> Europe already has an ATproto social network - Eurosky - run by a non-profit foundation - Modal - that is building everything in the open, with full transparency, sharing all the steps in their development roadmap:
And weirdly, there was never a peep about this in the press - while the W Social launch was on national news and a bunch of high-profile EU politicians immediately joined. What's going on here?
The german public broadcaster gave them a 5 minute feature on yesterdays evening news, that felt more like a paid ad than journalism. The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network? I guess the folks behind it are just well connected in Brussels.
Saw that interview, too. Biggest red flag to me was the claim, that they would use the mandatory id-document only to initially verify your'e not a bot - then discard it and they would "not store anything". Very hard to believe.
> The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network?
This is so stupid. It’s really like truth social. Having a private company with closed source pretending to be open and sovereign (whatever that means), adding ID verification by scanning your passport, it’s like.. gasoline for conspiracy theories. They’re so incredibly tone deaf. It’s like being back in the early 2000s when the older generation didn’t understand the internet. But it’s 2026…
Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like. That would at least serve some value. You can’t have both the social part and the control of the narrative.
Public broadcasters in .de and .at have generally become very shady. To me it seems they dont have to pretend to do good journalism anymore, because they are financed by a mandatory fee per household anyway. It started to be very visible during COVID times. Unfortunately, since then, it only got worse.
Looking at the people who immediately joined and this being presented at WEF, this looks less like an EU BlueSky or X and more like an EU Truth Social - i.e. the core users seem to be EU politicians who don't want to depend on a platform owned by their political opponents for reach and so want to have their own platform.
It isn't so much about platform owned by political opponents as platforms now being political and/or that we always have to assume they come with a political agenda.
The guy who runs W Social, whilst he has a software developer background, has worked most of his time in the financial world. W social is also an LLC. It's a corporation with shares looking to make a profit somehow. No doubt there will be ads on there, and paid features.
I don't see how this will ever become a success, not because it's going closed source (people here don't care), or because it might have paid features (people here don't care) in the future, or even ands (people here don't care), but because of the name. Who the hell thought "W Social" was a good name for a company?
We are so bad at company names here in the EU it's embarrassing.
I think they just choose W, because it's the letter before X (former twitter). Apart from the EU leaders and politicians stroking each other egos, I hardly think anyone would be there and it would die out in few years.
Given how bad X was as a company/product name, basing your own company name off that certainly seems like an interesting choice. X at least has the fact it's rebranded Twitter bringing in attention.
W Social is a Swedish company and therefore not an LLC. It is an Aktiebolag (AB), it is closer to a Corporation (Inc). Still for profit but not necessarily evil, just the most common business type in Sweden.
This thread is the first time I've even heard of "W Social" so I have no specific insight into their naming, but I'd assume it comes from (gaming/lifestyle) streaming culture where "chatters" will often say "W <thing>" (good, win) or "L <thing>" (bad, lose) as short-form feedback on how they feel about <thing>.
Divide and conquer?! Twitter could have been IT and somehow did not make it. Now we have many contenders and with Europe witnessing being cut off from American services, many are betting on growing public budgets for infrastructure projects.
I paid for Mastodon(.social) for a while and somehow still think, projects funded by users should be the norm, but web B2C always had a hard stance in EU, pitching for public funds seems to remain "the winner"/most viable option in this space.
Eurosky actually looks like a promising alternative (speaking as non-european) but the AT protocol should have more open friendly competition than just the flagship instance of bluesky. Eurosky seems interesting as well.
Note that “instance” is Mastodon-brained and is a wrong way to think about atproto. The correct parallel is RSS / Google Reader.
Atproto has two types of things: hosting and apps.
- Hosting is like RSS. You can host your data on your own server and broadcast from it. It’s just an open source Docker container.
- Apps are like Google Reader. They aggregate from all hosts and usually build an index so they can show a rich view over the network. That’s what Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, etc, so.
So there is no “instance”. There’s hosting and there’s apps.
Sovereignty is mostly just a protectionist racket. European firms struggle to compete with dominant US platforms, framing industrial policy as "sovereignty" rather than protectionism just sounds more strategic and security-oriented. I've seen US platforms bend over backwards to meet the requirements and they still choose their preferred winner. Predictably the goalposts keep moving.
