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

blog.elenarossini.com

41–50 of 176 posts

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

#42
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.

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

#43

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.

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

#45
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.

> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.

This obviously is total nonsense.

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

#47
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what is that experience of yours? Do you have experience from deployments with many independent atproto data servers and relays federating together? Or do you have experience from bluesky, meaning you're only interacting with one central server and none of the complexities of federation come into play?

This is exactly why I clarified with "as a user".

I just checked and yes, I follow someone that's on Eurosky. Maybe I follow multiple, I honestly don't know because it isn't at all noticeable. It just works.

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

#48
I have a hunch that many - most? - of these European digital sovereignty projects will end up being grifts. Whenever money is being thrown at any crappy, low-effort startup that knows how to speak the right language, you get grifters coming out of the woodwork.

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

#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.

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

#50

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.

And probably stuffed with tax money. As usual.
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