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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

#141

Post by skrebbel »

kristianc wrote: post #49

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)

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

#142

Post by chadgpt3 »

Arainach wrote: post #126
mcfly_c-137 wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

not a single big corporation throws away your identity documents, they are very valuable

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

#143

Post by chadgpt3 »

afavour wrote: post #9
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.

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.

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

#144

Post by NonHyloMorph »

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…

Haha. uvWXyz .still bad, agreed. Also if you somewhat fluent in german: "vögeln" as replacement for twitter with a dating platform twist.

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

#145

Post by CM30 »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #88
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.

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.

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

#146

Post by CM30 »

fp64 wrote: post #135
CM30 wrote: post #84

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, 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?

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.

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

#147

Post by fp64 »

CM30 wrote: post #146
fp64 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They at least need to add the ID verification somehow to the backend, which is why I'd be really curious seeing how that is implemented

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

#148

Post by klabb3 »

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 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.

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

#149

Post by mcfly_c-137 »

Arainach wrote: post #126
mcfly_c-137 wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

Yes, absolutely. No argument on that. What I meant is, I find it hard to trust them on that claim:

>we don't store anything except an encrypted token to prevent s.o. from opening multiple accounts. Authorities will not be able to identify users.

The current political climate in Germany is quite the opposite: Less anonymity. More access for authorities. So why this wave of support from politics?

I really would not mind to be wrong, though.

But Elena Rossini points out a lot of things in her 3 posts that confirm my skepticism.

Link to the interviews from german tv which I'm referring to[0]. Not sure if that helps.

[0] https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/w-social-nachric...

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

#150

Post by danabramov »

danabramov wrote: post #71
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ri…

Update: I just wrote a post about this since I keep typing it over and over in these threads. https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/
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