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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

#161

Post by joe_mamba »

lynx97 wrote: post #137
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.

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.

>they are financed by a mandatory fee per household anyway

That pisses me the fuck off as well. Not only is it forced coercion to have to pay an extra tax for receiving state propaganda, not only are their fees higher than what the brits pay for the BBC, they also don't produce any valuable IP for all that money they get from us, like the BBC does (Dr. WHo, Top Gear, etc). And in UK only people with TV have to pay whereas every household in AT has to pay regardless if you have a TV or not.

Nobody managed to convince me that the mandatory austrian broadcast fee is not a massive scam and a jobs program for the politically connected people to hire themselves, their friends and their family into insanely lucrative public sector jobs with golden benefits on the taxpayer's expense.

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

#162

Post by Geezus_42 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #153
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?

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

The incentive is control.

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

#164

Post by sunshine-o »

3997531578 wrote: post #46

Regime-aligned social media, just what people needed. And as an not completely unintended side-effect, some nephews of EU bureaucrats will make hay.

The whole * media industry got so bad we just assume it will be controlled, whether it is on a piece of paper, TV or the Internet.

Sad.

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

#165

Post by misfitgentleman »

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.

Why not go straight to the top with A?

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

#167

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

bborud wrote: post #65
xg15 wrote: post #58

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.

Their splash page is the sentence "Trust Your Feed." in gigantic font. I'm not sure what that could possibly be interpreted as other than an inherently political promise to shape the feed away from sources they consider untrusted.

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

#168

Post by ninjalanternshk »

CurryFurry wrote: post #154
oytis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not marketers, lobbyists

NGOs are also lobbyists, and of the worse kind.

NGOs are not lobbyists.

Some NGOs lobby/employ lobbyists.

That’s not the same thing.

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

#170

Post by TalkingCodeMonk »

danabramov wrote: post #150
danabramov wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Your post changed my prespective on atproto! It also solidified the architectural issues I've had all along with the fediverse, and view that it's more of an interim solution which doesn't resolve the core centralisation and censorship issues; often exacerbating them to the extreme.

Just noticed who you are. Big fan of you're work and approach to problem solving! Do you have any similar posts about alternative protocols in this space, like nostr et al?

I've been ruminating on the incorporation of censorship resistance by adopting core concepts from tor/I2P and Monero using cryptographic techniques for validation and obfuscation that enable users to subscribe to specific communities, chatrooms, or channels within a PDS, so they also operate like private/public-PDS's to replace messaging providers with a uni/multi/any-cast rss. The reason I think this should coexist in the same protocol is that if the hosting provider itself is untrusted by default, and all comms are E2EE between all consumers from the ground up (public comms could contain a decryption key in the response, or one assembled by relays), the individual hosting providers can't choose to selectively filter or censor individual comms they disagree with at any layer, because they can't see the speech, where it's coming from, or where it's going; even for publicly broadcasted comms, until at least after the response has been transmitted to relays (enforced by the protocol).

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