August 4, 2026
2gether Watch Is Open Source — Why That Matters
Watch2Gether, Teleparty, Scener, Rave, and Kast are all closed source. That's normal for most software, but it means you're taking their word for what happens to your data — including, for the tools that offer calls, what happens to your camera and microphone feed.
2gether Watch is MIT-licensed and open source. The entire signaling server and frontend are readable, not just described in a privacy policy.
What being open source actually gets you
- You can verify the privacy claims instead of trusting them. The README states that media never touches the server because everything is peer-to-peer WebRTC — with the code public, that's a claim you can check against
Rooms/RoomManager.csrather than take on faith. - You can self-host it. See our self-hosting guide — closed-source competitors don't offer this option at all.
- It can't disappear. If a hosted SaaS watch-party tool shuts down, it's just gone. An open-source project can be forked and kept running by anyone.
- You can fix or extend it. Missing a feature you want? The code is there to change, rather than a feature request sitting in someone else's backlog.
What open source doesn't guarantee
Open source isn't automatically safer or better maintained than closed source — the difference is that you can check, not that everything is automatically fine. Read the code, check the commit history, and look at how issues get handled before trusting any project, this one included.
Where to look
The repository is on GitHub. The WebSocket signaling protocol is documented directly in the RoomManager class, the room-ID validation rules are shared between the HTTP and WebSocket layers, and the test suite covers the signaling logic end to end. If you're evaluating whether to trust or contribute to the project, that's the place to start.