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> 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?
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.
But thats just the thing with atproto. The company sucks? Just move your PDS.
I think that last bit explains why European govt orgs have migrated to it, over the open source Eurosky.
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.
Which is to say, there's nothing particularly remarkable about it being an Aktiebolag. It would be more remarkable if it wasn't.
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.
There's two really good blog posts in these W Social people, with really good research. https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-socia... https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-public-institutions-a...
There's a fantastic thread covering this and many other issues. This seems to go against the core EU directives for self sovereignty, just signing up to a very rogue platform that happens to have some protocol interoperability. Also, lol, they have no cross site scripting protection. https://bsky.app/profile/stollmeyer.eurosky.social/post/3moi...
Given the presence of https://eurosky.tech and https://mu.social, the EU folks going to W over them is either massive out of touch pitiful incompetence, or worse, sharks preferring to go with other sharks they feel they can control, instead of something actually positive and better, but not as directly manipulable.
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Not marketers, lobbyists
Both? But yea, if you see the Advisory Board shown in an image lower in the article, you get the general idea.
WSocial just went to politicians directly,it's not known by general public. Good news is, it rarely helps with commercial success
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.
so those distinctions dont seem to count much nowadays
An unfortunate step backwards. I'm cheering for Eurosky and open networks.
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.