This seems a bit tone deaf. Trump can force American tech companies to hand over data or disable accesss of European accounts. Eg a year ago he didn’t like what some judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague (NL) were doing so he had Microsoft block their email access.
Sure it vibes very well with protectionists but the sovereignty angle is real. The USA is no longer a reliable partner.
(And just before someone mistakes my comment as having any stance on W Social, I do not)
The article explains what's needed to run something like Bluesky (ctrl-f "To be fully sovereign you need").
My understanding is that Eurosky aims to be a non-profit ran alternative, hosted in EU. It integrates with Bluesky seamlessly (Bsky users and EUSky users can interact) but would keep working if Bluesky was taken down. I believe it also gives Eurosky agency when it comes to moderation.
I have a hunch that many - most? - of these European digital sovereignty projects will end up being grifts. Whenever money is being thrown at any crappy, low-effort startup that knows how to speak the right language, you get grifters coming out of the woodwork.
not bad but bluesky/eurosky is just better. activitypub based networks treat instances as sovereign with full control over users data. they can permanently delete your posts and the posts you see depend on who the admin wants to federate with. the only way to be independent is run your own server so non technical users get stuck under reddit style moderation.
at protocol is global by default and puts you in control with full account portability. and it looks like its easier to expand it to new use cases like tangled (github alternative) or rocksky (social listening like last fm).
On the other hand, the currently overwhelmingly dominant Bluesky app and infrastructure can control what users see, presenting a centralized chokepoint. It’s nice to own your data but if your social circle uses a single centralized app to view it, shrug.
Really sad seeing europa.eu and high profile politicians switching switching to such obviously bullshit low effort hacks. Ursala von der Leyen just joined and fired off a hello, for example. Many agitated replies to it, discussing the matter, with lots and lots of discontent for W Social: https://bsky.app/profile/vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu/post/3moio...
There's a fantastic thread covering this and many other issues. This seems to go against the core EU directives for self sovereignty, just signing up to a very rogue platform that happens to have some protocol interoperability. Also, lol, they have no cross site scripting protection.
https://bsky.app/profile/stollmeyer.eurosky.social/post/3moi...
Given the presence of https://eurosky.tech and https://mu.social, the EU folks going to W over them is either massive out of touch pitiful incompetence, or worse, sharks preferring to go with other sharks they feel they can control, instead of something actually positive and better, but not as directly manipulable.
Not sure if the backlash got to them or they got word of potential legal issues caused by doing this, but I can see their GitHub page and its associated repositories just fine now:
But I do kinda wonder the legality of this sort of move anyway. If other people contributed code and didn't agree to some terms of service saying their work would become the property of the project owner, would it even be legal to make it closed source under a different license?
I suspect they didn't actually make many changes at all. Their product is literally a rebranded version of Bluesky, to the point the original test login didn't even change the background image or text.
bluesky is mit/apache so they can legally make a closed source fork. what they cant do is sue people who reupload any version before they went closed, even if they used a copyright assignment cla because neither of the licenses can be revoked.
I don't understand why anyone would want to make the same mistake all over again: jumping onto a private platform owned by a company inevitably results in you becoming the product sold and enshittification.
Call me when the Fediverse has a search function that actually fucking works. Most of my time in social media is spent searching for keywords of whatever I'm interested in, which is one thing which Mastodon is absolutely awful at.
Also, while we’re at it, try to make Fediverse culture less insular and more open. There's no point in trying to reply to anyone since everyone hates everyone else. Pointless platform.
And what is that experience of yours? Do you have experience from deployments with many independent atproto data servers and relays federating together?
Or do you have experience from bluesky, meaning you're only interacting with one central server and none of the complexities of federation come into play?
No, not necessarily. Mastodon is actually "social media", as opposed to twitter/X, bluewhatever, facebook, or any other commercial outlet, to be honest, all of these have become "feeds" of promoted content designed to maximize "engagement".
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
You’re posting that on HN. I consider HN to be social media but lacking the most pernicious features (ads, algorithmic feeds) and benefitting from both strong moderation and self-policing. But it gets to do that by being funded from extrinsic sources, which is itself a compromise.
Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
Also Mastodon is on the road to enshittification since the previous CEO and founder bowed out for $1M using donations and the main instance federates with Meta's Threads.
The other instances are out of the question since one rogue instance owner can lock and shutdown that instance.
> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
So? I don't use social media to receive curated, hourly dispatches from Barack Obama or Taylor Swift (or, more likely, their account managers). And it might feel important to get the latest rage bait and memes from Elon - it's almost like being friends with the world's first trillionaire - but is it really a good use of your time?
I think a healthier way to use social media is to have two-way interactions with some reasonably stable social circle; less about "people who matter" and more about "people who matter to you". Mastodon certainly has the critical mass to make this possible.
I could name so many projects or people. The Rust language? KDE? Comics like War and Peas, or David Revoy's works? Hackers like Foone, Mara Bos? Technology Connections!
Countless cute kitten pics. Minimal hate or bigotry in my feed. Don't have to log in. Don't even have to sign up. Finite scroll on the homepage.
Terry Tao, Bert Hubert, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), Bunny Huang are just a few in my feed. But Mastodon is more about peer-to-peer communication than celebrities farming engagement indeed.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
Another social network with 0 network effect and is dead on arrival. Now being closed makes it far worse than Bluesky and no better than a prototype pre-production version of Threads; with 0 users.
> Europe already has an ATproto social network - Eurosky - run by a non-profit foundation - Modal - that is building everything in the open, with full transparency, sharing all the steps in their development roadmap:
And weirdly, there was never a peep about this in the press - while the W Social launch was on national news and a bunch of high-profile EU politicians immediately joined. What's going on here?
It means that marketers won over technical, factual people.
Not marketers, lobbyists
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The marketers or the so far unnamed private investors.
Mastodon is also European
Mastodon is too secure and private for them.
There’s no money or power to be had in providing free/libre tools to the masses
So there’s no chance a politician or marketer or anyone who has commerce as their primary motivation will spend any effort promoting it
They want people to get used to digital id.
W Social felt extremely shady since their first advertisement on HN.
Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :)
Super shady.
The german public broadcaster gave them a 5 minute feature on yesterdays evening news, that felt more like a paid ad than journalism. The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network? I guess the folks behind it are just well connected in Brussels.
Thank you but no thank you.
The company is "W Social AB", meaning "aktiebolag" which in Swedish is what you in the USA would call an LLC or "joint stock company.
So they are 100% looking to monetize and turn a profit.
I wouldn't call it shady, but closed source, for-profit sounds accurate.
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Saw that interview, too. Biggest red flag to me was the claim, that they would use the mandatory id-document only to initially verify your'e not a bot - then discard it and they would "not store anything". Very hard to believe.
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> The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network?
This is so stupid. It’s really like truth social. Having a private company with closed source pretending to be open and sovereign (whatever that means), adding ID verification by scanning your passport, it’s like.. gasoline for conspiracy theories. They’re so incredibly tone deaf. It’s like being back in the early 2000s when the older generation didn’t understand the internet. But it’s 2026…
Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like. That would at least serve some value. You can’t have both the social part and the control of the narrative.
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Indeed a very odd sight between WC matches. I don't normally watch much TV, but I think this warrants further investigation and inquiry.
No mention of long-term stake of EU in ActivityPub platforms either, as if W would be our savior.
And probably stuffed with tax money. As usual.
Public broadcasters in .de and .at have generally become very shady. To me it seems they dont have to pretend to do good journalism anymore, because they are financed by a mandatory fee per household anyway. It started to be very visible during COVID times. Unfortunately, since then, it only got worse.
The name is terrible too.
Are you alluding to the association of "W" with George W Bush?
Not sure that's really a thing outside the USA. And as far as I heard that reference, it was always pronunced "Dubya" not "Double-You"
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Yeah, based on the people and organizations moving there, RedSky would be more appropriate.
it's actually a double-v as in "the vvitch"
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I thought this was a good post on the topic: [W Social is TruthSocial with a European accent.][1]
[^1]: https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3mokohkfb4224
i wish there was a disclosure about letting LLM write this article
Looking at the people who immediately joined and this being presented at WEF, this looks less like an EU BlueSky or X and more like an EU Truth Social - i.e. the core users seem to be EU politicians who don't want to depend on a platform owned by their political opponents for reach and so want to have their own platform.
And get confirmation bias on whatever they write from like-minded cronies, without the usual anonymous piss-takers.. kinda sad really!
It isn't so much about platform owned by political opponents as platforms now being political and/or that we always have to assume they come with a political agenda.
