Thanks @_elena! Wonderful insights and thanks for investing your energies into this research.

Another take away for me pertains how the Fediverse is 'complicated' to get into and stick around. Seeing how many political and institutional actors moved to #WSocial overly quick tells me that it isn't healthy either, to not know what's happening behind the scenes. Apparently, these actors haven't learned a thing, neither about the past, nor about network infrastructures. At least with the bit of friction you have with the fediverse, you have a didactic moment of realising that servers are somebody else's computer.

Ridiculously bad start, probably the worst I've seen in 20+ years of using socials.

I created my profile and locked in the username. Now I can't log in, and I can't reset the password since the system says my account doesn't exist.

I've mailed support; let's see what comes of it. Me staying on Mastodon is the number one probability 😆

#wsocial #socialmedia

Elena Rossini 🌈

2026-06-29 06:39:28

Scoop: #WSocial has been experiencing major technical problems for over a week: it is effectively a ghost town, filled with thousands of new accounts that cannot use the platform.

Because my new article contains a possible solution to their problem, by the time you read this the issue may have been fixed. Or not. It has been going on for 7+ days, with complete radio silence by its developers and founders.

My exclusive:

🔗 : blog.elenarossini.com/w-social…

#SocialMedia #ATproto #RateLimiting

W Social: a Broken Ghost Town?

W Social has been experiencing major technical problems for over a week: it is effectively a ghost town, filled with thousands of new accounts that cannot use the platform.

^{Elena Rossini}

Endlich ein soziales Netzwerk für Jugendliche. Man kann sich registrieren, aber nicht anmelden. Absolut sicher! /s

#wsocial

Thank you for this article, Elena.

To sum up: People on the #fediverse, the network that European career politicians decided was beneath them, help VC-backed #wsocial get their act together.

Fedi, you are too good for this world.

Scoop: #WSocial has been experiencing major technical problems for over a week: it is effectively a ghost town, filled with thousands of new accounts that cannot use the platform.

Because my new article contains a possible solution to their problem, by the time you read this the issue may have been fixed. Or not. It has been going on for 7+ days, with complete radio silence by its developers and founders.

My exclusive:

🔗 : blog.elenarossini.com/w-social…

#SocialMedia #ATproto #RateLimiting

SCOOP: #WSocial is doctoring metrics on its homepage, inflating the number of comments on posts by prominent people on its network.

I suppose a more accurate tagline for them should be "Trust your feed?"

My article about it: "W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data"

🔗 : blog.elenarossini.com/w-social…

#blog #BigTech #EUBigTech #TEP #TrustedEuropeanPlatforms #TrustYourFeed

Dear Fedi friends,

It may be time for a re-introduction: I'm Elena, an Italian creative (writer, photographer, filmmaker) living in Paris, France.

You may have initially gotten to know me for my advocacy for the Fediverse (like my Fedi intro video: blog.elenarossini.com/fedivers… or my blog or my Fediverse stock photo). So, you may have been a bit confused lately, over all my critical posts about the new network W Social. Why do I keep bringing it up?

I believe that W Social - and its required, companion app W Identity - are an existential threat to the Fediverse. So I'm fighting tooth and nail to oppose and resist them.

Why? The European Commission has enthusiastically embraced this new hard fork of Bluesky that requires age verification. Even Ursula von der Leyen advertised the launch of W Social in between G7 meetings last week.

I have MOUNTAINS of evidence of poor planning, extremely lax security, use of U.S. Big Tech platforms for something that purports to be "based in Europe, for the world."

Why is it a threat for the Fediverse? The only way to make sense of the European Commission's embrace of this platform is that maybe it sees it as a trial run for MANDATORY age verification for social media across the European Union.

No Fediverse app has infrastructure in place to comply. And if a mandate is introduced, it would spell the end of the open social web and internet anonymity... like Chat Control, but basically killing the Fediverse.

I find it EXTREMELY disturbing to see the enthusiastic embrace of W Social by the European Commission. It took them YEARS to change their website footer and add Mastodon and Bluesky instead of X. In the span of 5 weeks, they replaced the Bluesky logo (a butterfly) with the "W" from W Social.

All my posts about W Social from last week went viral. My articles have been quoted in articles in French, Dutch and German news sites (blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-so…).

I have held back from sharing more evidence I found because I don't want to appear like a bully who promotes pile-ons. I'm a nice, sweet person, I promise! I take ZERO pleasure in writing about W Social, but I have unwittingly become an expert on them - after researching them for 5 months. So here I am.

I will keep investigating them. If you don't want to hear about this topic anymore - I would understand - you can mute the hashtags #Wsocial and #DubyaSocial (that's a pretty apt way to describe them IMHO).

Peace out.

