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.
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 features (people here don't care) in the future, or even ands (people here don't care), but because of the name. Who the hell thought "W Social" was a good name for a company?
We are so bad at company names here in the EU it's embarrassing.
> 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 from this in the press - while the W Social launch was on national news and a bunch of high-profile EU politicians were immediately joining. What's going on here?
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.
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.
The article explains what's needed to run something like Bluesky (ctrl-f "To be fully sovereign you need").
My understanding is that Eurosky aims to be a non-profit ran alternative, hosted in EU. It integrates with Bluesky seamlessly (Bsky users and EUSky users can interact) but would keep working if Bluesky was taken down. I believe it also gives Eurosky agency when it comes to moderation.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If you use bsky.app, you still see posts from other servers (Blacksky, Eurosky, W Social, and so on). But yes, by the protocol's design you're primarily interacting with one central aggregator of everything (Bluesky's AppView).
That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”.
Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent PDS hosts (because people I follow like that). But it doesn’t show up in user experience because that’s the whole point.
And yes, I can use another aggregator instead of the Bluesky app, or even use a client which has no backend and relies on community-run Constellation index. It all roughly works the same.
My hosting is managed by Bluesky but it has nothing to do with Bluesky app. Hosting is a separate decoupled thing. I could move hosting to my own Docker container, and all aggregators would see my posts just as fine.
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.
You’re posting that on HN. I consider HN to be social media but lacking the most pernicious features (ads, algorithmic feeds) and benefitting from both strong moderation and self-policing. But it gets to do that by being funded from extrinsic sources, which is itself a compromise.
No, not necessarily. Mastodon is actually "social media", as opposed to twitter/X, bluewhatever, facebook, or any other commercial outlet, to be honest, all of these have become "feeds" of promoted content designed to maximize "engagement".
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
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.
Huh, okay. For me there's everything from government updates to industry news to friends and acquaintances active on Mastodon. Meeting new people there as well. Maybe infosec and my friends are just all dorks
With this logic, Threads is the biggest 'Mastodon instance' with 500M active users monthly.
Why aren't the general public using the original first 'instance' which is Mastodon if it is just another node?
> Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.
I think this is where it falls apart.
Nobody wants to waste their time host your own, moving from a rouge instance, trying to search for users to follow and the worst one:
Choosing which instance to sign up to.
It is no wonder that even Bluesky is more active than Mastodon.
If I was going to tell someone what social media to sign up to other than X, it has to be either Threads or Bluesky.
Practically, if you choose a big enough server, it's rarely a problem. mastodon.social is the most popular one, maintained by Mastodon the non-profit itself.
Biggest turn off and a killer feature depending on who you ask is a lack of Algorithm. That's why people who move away from Twitter feel disoriented, but people who were never on Twitter in the first place are alright.
> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
So? I don't use social media to receive curated, hourly dispatches from Barack Obama or Taylor Swift (or, more likely, their account managers). And it might feel important to get the latest rage bait and memes from Elon - it's almost like being friends with the world's first trillionaire - but is it really a good use of your time?
I think a healthier way to use social media is to have two-way interactions with some reasonably stable social circle; less about "people who matter" and more about "people who matter to you". Mastodon certainly has the critical mass to make this possible.
Terry Tao, Bert Hubert, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), Bunny Huang are just a few in my feed. But Mastodon is more about peer-to-peer communication than celebrities farming engagement indeed.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
Another social network with 0 network effect and is dead on arrival. Now being closed makes it far worse than Bluesky and no better than a prototype pre-production version of Threads; with 0 users.
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 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.
Indeed a very odd sight between WC matches. I don't normally watch much TV, but I think this warrants further investigation and inquiry.
No mention of long-term stake of EU in ActivityPub platforms either, as if W would be our savior.
And probably stuffed with tax money. As usual.
I thought this was a good post on the topic: [W Social is TruthSocial with a European accent.][1]
[^1]: https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3mokohkfb4224
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 features (people here don't care) in the future, or even ands (people here don't care), but because of the name. Who the hell thought "W Social" was a good name for a company?
We are so bad at company names here in the EU it's embarrassing.
Just use https://mu.social, it's essentially the same thing, just built in the open by the Eurosky stack.
> 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 from this in the press - while the W Social launch was on national news and a bunch of high-profile EU politicians were immediately joining. What's going on here?
It means that marketers won over technical, factual people.
The marketers or the so far unnamed private investors.
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.
- am i the only one or does anyone else think this website is somehow hijacking the scrollbar?
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.
> Europe already has an ATproto social network - Eurosky
Why is this a different network? Are Eurosky relays not indexing anything outside Eurosky?
The article explains what's needed to run something like Bluesky (ctrl-f "To be fully sovereign you need").
My understanding is that Eurosky aims to be a non-profit ran alternative, hosted in EU. It integrates with Bluesky seamlessly (Bsky users and EUSky users can interact) but would keep working if Bluesky was taken down. I believe it also gives Eurosky agency when it comes to moderation.
