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

blog.elenarossini.com

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

#81

Post by malmz »

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…

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.

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

#82

Post by oytis »

pocksuppet wrote: post #80
oytis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not marketers, lobbyists

Probably marketers in this one. Marketers who know how to access politicians adn get invited to WEF. The distinction: marketers know how to trick people, lobbyists bribe them.

That's not lobbyism, that's straight corruption. Lobbyism is, at least in theory, about convincing politicians

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

#83

Post by technothrasher »

mortarion wrote: post #54
sparkling wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> what you in the USA would call an LLC

"Inc" is probably closer than "LLC". While an LLC is a type of joint stock company, it is a specific form with a pass-through tax structure and restrictions on foreign ownership. "Inc" signifies the more general form of corporation in the US.

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

#84

Post by CM30 »

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?

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

#85

Post by deathanatos »

colesantiago wrote: post #11
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.

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 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.

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

#86

Post by pocksuppet »

oytis wrote: post #82
pocksuppet wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably marketers in this one. Marketers who know how to access politicians adn get invited to WEF. The distinction: marketers know how to trick people, lobbyists bribe them.

That's not lobbyism, that's straight corruption. Lobbyism is, at least in theory, about convincing politicians

In practice it's about bribing them or at least telling them personal gains. Like if you tell a politician he should support the war on Iran because he owns lots of oil stocks and they'll go up.

Marketing is telling a politician this app is the future of EU social chat so you need to be using it.

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

#88

Post by sajithdilshan »

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…

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.

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

#89

Post by KPGv2 »

rvba wrote: post #69
mortarion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can have an "open" non profit, that is actually closed and is working to turn into a for profit... so those distinctions dont seem to count much nowadays

Where is this possible? In the US, it is impossible. Non-profit's do not have owners, so they cannot be sold or changed to for-profit ones, so there are only two ways for a non-profit to "turn into" a for-profit:

* sell non-profit's assets to a for-profit company (so it's not turning into a for-profit company, and ownership of the non-profit can never be sold since it's not owned by anyone that can approve the sale, there are no shares, etc.) This is only legal if sold at fair market value. So the for-profit can't just take the IP, equipment, land, etc. It has to buy it at what anyone else would buy it at. It also has to be approved of by the state's government. Then the proceeds of the sale have to be transferred to another non-profit.

* form a for-profit subsidiary, which is still controlled by the non-profit. And the for-profit is owned by the non-profit, so the profits flow upward to the non-profit to be used to support the non-profit's agenda.

Either way, the non-profit cannot become a for-profit, and it takes corporate governance shenanigans (like the bullshit happening with OpenAI) to even approximate this. Essentially, it requires corruption and a non-profit board that is unaccountable to its stakeholders.

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

#90

Post by jwr »

erxam wrote: post #42
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.

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.

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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