Earlier quoted context omitted.
EU doesn't have enough money to just buy the competition
EU had more money than China yet shipped fewer dominant software platforms
money and credit are different things. EU has credit.
W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
131–140 of 176 posts
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#132The 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.
we need a Y social that's just a static website encouraging us to go outside.
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
EU doesn't have enough money to just buy the competition
EU had more money than China yet shipped fewer dominant software platforms
China doesn't allow foreign social media on their territory at all. US had one for a short time, then panicked and forced them to sell. EU can neither buy American platforms, nor does it want to build a great firewall of Europe, so it's trying to find other ways to get in control
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why is that hard to believe? Plenty of systems work that way today. Holding on to that kind of information is a liability.
The way verification works requires sharing unique identifiers that a government can always trace back to the real identity. It is not clear whether these identifiers are retained, but I believe it is partially necessary to allow for "decentralization"
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#135Not 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, wou…
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?
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#136- 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.
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#137W 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.
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.
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you know there's nobody worth following on Mastodon?
I was on mastodon for a year, and the only people there were other dorks looking for someone to follow on mastodon
If you actually take the time to look for posts and communities about things you care about, you'll find more than enough of interesting people. It's just that there is no algorithm to feed you content, you have to be active in looking for it, at least initially.
I'm not necessarily saying you made this mistake, but plenty of other people who dip their toe in the fediverse do this - they get in, find nothing in their feed, they shrug and forget about it. A good start is to search for a few hashtags that match your interests, even add a follow for those if you see they're active, and soon you'll start seeing interesting people. I've been on there for years, and I'm always amazed at the small niche discussion threads I find.
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why would I ever choose locked down, corporate Twitter v2 "it'll be different this time!" over Mastodon?
> But why would I ever choose locked down, corporate Twitter v2 "it'll be different this time!" over Mastodon? So that you don't have to move from Mastodon instance to Mastodon instance over a petty owner disagreement after they delete the entire server with all your data.
And yet, oodles of people continue to happily use it every day. From what I've seen, it's only the assholes who get booted out of everywhere they go.
Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
#140Divide 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.