Its about restricting replies to sycophants.
The guy who runs W Social, whilst he has a software developer background, has worked most of his time in the financial world. W social is also an LLC. It's a corporation with shares looking to make a profit somehow. No doubt there will be ads on there, and paid features.
I don't see how this will ever become a success, not because it's going closed source (people here don't care), or because it might have paid features (people here don't care) in the future, or even ands (people here don't care), but because of the name. Who the hell thought "W Social" was a good name for a company?
We are so bad at company names here in the EU it's embarrassing.
I think they just choose W, because it's the letter before X (former twitter). Apart from the EU leaders and politicians stroking each other egos, I hardly think anyone would be there and it would die out in few years.
Given how bad X was as a company/product name, basing your own company name off that certainly seems like an interesting choice. X at least has the fact it's rebranded Twitter bringing in attention.
we need a Y social that's just a static website encouraging us to go outside.
It will serve it's primary purpose of separating criticism from direct association with EU politicians posts. They also hate community notes.
W Social is a Swedish company and therefore not an LLC. It is an Aktiebolag (AB), it is closer to a Corporation (Inc). Still for profit but not necessarily evil, just the most common business type in Sweden.
Haha. uvWXyz .still bad, agreed. Also if you somewhat fluent in german: "vögeln" as replacement for twitter with a dating platform twist.
Maybe they just chose the letter before X?
This thread is the first time I've even heard of "W Social" so I have no specific insight into their naming, but I'd assume it comes from (gaming/lifestyle) streaming culture where "chatters" will often say "W <thing>" (good, win) or "L <thing>" (bad, lose) as short-form feedback on how they feel about <thing>.
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Yeah, terrible name indeed.
Just use https://mu.social, it's essentially the same thing, just built in the open by the Eurosky stack.
Divide and conquer?! Twitter could have been IT and somehow did not make it. Now we have many contenders and with Europe witnessing being cut off from American services, many are betting on growing public budgets for infrastructure projects. I paid for Mastodon(.social) for a while and somehow still think, projects funded by users should be the norm, but web B2C always had a hard stance in EU, pitching for public funds seems to remain "the winner"/most viable option in this space.
“There have been so many red flags with W Social since its hastily cobbled-together *announcement at Davos*”
I think that last bit explains why European govt orgs have migrated to it, over the open source Eurosky.
An unfortunate step backwards. I'm cheering for Eurosky and open networks.
Eurosky actually looks like a promising alternative (speaking as non-european) but the AT protocol should have more open friendly competition than just the flagship instance of bluesky. Eurosky seems interesting as well.
Note that “instance” is Mastodon-brained and is a wrong way to think about atproto. The correct parallel is RSS / Google Reader.
Atproto has two types of things: hosting and apps.
- Hosting is like RSS. You can host your data on your own server and broadcast from it. It’s just an open source Docker container.
- Apps are like Google Reader. They aggregate from all hosts and usually build an index so they can show a rich view over the network. That’s what Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, etc, so.
So there is no “instance”. There’s hosting and there’s apps.
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In addition to Eurosky there's also Blacksky, Northsky, and Anisota. Plus dozens of other non-microblogging apps. AT is growing pretty quickly now.
Sovereignty is mostly just a protectionist racket. European firms struggle to compete with dominant US platforms, framing industrial policy as "sovereignty" rather than protectionism just sounds more strategic and security-oriented. I've seen US platforms bend over backwards to meet the requirements and they still choose their preferred winner. Predictably the goalposts keep moving.
This seems a bit tone deaf. Trump can force American tech companies to hand over data or disable accesss of European accounts. Eg a year ago he didn’t like what some judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague (NL) were doing so he had Microsoft block their email access.
Sure it vibes very well with protectionists but the sovereignty angle is real. The USA is no longer a reliable partner.
(And just before someone mistakes my comment as having any stance on W Social, I do not)
EU doesn't have enough money to just buy the competition
EU had more money than China yet shipped fewer dominant software platforms
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> Europe already has an ATproto social network - Eurosky
Why is this a different network? Are Eurosky relays not indexing anything outside Eurosky?
The article explains what's needed to run something like Bluesky (ctrl-f "To be fully sovereign you need").
