Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

blog.elenarossini.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 176 posts

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#51

Post by mortarion »

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.

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#52

Post by danabramov »

mort96 wrote: post #36
danabramov wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”. Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent PDS hosts (because people I follow like that). But it doesn’t show up in user experience because that’s the whole point . And yes, I can use another aggregator instead of the Bluesky app, or even use a client which has no…

And it works as smoothly for people on other app servers?

What does “people on other app servers” mean? That’s not a thing.

App servers are aggregators. You can use any to read the network. Here’s a post I wrote, as seen via Bluesky aggregator:

https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3mol3gyikac2d

A second later, I could see the same post via the Blacksky community aggregator: https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7tt...

Here’s the same post on pdsls which reads it directly from my hosting: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7ttr2ktxdo/app....

My hosting is managed by Bluesky but it has nothing to do with Bluesky app. Hosting is a separate decoupled thing. I could move hosting to my own Docker container, and all aggregators would see my posts just as fine.

Does this clear things up?

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#53

Post by xg15 »

maelito wrote: post #33
xg15 wrote: post #31

> 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.

The marketers or the so far unnamed private investors.

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#54

Post by mortarion »

sparkling wrote: post #43
pocksuppet wrote: post #2

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.

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#55

Post by tannhaeuser »

sparkling wrote: post #43
pocksuppet wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#56

Post by shermantanktop »

mglvsky wrote: post #16
jwr wrote: post #3

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.

I'd go further - just leave social media

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.

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#58

Post by xg15 »

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.

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#59

Post by RobotToaster »

mortarion wrote: post #51

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 featur…

Maybe they just chose the letter before X?

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty

#60

Post by oytis »

maelito wrote: post #33
xg15 wrote: post #31

> 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
Post reply on HN