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Posted by nemoniac 7 hours ago

Has W Social switched to closed source?(blog.elenarossini.com)
135 points | 85 commentspage 2
teddyh 1 hour ago|
Maybe they moved to Codeberg?
mystraline 3 hours ago||
How to create an account on #WSocial in 13 easy steps:

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!

tancop 1 hour ago|
> Seriously, join Mastodon!

not bad but bluesky/eurosky is just better. activitypub based networks treat instances as sovereign with full control over users data. they can permanently delete your posts and the posts you see depend on who the admin wants to federate with. the only way to be independent is run your own server so non technical users get stuck under reddit style moderation.

at protocol is global by default and puts you in control with full account portability. and it looks like its easier to expand it to new use cases like tangled (github alternative) or rocksky (social listening like last fm).

hahajk 6 hours ago||
> Europe already has an ATproto social network - Eurosky

Why is this a different network? Are Eurosky relays not indexing anything outside Eurosky?

dutchCourage 5 hours ago||
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.

maelito 5 hours ago||
They are, it's just a second instance of a realy. For independance, resilience, moderation, and also probably minor technical choices.
rafram 5 hours ago||
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.
kristianc 5 hours ago||
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.
jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago||
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 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.

jwr 6 hours ago||
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.

erxam 5 hours ago||
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.

dolmen 3 hours ago|||
> Call me when the Fediverse has a search function that actually fucking works.

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.

jwr 1 hour ago|||
I have entirely different experiences and I haven't seen much hating — but having read this, perhaps indeed mastodon isn't for you :-)
afavour 6 hours ago|||
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.
mort96 6 hours ago||
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?

danabramov 6 hours ago|||
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.

mort96 5 hours ago||
And it works as smoothly for people on other app servers?
danabramov 4 hours ago||
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?

tao_oat 6 hours ago||||
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).
afavour 5 hours ago|||
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.

mglvsky 6 hours ago|||
I'd go further - just leave social media
jwr 6 hours ago|||
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.

pfraze 5 hours ago|||
Fyi it’s actually called bluesky, not bluewhatever
addedGone 3 hours ago||
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.
pfraze 2 hours ago|||
Wcyd? It was the name that Dorsey chose before the PBC was even formed. It's from the technical term of art, like greenfield.
onraglanroad 2 hours ago|||
I'm guessing that's because blue means left wing in the USA and red means right wing.

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.

tancop 57 minutes ago||
no one really knows, when broadcasters started using party colors it was all over the place and they settled on blue for dems. i guess its because neither party was socialist so there was no association with red like in europe.
soco 5 hours ago|||
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.
shermantanktop 4 hours ago|||
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.
matteomrj 6 hours ago|||
Eurosky is also an option.
17383848 6 hours ago||
[dead]
Landing7610 6 hours ago|||
But thats just the thing with atproto. The company sucks? Just move your PDS.
RobotToaster 4 hours ago||
If they filter you at the relay or appview level that doesn't work.
greenavocado 6 hours ago|||
There is no lesson to be learned. There are billions of noobs. There is always a cow to milk, it seems.
colesantiago 6 hours ago||
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.

deathanatos 2 hours ago|||
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.

jwr 6 hours ago||||
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.

Aachen 6 hours ago||||
How can you know there's nobody worth following on Mastodon?
bigfishrunning 6 hours ago||
I was on mastodon for a year, and the only people there were other dorks looking for someone to follow on mastodon
Aachen 5 hours ago||
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
zerobees 5 hours ago||||
> 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.

oytis 6 hours ago||||
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

jeromegv 6 hours ago||||
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.

colesantiago 6 hours ago||
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.

oytis 5 hours ago||
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.

Tepix 5 hours ago||||
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.

angst_ridden 6 hours ago||||
Tell me you don't understand the point of Mastodon without telling me you don't understand the point of Mastodon.
colesantiago 5 hours ago||
> 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.

badgersnake 5 hours ago|||
> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.

This obviously is total nonsense.

vivzkestrel 4 hours ago||
- am i the only one or does anyone else think this website is somehow hijacking the scrollbar?
rvz 6 hours ago||
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...

pixel_popping 5 hours ago|
W Social isn't built with proper cryptography and so-on, it's amateurish.
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