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.
"Inc" is probably closer than "LLC". While an LLC is a type of joint stock company, it is a specific form with a pass-through tax structure and restrictions on foreign ownership. "Inc" signifies the more general form of corporation in the US.
Aktiebolag is the overwhelmingly most common company form in Sweden and similar to common corporation forms in many other countries. It's not the same thing as a US LLC, which is a strange entity that has pass-through taxation.
Which is to say, there's nothing particularly remarkable about it being an Aktiebolag. It would be more remarkable if it wasn't.
Where is this possible? In the US, it is impossible. Non-profit's do not have owners, so they cannot be sold or changed to for-profit ones, so there are only two ways for a non-profit to "turn into" a for-profit:
* sell non-profit's assets to a for-profit company (so it's not turning into a for-profit company, and ownership of the non-profit can never be sold since it's not owned by anyone that can approve the sale, there are no shares, etc.) This is only legal if sold at fair market value. So the for-profit can't just take the IP, equipment, land, etc. It has to buy it at what anyone else would buy it at. It also has to be approved of by the state's government. Then the proceeds of the sale have to be transferred to another non-profit.
* form a for-profit subsidiary, which is still controlled by the non-profit. And the for-profit is owned by the non-profit, so the profits flow upward to the non-profit to be used to support the non-profit's agenda.
Either way, the non-profit cannot become a for-profit, and it takes corporate governance shenanigans (like the bullshit happening with OpenAI) to even approximate this. Essentially, it requires corruption and a non-profit board that is unaccountable to its stakeholders.
> 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?
In practice it's about bribing them or at least telling them personal gains. Like if you tell a politician he should support the war on Iran because he owns lots of oil stocks and they'll go up.
Marketing is telling a politician this app is the future of EU social chat so you need to be using it.
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.
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.
W Social is a Swedish company and therefore not an LLC. It is an Aktiebolag (AB), it is closer to a Corporation (Inc). Still for profit but not necessarily evil, just the most common business type in Sweden.
This thread is the first time I've even heard of "W Social" so I have no specific insight into their naming, but I'd assume it comes from (gaming/lifestyle) streaming culture where "chatters" will often say "W <thing>" (good, win) or "L <thing>" (bad, lose) as short-form feedback on how they feel about <thing>.
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:
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, would it even be legal to make it closed source under a different license?
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.
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 rich view over the network. That’s what Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, etc, so.
So there is no “instance”. There’s hosting and there’s apps.
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.
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.
Really sad seeing europa.eu and high profile politicians switching switching to such obviously bullshit low effort hacks. Ursala von der Leyen just joined and fired off a hello, for example. Many agitated replies to it, discussing the matter, with lots and lots of discontent for W Social: https://bsky.app/profile/vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu/post/3moio...
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
Bluesky is really lagging in user adoption because the name itself implies some sort of political divide, and from experience, it seems that it's an echo chamber where "right" activists are getting demolished at the first occasion, I wished it would have a mix of people and opinion.
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.
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 could name so many projects or people. The Rust language? KDE? Comics like War and Peas, or David Revoy's works? Hackers like Foone, Mara Bos? Technology Connections!
Countless cute kitten pics. Minimal hate or bigotry in my feed. Don't have to log in. Don't even have to sign up. Finite scroll on the homepage.
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.
Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :)
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.
So they are 100% looking to monetize and turn a profit.
I wouldn't call it shady, but closed source, for-profit sounds accurate.
"Inc" is probably closer than "LLC". While an LLC is a type of joint stock company, it is a specific form with a pass-through tax structure and restrictions on foreign ownership. "Inc" signifies the more general form of corporation in the US.
Which is to say, there's nothing particularly remarkable about it being an Aktiebolag. It would be more remarkable if it wasn't.
so those distinctions dont seem to count much nowadays
* sell non-profit's assets to a for-profit company (so it's not turning into a for-profit company, and ownership of the non-profit can never be sold since it's not owned by anyone that can approve the sale, there are no shares, etc.) This is only legal if sold at fair market value. So the for-profit can't just take the IP, equipment, land, etc. It has to buy it at what anyone else would buy it at. It also has to be approved of by the state's government. Then the proceeds of the sale have to be transferred to another non-profit.
* form a for-profit subsidiary, which is still controlled by the non-profit. And the for-profit is owned by the non-profit, so the profits flow upward to the non-profit to be used to support the non-profit's agenda.
Either way, the non-profit cannot become a for-profit, and it takes corporate governance shenanigans (like the bullshit happening with OpenAI) to even approximate this. Essentially, it requires corruption and a non-profit board that is unaccountable to its stakeholders.
No mention of long-term stake of EU in ActivityPub platforms either, as if W would be our savior.
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?
The distinction: marketers know how to trick people, lobbyists bribe them.
Marketing is telling a politician this app is the future of EU social chat so you need to be using it.
WSocial just went to politicians directly,it's not known by general public. Good news is, it rarely helps with commercial success
[^1]: https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3mokohkfb4224
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.
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, would it even be legal to make it closed source under a different license?
I think that last bit explains why European govt orgs have migrated to it, over the open source Eurosky.
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 rich view over the network. That’s what Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, etc, so.
So there is no “instance”. There’s hosting and there’s apps.
1. choose a username
2. choose a password
3. choose your interests
4. download the #WIdentity app to your phone (two options: Apple AppStore or Google Play Store)
5. scan a QR code
6. create a PIN code
optional: enable biometrics; re-enter PIN
7. choose whether you simply want to verify that you're human or if you also want to verify your name
8. choose the verification method (automatic photo review, request a manual review or scan your passport chip)
9. scan your passport's picture page
10. scan your passport's chip
11. take a selfie
12. scan a QR code to link the W Identity to your W Social account
13. enter your PIN code
https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTE...
Or.... How about not? Seriously, join Mastodon!
Why is this a different network? Are Eurosky relays not indexing anything outside Eurosky?
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.
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.
We've seen it so many times.
Learn the lesson. Use Mastodon this time.
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.
Actually that's a feature. If search doesn't work, there is less incentive for bots polluting others people searches.
On the other hand, search works so bad than even connecting to people you know on other networks is painful.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
Why did you switch them around? Red always meant left wing. Even in the US red meant the Soviets. It's just confusing to everyone else.
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.
Countless cute kitten pics. Minimal hate or bigotry in my feed. Don't have to log in. Don't even have to sign up. Finite scroll on the homepage.
The rest of your comment seems to be pure speculation, so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
A "main instance" is contrary to the whole idea of a Fediverse anyway.
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.
This obviously is total nonsense.
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...