ATProto/ActivityPub rivalry notwithstanding, omfg if I were Mastodon today I'd be so angry at this

#WSocial’s advice here is TERRIBLE - deleting your account won’t change a thing. Just now I found the record of a minor (15yo) who was verified by #WIdentity. His account status is now “taken down” but his full name, nationality and approx. date of birth are still visible on W's verification list!

And a follow up question. Who are you? Why are you anonymous?

Under the 1st option only the name is said to be public. You still publish nationality & birth-year date for those users. Nothing in your privacy notice, your TOS or this screen allows that. @ec.europa.eu & @ad4europe.eurosky.social is this the platform you want to endorse, or time for your own PDS?

I did it. I finally migrated to @eurosky.social. Thanks to @support.wsocial.eu for fixing a bug that prevented me from. Big thanks to @liabelle.me and @caesar.dev for staying in touch with me at any time! My reason for the migration from @wsocial.eu to @eurosky.social:

Dear #WSocial verified users, who had your account verified after 16-09-2026: if you are not comfortable with your full name, nationality and approx. age being shared *outside* of W, on the open web, please DO NOT delete your account. You need to file a proper right of deletion request instead #GDPR

W is currently facing a wave of criticism that mixes false accusations, disinformation, distorted facts with legitimate questions. We will publish a detailed memo in due course to address the claims and set out the facts.

We understand that you may prefer not to share your age range and nationality publicly. If so, you can delete your account under Settings → Account → Delete account. You can read more about how it works and the reasoning behind it here: wsocial.eu/profile/wsocial.eu/post/3mxgl…

That is why we are building W. That is also why some special interest don't want us to succeed.

birthDateApprox stores a generated date: 1 January of the birth year, shifted randomly within a 24-month range. The day and month have no connection to your birthday, and even the year may differ. We use it to derive an age range, balancing privacy with context about who is behind the keyboard.

Hi Jan. Thanks for sharing. Do you believe that the average user will understand fully that their full legal name, nationality and in many cases *real* birth dates and email addresses (We can send you DIDs in private) will be published to the open web, where W cannot retain control?

Unfortunately, many Euros I speak to unironically want this, as some sort of "protection from Russian influence", when Russian influence campaigns use domestic influencers, and obtaining residency in the EU is quite easy (Malta)

I understand perfectly well. My questions concern the people behind the flood of content about W since we launched our beta in June. Who are they? Who funds them? What other financial interests might they have? And why is the site anonymous? Those are reasonable questions about transparency.

You know, part of the reason why I’ve been so concerned about the-letter-that-shall-not-be-named is because I was worried about their users being misled or their legal IDs potentially being leaked, but the responses under the ridiculous announcement from the official account suggest I shouldn’t care

This article was written, as to my knowledge, by Sascha Pallenberg. He has an account with EuroSky, not with W Social. If you don’t like the content of his articles, you also need to report this to the Content Moderation Team of EuroSky. I hope this was helpful. Thank you! 👋🏻

even if you're going to do legal identity verification (which sucks!), i don't like that they didn't even attempt to make the user own their own data in their own repo, and make verification only be a record with a strongRef in W's repo. why publish full names and birthdates to W's own repo? wild