npmx launched today, and witnessing its incredible development journey has taught me a lot about what I’m calling the collaboration feedback loops of successful Open Source projects — patterns where every contribution to a project makes future contributions easier, creating a virtuous cycle of collaboration, enabled by trust and collective governance. Let’s start with some details about npmx.
JavaScript is one of the world’s most popular programming languages, and JavaScript developers use the Node package manager (npm) to incorporate packages written by others into their work. npm packages can be accessed through npmjs.com, but this website, maintained by Microsoft’s GitHub, has not been gaining new features at the fastest pace. Currently, its entire homepage is an ad for paid services offered by Microsoft.
npmx is a brand new browser for npm packages, developed by the community. It doesn’t replace the npm package registry, it just offers another way to browse the packages in it.
On 22 Jan 2026, Daniel Roe made the first commit to npmx, and 10 days later, 100 people had already contributed to it. 13 days in, the numbers were even more impressive: 199 contributors, with over 1000 merged pull requests.
Of course, npmx has plenty of innovative features, some of which I’ve never seen in another package manager interface: package comparisons, community flagging of vulnerabilities and outdated dependencies, automatic documentation generation, and detailed download charts.
npmx even runs its own atproto PDS, which is a great home for the social accounts of Open Source projects, since it provides them with a community-run, European-hosted home. That’s where the Open Source Pledge Bluesky account lives now.
But what I find most impressive about npmx is something else: how its team has fostered a culture of trust and playfulness that has enabled the speed and scale of its development by creating collaboration feedback loops.
Collaboration Feedback Loops
Here’s where the feedback loops come in. At least two things are required for a project like npmx to come into being.
First, imagination. We’re so used to the practices that are common in our everyday lives that it can be difficult to get into the mindset of imagining alternatives. But imagination is an activity best done socially. Once Daniel raised the possibility of alternatives to npmjs.com, and once the community started bouncing ideas around, hundreds of contributors came up with suggestions they would not have come up with individually. Each contributor built a foundation for the next person’s imagination.
Second, implementation. There’s a lot of work to do on a project like this, and not everyone has the time or expertise to lay down the technical foundations. But the more npmx developed, the wider the variety of work available became, giving would-be contributors an ever-increasing range of tasks to test their skills on.
This is the collaboration feedback loop of Open Source. Earlier contributors make future contributions easier, both in terms of imagination and implementation. Each contribution sends ripples beyond the code contained within it — present contributions set up a ladder for future contributors to use.
But there are at least two conditions that must be met for this virtuous cycle to happen.
Open Collaboration
The first condition is open collaboration. It’s obvious that there’s a kind of collaboration feedback loop when any two people collaborate, like when you and your partner bounce ideas off each other. Loops of larger scales can happen within companies — one on the larger side might have 50 or 100 developers.
But only global, fully open collaboration can produce virtuous cycles on the scale that Open Source has given us. Open collaboration gives us a huge potential base of contributors, with a variety of ability that is impossible to find within any single company (Weber 2005, ch 6).
This global base of contributors is what npmx is leveraging, and ironically, Microsoft itself has admitted that “commercial quality can be achieved/exceeded by OSS projects” (Weber 2005, p 126).
Trust
The second condition is one that npmx meets with flying colours: having a culture of trust. 5 weeks into the project, npmx already has 18 maintainers. Many creators would struggle to find the trust to give 17 people a say in the governance of a project they just started. But the esteem implicit in trust motivates people to do their best and to build relationships with those that took a risk for them.
This kind of trust reveals a deep understanding present in npmx’s culture — an understanding that we depend on other people more than we know, and that we can only go so far by ourselves.
In npmx’s case, this distributed governance model has paid off, and not just in terms of productivity. The sheer energy, optimism, excitement and hope in the npmx community is something I’ve rarely, if ever, seen in an Open Source project. It feels like the opposite of corporate drudgery; like a big programming sleepover where everyone is excited to playfully create.
Of course, no collaboration feedback loop can increase in speed forever, and npmx’s growth will eventually settle into a cosy steady state. But how nice it is to witness this cultural moment in Open Source. And how nice it is to be part of it! I have made my own first contributions to npmx.
In a different sense, the npmjs.com team is also participating in the fun — it looks like the success of npmx has pushed them to ship their first new features in a while.
But companies that depend on npm can participate, too. That’s most companies, by the way.
Many companies are already supporting the Open Source maintainers whose work they depend on, by paying those maintainers and becoming members of the Open Source Pledge, which is how we’ve raised $6,904,318 for Open Source maintainers to date.
Supporting npmx financially certainly counts towards Pledge membership. But more than that, it’s a way for companies to support not only the technological innovators they rely on, but also the cultural innovators: those who enable Open Source innovation with their vision of trust and collective governance. Our global tech ecosystem wouldn’t be there without them.