W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty
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In the past few months I have unwittingly become an expert on all things W Social: the microblogging platform that is a fork of Bluesky and bills itself as Europe’s alternative to X, with identity verification “to fight bots and misinformation” and data hosted in Europe “to promote European digital sovereignty”. Why am I fascinated by this topic? I find the discrepancies between their public image and the reality behind the scenes truly striking.<br>Over the course of the past few days I have received sensational information that no media organization has so far reported. So here we go, with another article about W Social on their big week, as they are set to open their public beta to their waiting list later today.<br>But first: if you missed my previous articles on the topic, you can find them here:<br>W Social - Elena Rossini<br>A series of articles about the controversial social network W Social, a for profit company set up by Swedish entrepreneurs, who openly admitted they want to help train European AI models with their users’ data (amongst other things).<br>Elena RossiniElena Rossini
⚠️<br>Disclaimer:
This article represents my personal opinions, commentary, and conclusions formed through independent research using publicly available sources. Any characterizations, interpretations, or inferences are presented as opinion, not as statements of objective fact. Readers are encouraged to review the referenced materials and draw their own conclusions.
Prominent Institutions and Government Officials Move their Accounts to W Social<br>On Friday June 12th I received a tip: that the ATproto accounts of the European Commission, its president Ursula von der Leyen, the European Central Bank and its president Christine Lagarde had been migrated from Bluesky PBC to W Social’s servers.<br>I immediately double-checked the information on the website clearsky.app (which indexes information about ATproto) and saw this for myself:
screenshots from the website clearsky.app which show how the Bluesky accounts of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen and Christine Lagarde were very recently moved to W Social's servers<br>I was incredibly surprised by this move: W Social is a private, for-profit enterprise controlled by Swedish entrepreneurs which had a really spotty launch and isn’t forthcoming with communications about their tech stack .<br>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:<br>Development Roadmap - Eurosky<br>Eurosky is a European initiative to build and operate sovereign social web infrastructure<br>Eurosky
Last week Eurosky shared news about their strides in attaining greater independence from Bluesky PBC’s infrastructure: they are now mirroring the did:plc directory and set up their own firehose running on European infrastructure; they even launched a new platform/webapp - mu.social - that is a full replacement of the Bluesky app.<br>If these concepts sound foreign to you, let me attempt to explain things in plain terms. Social networks powered by ATproto are built on composable, modular services that can be independently hosted. To be fully sovereign you need:<br>your own Personal Data Server (PDS), which stores user accounts, posts, likes, follows, profile data and also handles identity and signing keys;<br>a relay, which aggregates messages from PDS instances and makes them available to AppViews as a data stream;<br>an AppView, which indexes data from relays and provides a search engine;<br>a moderation service, which manages labels, blocks and mutes;<br>a PLC (Public Key Infrastructure), which maps usernames to public identities.<br>While self-hosting an ATproto Personal Data Server is now relatively easy and affordable, running the other components requires great resources and technical expertise.<br>W Social has made promises of hosting their users’ data in Europe but they haven’t been forthcoming about their roadmap and whether or not they are relying on Bluesky PBC’s infrastructure for the other services.<br>Thus my surprise when I heard about the migration of such prominent institutional accounts. Had they done due diligence, I wondered?<br>Exclusive: W Social may have quietly become closed-source<br>Then on Saturday I received another tip. Someone wrote to me:<br>W Social have taken down the public repo of their app: https://github.com/w-social-eu. You can still look at the last state from early March in the archive, but right now it's no longer public. That means that the European Commission has factually migrated their data from an open source platform (Bluesky) into a closed source platform (W Social).<br>I immediately checked GitHub as well as Codeberg and other Git platforms and could not find any traces of W Social (even after trying alternate spellings).
a screenshot showing the missing W...