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W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
Read the full article on blog.elenarossini.com ↗209
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The 5-second version
- W Social, a for-profit fork of Bluesky billing itself as Europe's alternative to X, has migrated major institutional accounts including the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Central Bank, and Christine Lagarde from Bluesky PBC to its own servers.
- The European Commission migrated to W Social only one week after announcing a Tech Sovereignty Package that explicitly prioritized open source in public administrations, despite W Social being closed-source.
- W Social has quietly taken down its public GitHub repository, making its previously open-source application closed-source, with no code available on GitHub, Codeberg, or other platforms as of the reporting date.
- A fully sovereign ATproto implementation requires independently hosting five components: Personal Data Server (PDS), relay, AppView, moderation service, and PLC directory—yet W Social has not disclosed its roadmap or whether it relies on Bluesky PBC infrastructure for non-PDS services.
- Eurosky, a non-profit alternative run by the Modal foundation, offers a transparent open-source European ATproto network with its own relay, did:plc directory mirroring, and full Bluesky app replacement at mu.social.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
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.Read on HN ↗
> 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?Read on HN ↗
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:fpruhu…Read on HN ↗
jauntywundrkind6.2k karma
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-so…Read on HN ↗