My understanding is that Eurosky aims to be a non-profit ran alternative, hosted in EU. It integrates with Bluesky seamlessly (Bsky users and EUSky users can interact) but would keep working if Bluesky was taken down. I believe it also gives Eurosky agency when it comes to moderation.
They are, it's just a second instance of a realy. For independance, resilience, moderation, and also probably minor technical choices.
I have a hunch that many - most? - of these European digital sovereignty projects will end up being grifts. Whenever money is being thrown at any crappy, low-effort startup that knows how to speak the right language, you get grifters coming out of the woodwork.
There's billions available for whoever greases the right palms.
How to create an account on #WSocial in 13 easy steps:
1. choose a username
2. choose a password
3. choose your interests
4. download the #WIdentity app to your phone (two options: Apple AppStore or Google Play Store)
5. scan a QR code
6. create a PIN code
optional: enable biometrics; re-enter PIN
7. choose whether you simply want to verify that you're human or if you also want to verify your name
8. choose the verification method (automatic photo review, request a manual review or scan your passport chip)
9. scan your passport's picture page
10. scan your passport's chip
11. take a selfie
12. scan a QR code to link the W Identity to your W Social account
13. enter your PIN code
https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTE...
Or.... How about not? Seriously, join Mastodon!
> Seriously, join Mastodon!
not bad but bluesky/eurosky is just better. activitypub based networks treat instances as sovereign with full control over users data. they can permanently delete your posts and the posts you see depend on who the admin wants to federate with. the only way to be independent is run your own server so non technical users get stuck under reddit style moderation.
at protocol is global by default and puts you in control with full account portability. and it looks like its easier to expand it to new use cases like tangled (github alternative) or rocksky (social listening like last fm).
On the other hand, the currently overwhelmingly dominant Bluesky app and infrastructure can control what users see, presenting a centralized chokepoint. It’s nice to own your data but if your social circle uses a single centralized app to view it, shrug.
> Or.... How about not? Seriously, join Mastodon!
Which decentralised instance?
> Which decentralised instance?
any of them
all of them
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EU bigwigs don't care about Open Source. They care about EU data sovereignty and supporting EU businesses (well the appearance of doing so, anyway).
Really sad seeing europa.eu and high profile politicians switching switching to such obviously bullshit low effort hacks. Ursala von der Leyen just joined and fired off a hello, for example. Many agitated replies to it, discussing the matter, with lots and lots of discontent for W Social: https://bsky.app/profile/vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu/post/3moio...
There's two really good blog posts in these W Social people, with really good research. https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-socia... https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-public-institutions-a...
There's a fantastic thread covering this and many other issues. This seems to go against the core EU directives for self sovereignty, just signing up to a very rogue platform that happens to have some protocol interoperability. Also, lol, they have no cross site scripting protection. https://bsky.app/profile/stollmeyer.eurosky.social/post/3moi...
Given the presence of https://eurosky.tech and https://mu.social, the EU folks going to W over them is either massive out of touch pitiful incompetence, or worse, sharks preferring to go with other sharks they feel they can control, instead of something actually positive and better, but not as directly manipulable.
Not sure if the backlash got to them or they got word of potential legal issues caused by doing this, but I can see their GitHub page and its associated repositories just fine now:
https://github.com/w-social-eu
But I do kinda wonder the legality of this sort of move anyway. If other people contributed code and didn't agree to some terms of service saying their work would become the property of the project owner, would it even be legal to make it closed source under a different license?
There's no much there? A fork of some component where the only changes are some lines in config, and a bunch of shell scripts for a docker image?
I suspect they didn't actually make many changes at all. Their product is literally a rebranded version of Bluesky, to the point the original test login didn't even change the background image or text.
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bluesky is mit/apache so they can legally make a closed source fork. what they cant do is sue people who reupload any version before they went closed, even if they used a copyright assignment cla because neither of the licenses can be revoked.
The site loads somewhat, burns 100% CPU non-stop, I can't really click any of the buttons. I guess it's not for me. :)
Slightly off topic, but what's the origin / where does the name "W" come from?
Well I guess it's slightly more honest than US social media. In this case the government doesn't keep their involvement a secret.
Maybe they moved to Codeberg?
I don't understand why anyone would want to make the same mistake all over again: jumping onto a private platform owned by a company inevitably results in you becoming the product sold and enshittification.