#introduction #reintroduction

Needless to say, do not sign up for W or give them your ID information no matter how simple they eventually manage to make it.

You simply don’t need to.

You’re already in a far superior – non-corporate, federated – space.

Do not sign up for W. And warn your friends.

The only time you have any power to stop this is now. If they succeed in gaining network effects, you will be as powerless to stop them as you are with X.

And yes, they’re just another venture capital funded surveillance capitalist, people farmer, and burgeoning Nazi Bar. They just happen to be based in the EU. (As Nazi Bars traditionally have been.)

#WSocial #NoWNoX #surveillance #capitalism #BigTech #VC @_elena mastodon.social/@_elena/116770…

#WSocial: "We want to promote European digital sovereignty. We're made in Europe, for the world!"

@EUCommission: "A strong Europe needs independent digital spaces. Today, we’re expanding our presence to W."

W Social: "You need to verify your identity. Please download our #WIdentity app from Apple's App Store or Google's Play Store"

No further comment necessary.

Check for yourselves (04:30): inv.nadeko.net/Vcq4MiabpEQ

#BigTech #OpenWashing #EuropeWashing #SovereigntyWashing

Dear Fedi friends,

Yesterday I posted a toot about #WSocial on this account (I typically talk about them on Mastodon, but I needed more than 500 characters, so I switched here). It was widely shared and discussed.

Some of you may have missed my articles critiquing W Social. I have been following them - with a critical eye - and collecting evidence since their soft launch at Davos in January: blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-so…

Anyway, some of you mistook the tone of yesterday's toot and thought I was ENDORSING signing up for an account on W Social. In reality I was being sarcastic 🙃​

I will make sure to spell out my intentions much more clearly next time.

At any rate, my latest article about them made it to Hacker News yesterday (wild) and my research has been quoted in Dutch, German and French news outlets. The tide is finally turning (from fawning PR coverage to a more distanced, critical look).

Thank you for your support as always! ❤️​

#blog

“My fear is that W Social is just another for-profit Big Tech startup that happens to be based in the EU. We don’t need that. We don’t need more European surveillance capitalists and people farmers. We need ethical alternatives working for the common good.”

– Yours truly, in @_elena’s excellent exposé on W Social.

blog.elenarossini.com/w-social…

Do read the article to the end, especially noting the bit about the composition of their board of advisors, which includes an ex-Google AI lead and an ex-Paypal Chief [Violate Your] Privacy Officer who now works at Tools for Humanity (Sam Altman’s “Sci-fi dystopia? Hold my beer…” identity farming startup that wants to scan your eyeballs).

#WSocial #EuropeWashing #PrivacyWashing #BigTech #peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism #EU #ATProto #fediverse

"Yes we have a business model, it's not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money. - Anna Zeiter, CEO of #wsocial

They're talking about 50 billion Euros per year. You want to help them make some money, right? So it "stays in Europe".

Their proposal also aligns nicely with ending anonymity online. They'd require government ID verification for account creation.

I’ll skip it, thanks.

Was hoping for a privacy-preserving platform based on open source.

It’s fails on both those counts.

No different from X or Threads. So what’s the point?

A big nope!

#wsocial

#WSocial will open up their beta program today… and I have a SCOOP for you: it appears that they have quietly gone closed-source!

This is ironic, considering that the @EUCommission just unveiled their Tech Sovereignty Package, emphasizing the importance of #OpenSource. And yet they have migrated their main ATproto accounts to W Social - whose code can no longer be inspected!

My full article - with a great analysis by @aral:

🔗: blog.elenarossini.com/w-social…

#FOSS #DigitalSovereignty #BigTech

#Wsocial : We don't do #ElonMusk. #Nazis are very welcome on our platform but they must be European.

@EUCommission President: Yay, we'll join Wsocial the new European unicorn or something! 🎉

#BuyEuropean #DigitalSovereignty

Dear Fedi friends, I need your help.

If by any chance any of you have saved the video of #WSocial CEO Anna Zeiter's presentation at the Monaco AI conference (uploaded to YouTube on May 21) I would be ETERNALLY grateful.

OG URL: youtu.be/xDNGHaISqs4

The 35 minute video included priceless quotes like: "Yes we have a business model, it's not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money."

Following the publication of my exposé, the video has been removed from YouTube!

Do you remember the surprise announcement of a new social network in Davos this past January? Something that promised to be the "first" European social network?

Its name is #WSocial and it's a fork of #Bluesky. Its founders have ties with European politicians - but there is no official involvement by the EU.

You wouldn't know any of this from media reports because they all rehashed their talking points. So I wrote a post about it, dispelling some myths:

blog.elenarossini.com/w-social…

#OpenWashing