and rewarding months of my life. I think I can say of our lives, and this will resonate with a lot of the now more than 200 contributors to the project. I’ll let others tell you the story we weaved together this past month. I loved reading their blog post drafts for the alpha release web ring. I'm still amazed that we're launching our alpha with 20 interlinked blog posts. This is what a passionate community can achieve, and it is impossible to replicate in other organizations. I shed tears of happiness several times as I went through what npmx meant to them, how working together had already changed them, and how much more hopeful we all are about the future.
I imagine you reached my post through the npmx announcement blog post, but if not, that is a good place to start. Check out daniel's virtuous circle story. Then let salma take you on a tour to learn how to get involved in an open source project like npmx. They have both taught me so much this past month about how to better communicate with others. And they have been very patient in moments when my passion pushed me to go wide and lose focus. There is a lot to learn ahead. Building with great folks in a diverse team is the best way to work on your weaknesses, and to double down on your strengths.
Read the stories from the npmx maintainers. They have poured so much love and care into our project and community during the past month. Learn from James how the e18e community has been collaborating with npmx. Alex is an incredible example of why we feel that npmx is the result of so many converging communities, so many stories of collaboration that aligned to build something bolder together. Let her tell you about what happened this month. Read from Alec about his journey collecting random seeds that led him to join the community and become a referent for his peers, showing how working together on a project like npmx will also end up helping polish his magical graphics lib and the entire vue, nuxt, and vite stack and all the libraries and plugins we are depending on. Learn how getting involved in npmx and OSS made Philippe a better developer.
And if you really want to see why we’re so thrilled about the community we’re fostering together. Enjoy the tales of wonderful human beings like Paula, who overcome her impostor syndrome and made her first contribution to an Open Source project, and is now working everywhere in the community. The same for Jens’ story, feel the energy of trueberryless, the emotion of sybers, why John’s feels this project is different, Faris Aziz post on Community and Open Source, read about radosvet First Open Source Contribution, Abbey Perini found an accessibility-first culture in npmx and learned to enjoy code reviews, and vale's perspective about npmx. If you prefer a video, Alexander's has you covered.
Open Source Sustainability
You should also check the blog posts from open source projects and companies that have been working closely with us. Apart from Vercel covering our infrastructure costs. Read about why the Storybook team is a huge fan of the npmx community. Read why Bluesky became our first sponsor on Open Collective. Check out how the community worked with the VoidZero team to improve the Vite stack together. Check out why Netlify is excited about what we’re building.
Seeing how much we have done in one month, we’re all talking about our next steps. And this time, we need to build with sustainability in mind from the start. We need to take care of each other. We took a one-week open source vacation right when the project was going exponential, and it was the right call. The rhythm this past week has been a lot more sustainable. We should dream of building a project that our kids will continue working on. We’re already talking about taking a 2-week vacation during the European summer. And this time, maybe we could do it together with other OSS projects. If you’re interested, join us at build.npmx.dev and let’s work on this together. I’m already savoring the idea of going to the beach with my family without creating cross-issues or PRs.
We also need to work on funding and check Vlad’s npmx experience from the Open Source Pledge side. We’ll need to reach out to new communities for npmx. We’re talking with folks who have experience with foundations to think about a future home for our project and to work together to dream up how to secure proper funding for some of the people on our future core team so they can work full- or part-time on the project. We can also explore how our tools can help us get more funding. There are a lot of ideas we could implement in npmx and see if we could have an impact and help other maintainers. We know everyone needs more funding. We need to work together and push for a fairer relationship between our open-source projects and the companies that depend on our work.
Even if the project is only one month old, our community is already talking about IRL meetups. About applying for conference talks, in big part to have an excuse to meet with others and keep expanding our bridges to other communities. We're going to do a talk with zeu for ATmosphere Conf 26 in Vancouver, and James, Willow, and others will be there too. We're reaching out to other conferences too, and conference organizers are working with us in the community. Read about why ZurichJS believes open source needs community. There are so many open plans. You're welcome to join us IRL too.
Our Open Source Adventures
Connecting with the people that joined the npmx community and working with others to build long-term bridges have helped me so much this month, in so many ways. I can finally write that I feel good with myself. I have so much hope about our shared future. And it is important to say it as it is. I’m no longer depressed. If you’re going through something similar to what some of us experienced last year, please know that you aren’t alone. If you think I can help in any way, get in touch with me on atproto @patak.cat or discord. I’m more than happy to share notes with you and see if we can help each other. For what it is worth, I know what helped me move forward and dream about a better future for my kids again. It is finding a community where we can learn from each other and work together to build better tools for ourselves and for others.
I’m going to work full-time on npmx and other open-source projects I’m part of. I'm very happy to be working once more with the Vite team. We have a lot of ideas for Vite 9. And I’m going to try to do it as an independent, Open Source Adventurer. I’m not going to code much. I’m leaning on what I think will give more value to others. I want to work more on the community side, on building bridges with other communities, on reaching out to more people, and finding ways to build together with them. Thanks to the many friends that are already supporting me in this new journey. I told my daughter a few weeks ago that my work from now on will be to make sure my open source friends are happy and well-funded, so they can enjoy working together to expand our shared commons. Wonderful folks surround us. They deserve the world. Let’s make sure our open-source adventures are sustainable in the long term, for everybody. If you’re interested in working with us, join build.npmx.dev and let’s talk. See you there!
Conclusion
Here is a cat pic for you. Everything is better if we do it together.
