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.
I haven't actually been subject to this, yet, but I've seen enough people react negatively against others doing this that it saps all my desire to do anything other than just aimlessly scroll every once in a while. I can read the room, you know.
Sometimes I wonder why do instance admins even open up their instances? Just run it for your friends and those who you like and cut the crap.
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?
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
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.
The rest of your comment seems to be pure speculation, so.
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.
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.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
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.
A "main instance" is contrary to the whole idea of a Fediverse anyway.
This obviously is total nonsense.
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
That pisses me the fuck off as well. Not only is it forced coercion to have to pay an extra tax for receiving state propaganda, not only are their fees higher than what the brits pay for the BBC, they also don't produce any valuable IP for all that money they get from us, like the BBC does (Dr. WHo, Top Gear, etc). And in UK only people with TV have to pay whereas every household in AT has to pay regardless if you have a TV or not.
Nobody managed to convince me that the mandatory austrian broadcast fee is not a massive scam and a jobs program for the politically connected people to hire themselves, their friends and their family into insanely lucrative public sector jobs with golden benefits on the taxpayer's expense.
No mention of long-term stake of EU in ActivityPub platforms either, as if W would be our savior.
This is so stupid. It’s really like truth social. Having a private company with closed source pretending to be open and sovereign (whatever that means), adding ID verification by scanning your passport, it’s like.. gasoline for conspiracy theories. They’re so incredibly tone deaf. It’s like being back in the early 2000s when the older generation didn’t understand the internet. But it’s 2026…
Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like. That would at least serve some value. You can’t have both the social part and the control of the narrative.
What more do you expect from German and EU leadership?
>Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like.
Yeah but then nobody would ever read it. Which is why EU leaders want to coerce private platforms that are already highly successful with the public be their mouthpieces.
Germany's own government had dozens of meetings in secret with Google in order to discuss censorship. https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/08/google-met-top-german-go...
Not sure that's really a thing outside the USA. And as far as I heard that reference, it was always pronunced "Dubya" not "Double-You"
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.
So there’s no chance a politician or marketer or anyone who has commerce as their primary motivation will spend any effort promoting it
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.
Sure it vibes very well with protectionists but the sovereignty angle is real. The USA is no longer a reliable partner.
(And just before someone mistakes my comment as having any stance on W Social, I do not)
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!
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).
Which decentralised instance?
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.
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?
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.
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...
Careful, you'll be branded a conspiracy theorist if you notice WEF involvement as dangerous.
And as an not completely unintended side-effect, some nephews of EU bureaucrats will make hay.
Sad.
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.
I think that last bit explains why European govt orgs have migrated to it, over the open source Eurosky.
