[2 media attachments] Another day, another opportunity to roast #WSocial. Grab your 🍿 W Social had been hyping up the live broadcast of Ursula von der Leyen's State of the Union address for weeks. "Watch it on W!" (You'd think they had an exclusive). Nah, it was also shown live on YouTube and X and other places. The funniest thing is that co-founder Ingmar Rentzhog bragged in the live chat: "we are doing our best. The boradcast (sic) is truly Made in Europe." You'd think they had built their own live streaming service. Think again: they used stream.place by Eli Mallon, an ATproto developer based in Seattle. Last time I checked, Seattle is in Washington state? U.S.A.? W, the social network of European digital sovereignty! So I put Rentzhog on the spot and he became all defensive: 🔗 : https://mu.social/profile/elenarossini.com/post/3mvmmu5gua225 But it gets better! W Social had been bragging that only verified W users could comment in the live chat. Yesterday I found out that people with a blue checkmark by Bluesky could also comment. And I have one! It all went by really fast... At the end of the event I made sure to credit Eli Mallon and stream.place for powering the live stream. If W Social wouldn't do it, well, I would. I find it incredible that their modus operandi is to exploit open source infrastructure, giving the impression they built everything from scratch, without ever crediting anyone. #LSocial = Leech Social. The open social web is a highly collaborative space and it pains me to see the parasitic behavior of certain players who just take, take, take without ever giving anything back. The @EUCommission was in the live chat. Von der Leyen took time out from G7 meetings in June to publicize the W Social launch. I strongly believe they picked the wrong platform, which is openwashing and sovereignwashing. I typically do not tag the EC Mastodon account in posts about W, but this time it's important. (Apologies in advance to their social med…
Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ (@elena@aseachange.com)
[1 media attachment] #WSocial state of the network - September 15th, 2026 There is a lot of misinformation regarding W Social and how active/successful it is. So, from time to time, I'd love to share some numbers. The beauty of #opendata! The network endorsed by the #EuropeanCommission may be the darling of Brussels political circles and European media organizations (who simply rehash PR talking points). But the look behind the curtain is really troubling. As @pallenberg often says, this network is #DOA (dead on arrival). A social media graveyard, or rather, a simple moribund database. There is no way that Zeiter, Rentzhog & co. can start monetizing it in 2027. Numbers from this morning at 10:30am: - Accounts on their PDS: 37,531 - Users with verified ID: 7,492 - Users with 1+ post: 3,388 - Users who have never posted: 34,143 - Users with 0 posts and who follow 0 accounts: 26,444 - % of users with 0 posts, who follow 0 accounts: 70,4% - % of users who have never posted: 90,97% So, whenever you hear someone hyping it up, feel free to forward this post or point people to my articles at https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-social/ The one thing I will give W credit for though is how good they are at lobbying and hyping up their image. While this playbook may have worked in the past, not anymore. On an open network, with open data, it's child's play to expose misrepresentations and show the real, raw data. sources: pdsls.dev, clearsky.app, atproto.at and the csv of their full PDS that I download daily 💁♀️
Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)
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: https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-uncovered-the-reality-behind-the-hype/ #OpenWashing
Reigniting the Party: Lessons from a Stalled Migration to Bluesky
@stream.place's video on Streamplace
Episode #140: Eli Mallon - Streamplace and the future of decentralized video streaming
This week we're joined by Eli Mallon, founder of Streamplace, a decentralized video streaming platform. In this episode we discuss the future of decentralized video streaming, the challenges of building a new platform, and how developers can leverage Streamplace's tools. We also go into Atproto, the decentralized social media network that stream place is built on. - https://stream.place/about - https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/04/beyond-bluesky-these-are-the-apps-building-social-experiences-on-the-at-protocol - https://github.com/iameli - https://www.linkedin.com/in/eli-mallon-5703a94a - https://bsky.app/profile/iame.li - https://www.livepeer.org/ Episode sponsored By WorkOS (https://workos.com) and Mailtrap (https://l.rw.rw/devtools_2) Become a paid subscriber our patreon, spotify, or apple podcasts for the full episode. - https://www.patreon.com/devtoolsfm - https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/devtoolsfm/subscribe - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/devtools-fm/id1566647758 - https://www.youtube.com/@devtoolsfm/membership
W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty | Hacker News
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?
Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image This was definitely NOT on my bingo card for this year: European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen taking a moment between G7 meetings to promote the launch of the closed-source, for-profit network #WSocial. 🔗 : https://web.archive.org/web/20260617083436/https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rentzhog_kind-of-cool-to-see-ursula-von-der-leyen-ugcPost-7472769475885461504-hwct/ I fear this may be a harbinger of things to come: MANDATORY AGE VERIFICATION for social media across Europe. I hope I'm wrong on this. #privacy #SurveillanceCapitalism #EUBigTech
What is ‘W,’ Europe’s attempt to replace Elon Musk’s X?
The Swedish-based “W” platform” is the latest in a series of new social media sites vying to replace US Big Tech companies.
W — Trust your feed
We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.
W — Trust your feed
We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.
W — Trust your feed
We believe in the need for a global, trusted social media platform owned, run, and hosted in Europe. W is built on verified human users, transparency, privacy, and free speech.
Building resilient social media
Next week I’ll be in Berlin, speaking at a Franco-German “Summit on European Digital Sovereignty” satellite event to help launch…
Aral Balkan (@aral@mastodon.ar.al)
Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are… So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that – cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is). Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social. That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.) The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…) So @_elena@mastodon.social calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹): https://mu.social/profile/elenarossini.com/post/3mqob7shxks2t Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger: > “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z) Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in. These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want. 🤡🤡🤡 Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity. > “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³ But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it. Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control? And if so, why can’t they even get that right? Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead. Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them. So, yeah, how’s your Monday going? ¹ e.g., https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116770333053823108, etc. ² https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTECDMT2 ³ https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/ (from the YouTube video that they since deleted. Nice transparency there, clowns.) ⁴ Run this script in Node 18+ to reproduce the numbers from their PDS yourself: https://codeberg.org/aral/gists/src/branch/main/wsocial-pds-stats.js Also see https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ and https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/ #WSocial #EU #sovereignty #socialMedia #socialNetworking #mastodon #fediverse #activityPub #ATProto #startups #EUCommission
comment published just now, you can't make this stuff up 🤡 dear @ingmar.wsocial.eu, I wish you would credit @iame.li and @stream.place for powering your livestream. Eli is based in Seattle, which, last time I checked, is in the U.S. (and he's so great!) #WLive #SOTEU #SOTEU2026
Streamplace is honored to be powering @wsocial.eu's broadcast of @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu's State of the European Union this Wednesday, Sep 16. The broadcast will be available at live.wsocial.eu and stream.place/ec.europa.eu starting at 8am CEST. Streamplace was built for exactly this moment.
Tried to sign in via @stream.place, but cannot understand if the access I am giving is to Steamplace or WSocial, so have decided to watch the State of the Union live on the actual website of the EU commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/state-uni…
Streamplace
Streamplace is honored to be powering @wsocial.eu's broadcast of @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu's State of the European Union this Wednesday, Sep 16. The broadcast will be available at live.wsocial.eu and stream.place/ec.europa.eu starting at 8am CEST. Streamplace was built for exactly this moment.