We've seen it so many times.
Learn the lesson. Use Mastodon this time.
Call me when the Fediverse has a search function that actually fucking works. Most of my time in social media is spent searching for keywords of whatever I'm interested in, which is one thing which Mastodon is absolutely awful at.
Also, while we’re at it, try to make Fediverse culture less insular and more open. There's no point in trying to reply to anyone since everyone hates everyone else. Pointless platform.
> Call me when the Fediverse has a search function that actually fucking works.
Actually that's a feature. If search doesn't work, there is less incentive for bots polluting others people searches.
On the other hand, search works so bad than even connecting to people you know on other networks is painful.
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I have entirely different experiences and I haven't seen much hating — but having read this, perhaps indeed mastodon isn't for you :-)
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atproto is also open source and in my experience (solely as a user rather than a developer on the API/network) it simply works better than Mastodon.
ATProto is centralized.
And what is that experience of yours? Do you have experience from deployments with many independent atproto data servers and relays federating together?
Or do you have experience from bluesky, meaning you're only interacting with one central server and none of the complexities of federation come into play?
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I'd go further - just leave social media
No, not necessarily. Mastodon is actually "social media", as opposed to twitter/X, bluewhatever, facebook, or any other commercial outlet, to be honest, all of these have become "feeds" of promoted content designed to maximize "engagement".
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
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You’re posting that on HN. I consider HN to be social media but lacking the most pernicious features (ads, algorithmic feeds) and benefitting from both strong moderation and self-policing. But it gets to do that by being funded from extrinsic sources, which is itself a compromise.
But thats just the thing with atproto. The company sucks? Just move your PDS.
If they filter you at the relay or appview level that doesn't work.
Eurosky is also an option.
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There is no lesson to be learned. There are billions of noobs. There is always a cow to milk, it seems.
Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
Also Mastodon is on the road to enshittification since the previous CEO and founder bowed out for $1M using donations and the main instance federates with Meta's Threads.
The other instances are out of the question since one rogue instance owner can lock and shutdown that instance.
I am quite happy with people I follow on Mastodon. Sure, various politicians might not be there, but those are not people I want to hear from.
The rest of your comment seems to be pure speculation, so.
How can you know there's nobody worth following on Mastodon?
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> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
So? I don't use social media to receive curated, hourly dispatches from Barack Obama or Taylor Swift (or, more likely, their account managers). And it might feel important to get the latest rage bait and memes from Elon - it's almost like being friends with the world's first trillionaire - but is it really a good use of your time?
I think a healthier way to use social media is to have two-way interactions with some reasonably stable social circle; less about "people who matter" and more about "people who matter to you". Mastodon certainly has the critical mass to make this possible.
I could name so many projects or people. The Rust language? KDE? Comics like War and Peas, or David Revoy's works? Hackers like Foone, Mara Bos? Technology Connections!
Countless cute kitten pics. Minimal hate or bigotry in my feed. Don't have to log in. Don't even have to sign up. Finite scroll on the homepage.
5 replies →
Terry Tao, Bert Hubert, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), Bunny Huang are just a few in my feed. But Mastodon is more about peer-to-peer communication than celebrities farming engagement indeed.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
Threads is just another node that connects to ActivityPub, there is no "road" to enshittification.
Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.
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I, for one, want to choose for myself whether to block other instances or not. You seem to not tolerate this opinion.
A "main instance" is contrary to the whole idea of a Fediverse anyway.
> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
This obviously is total nonsense.
Tell me you don't understand the point of Mastodon without telling me you don't understand the point of Mastodon.
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European elites are so corrupt and complicit that if they say they will do something, you can rest assured the opposite will take place.
Another social network with 0 network effect and is dead on arrival. Now being closed makes it far worse than Bluesky and no better than a prototype pre-production version of Threads; with 0 users.
From [0]
> W Social unveiled at the WEF
That's everything I need to know.
[0] https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-ceo-l...
W Social isn't built with proper cryptography and so-on, it's amateurish.
- am i the only one or does anyone else think this website is somehow hijacking the scrollbar?
I don't notice anything with the scrollbar. I tried with and without ublock origin enabled.
Typical EU corrupt bureaucracy at work.
Regime-aligned social media, just what people needed.
And as an not completely unintended side-effect, some nephews of EU bureaucrats will make hay.
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