They are, it's just a second instance of a realy. For independance, resilience, moderation, and also probably minor technical choices.
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.
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.
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?
If you use bsky.app, you still see posts from other servers (Blacksky, Eurosky, W Social, and so on). But yes, by the protocol's design you're primarily interacting with one central aggregator of everything (Bluesky's AppView).
That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”.
Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent PDS hosts (because people I follow like that). But it doesn’t show up in user experience because that’s the whole point.
And yes, I can use another aggregator instead of the Bluesky app, or even use a client which has no backend and relies on community-run Constellation index. It all roughly works the same.
And it works as smoothly for people on other app servers?
What does “people on other app servers” mean? That’s not a thing.
App servers are aggregators. You can use any to read the network. Here’s a post I wrote, as seen via Bluesky aggregator:
https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3mol3gyikac2d
A second later, I could see the same post via the Blacksky community aggregator: https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7tt...
Here’s the same post on pdsls which reads it directly from my hosting: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7ttr2ktxdo/app....
My hosting is managed by Bluesky but it has nothing to do with Bluesky app. Hosting is a separate decoupled thing. I could move hosting to my own Docker container, and all aggregators would see my posts just as fine.
Does this clear things up?
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.
I'd go further - just leave social media
You’re posting that on HN. I consider HN to be social media but lacking the most pernicious features (ads, algorithmic feeds) and benefitting from both strong moderation and self-policing. But it gets to do that by being funded from extrinsic sources, which is itself a compromise.
No, not necessarily. Mastodon is actually "social media", as opposed to twitter/X, bluewhatever, facebook, or any other commercial outlet, to be honest, all of these have become "feeds" of promoted content designed to maximize "engagement".
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
Fyi it’s actually called bluesky, not bluewhatever
Which is what eYou is trying to build as well. Including AI fact-checking: far from perfect but interesting to read its fact checks on your own posts.
Eurosky is also an option.
But thats just the thing with atproto. The company sucks? Just move your PDS.
There is no lesson to be learned. There are billions of noobs. There is always a cow to milk, it seems.
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.
I am quite happy with people I follow on Mastodon. Sure, various politicians might not be there, but those are not people I want to hear from.
The rest of your comment seems to be pure speculation, so.
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
Huh, okay. For me there's everything from government updates to industry news to friends and acquaintances active on Mastodon. Meeting new people there as well. Maybe infosec and my friends are just all dorks
Threads is just another node that connects to ActivityPub, there is no "road" to enshittification.
Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.
With this logic, Threads is the biggest 'Mastodon instance' with 500M active users monthly.
Why aren't the general public using the original first 'instance' which is Mastodon if it is just another node?
> Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.
I think this is where it falls apart.
Nobody wants to waste their time host your own, moving from a rouge instance, trying to search for users to follow and the worst one:
Choosing which instance to sign up to.
It is no wonder that even Bluesky is more active than Mastodon.
If I was going to tell someone what social media to sign up to other than X, it has to be either Threads or Bluesky.
Practically, if you choose a big enough server, it's rarely a problem. mastodon.social is the most popular one, maintained by Mastodon the non-profit itself.
Biggest turn off and a killer feature depending on who you ask is a lack of Algorithm. That's why people who move away from Twitter feel disoriented, but people who were never on Twitter in the first place are alright.
Tell me you don't understand the point of Mastodon without telling me you don't understand the point of Mastodon.
> Tell me you don't understand the point of Mastodon without telling me you don't understand the point of Mastodon.
Yes, many people don't understand the point of Mastodon.
This includes many of the hundreds of users who tried to make Mastodon work as an X alternative but failed because it was too hard to use.
Decentralisation, Federation, self hosting and choosing an instance isn't enough of a point for many people to use it.
> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
So? I don't use social media to receive curated, hourly dispatches from Barack Obama or Taylor Swift (or, more likely, their account managers). And it might feel important to get the latest rage bait and memes from Elon - it's almost like being friends with the world's first trillionaire - but is it really a good use of your time?
I think a healthier way to use social media is to have two-way interactions with some reasonably stable social circle; less about "people who matter" and more about "people who matter to you". Mastodon certainly has the critical mass to make this possible.
Terry Tao, Bert Hubert, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), Bunny Huang are just a few in my feed. But Mastodon is more about peer-to-peer communication than celebrities farming engagement indeed.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
I, for one, want to choose for myself whether to block other instances or not. You seem to not tolerate this opinion.
A "main instance" is contrary to the whole idea of a Fediverse anyway.
> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
This obviously is total nonsense.
W Social isn't built for proper cryptography and so-on, it's amateurish.
Another social network with 0 network effect and is dead on arrival. Now being closed makes it far worse than Bluesky and no better than a prototype pre-production version of Threads; with 0 users.
From [0]
> W Social unveiled at the WEF
That's everything I need to know.
[0] https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-ceo-l...