W

I have decided that W Social will probably do more good than harm.

OMG What Now

W Social is a new European social network based on the AT Protocol. It was announced earlier this year, and quickly gathered support from some famous names. Most prominent among those was European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Elena Rossini has a very detailed examination here. I have to put a content warning on that. I gotta love Elena Rossini. But her articles on this may appear to an outside reader a little bit “this dickhead took my parking spot – a six hour exposé”. So that may or may not hold your interest. To be fair, there is some real dickheadotry to report here.

Anyway. W-Social’s pitch is all about Digital Sovereignty, open source, no algorithm, no tracking, and taking back social media from the American megacorps. All of which is profoundly irritating to long-term Fediverse or ATmosphere fans, who were trying to make that same pitch.

As opposed to genuine open-source decentralised networks, W Social seems to be an old-school social media startup with a play based on capturing and locking in a huge market through hypergrowth from day one. The kind of thing that would be tedious in 2014, and today looks like a company that’ll mail you DVDs so that you don’t have to drive to the video store. They have venture capital behind them, a secretive attitude, they exist more as a powerpoint deck than something you can actually use (you can “join the waitlist”), and they launched at Davos, of all places.

And they have a secret ingredient. They will verify the identity of every user. Just send them your national identity card, and you’ll have an account in no time. This appears to be the hook that’s snared European politicians. Various European institutions are moving over en masse.

Identity

So this is already horrifying. We’re trying to face down misguided attempts from all quarters to card the entire Internet, with the EC being a prominent antagonist. Many of us had hoped that talk of “digital sovereignty” would lead to EU governments embracing the open source approach. Instead they appear to be taking the opposite tack, a closed-source privately-run centrally-controlled walled garden under the political control of EU bureaucrats.

Perhaps this was inevitable though. I very much do believe that identity is at the core of everything that’s wrong with the Internet. EU leaders are smart enough to notice the same thing. They just came to different conclusions.

On my other blog, I laid out these principles for designing an acceptable identity system:

1. Individual people must be permitted to have multiple identities. Without this, the digital world becomes stifling and constraining – and for many people, dangerous.
2. An identity must originate from an individual making a conscious choice. When society creates an identity for you, that is always disempowering.
3. Bad behaviour from an identity must impose a significant cost on the real individual behind it.
4. No-one must ever be permanently excluded from participating online.

Handing over your ID card to use the Internet violates every one of these principles. But the goals are the same. I’m sure the EC would love to make it illegal to use any alternative to their ID-card-based system. But as long as they fail in that goal, such alternatives can only benefit from the comparison to the failing EC system. And the EC usually fails at its goals.

Eurosky

I started this blog because I was so passionate about the Fediverse. I knew I had a lot to rant about, and I needed a safe place to dump it all.

Bluesky came along and pissed in that pool. They built an entirely different, competing protocol, designed explicitly to support the Twitter model. That is, fast pace, instant reactions, a minimum of thoughtful reflection, quick takes rather than detailed examination. The result is really a rather complicated system, difficult to set up and run as an independent operator, and entirely incompatible with the diverse network of Fediverse sites. But because of their deep connections to influential people, they managed to steal the limelight. Today the ATmosphere, heavily concentrated around Bluesky, is an order of magnitude larger than the Fediverse.

The concentration is particularly galling, since decentralisation was claimed to be the explicit goal of the Bluesky network. But what they meant by that is, multiple large commercial providers. The goal was never for hobbyist or community instances to be viable. They just hoped that the commercial market would be big enough to support multiple players.

There are noble attempts to realise the decentralisation dream that Bluesky never seriously tried to address. Prominent among these is Eurosky. Their pitch is that they are a new European social network based on the AT protocol, that respects Digital Sovereignty, open source, no algorithm, no tracking, and taking back social media from the American megacorps. They’ve been developing their ideas in the open, consulting their community, carefully building out their ideas piece by piece, and following a principle of under-promise, over-deliver. So it’s a kick in the teeth to have a commercial enterprise steal that pitch with a half-assed website launched at Davos.

Since that’s what the whole ATmosphere is to the Fediverse, I have limited sympathy for Eurosky. Not zero sympathy. But there’s an element of schadenfreude mixed in there.

Evolution

Despite the valid complaints about the centralisation of the ATmosphere, it is at least decentralised enough that Bluesky would suffer a massive backlash if they attempted to switch off federation. And that backlash would be more than just waving placards. The Fediverse is right there for anyone who considers decentralisation to be important, and Bluesky has a much smaller moat of switching costs for their users to cross.

If the system is permanently federated in the first place, it is an easily-solved problem to forward posts between the ATmosphere and any other federated network. Bridgy Fed exists entirely to make that process smooth, but the principle doesn’t depend solely on them.

The nature of the Fediverse is more wild and sprawling than the ATmosphere. While setting up a PDS, perhaps using Wafrn, isn’t that hard technically, this is only a fraction of the components you need for a fully sovereign alternative to Bluesky. Whereas every Fediverse node is free-standing. Given the Fediverse’s flexibility, it is natural to expect the more outlandish and terrible ideas to migrate to there, while the ATmosphere is dominated by sites like W Social that walk the well-trodden path.

This is why I expect the long-term outcome to be that the ATmosphere is effectively a high-performance enclave embedded within the wider Fediverse. Perhaps most Bluesky users never see a post from the Fediverse. But their own posts will tend to leak out. And at the edges, the networks will mix and become indistinguishable.

Strategy

So the likely outcome is that W Social is more-or-less successful. It attracts the subset of European Internet users who are too impatient to wait for the evening news in order to hear what Ursula von der Leyen has to say. And there are enough of those to fund the enterprise.

Those users may or may not engage with the wider ATmosphere, let alone the Fediverse. However, many of those people will sooner or later bump into the concept of federation – not something the EC is likely to keep under wraps. They will discover, and appreciate, the option of talking to people on other social networks. And that is the seed of an idea.

Meanwhile, we get to see what happens when a social network takes identity verification seriously. Do you want to run that experiment? I don’t. But W Social does. I believe the outcome will be pretty bad. I’m not sure about that though. What I am sure of, is that this will provide useful data for the rest of us to mull over.

Future

In contrast to the standard Silicon Valley playbook of growth at all costs, I am a fan of organic growth. I’m sick of having solutions imposed on the whole world at once. The Fediverse ought to be the best choice at the micro level. The biggest thing holding it back is the outlandishness of the idea of federation in the first place.

W Social is a terrible idea and I want nothing to do with it. But if it didn’t exist, there would only be Facebook and Twitter to fill that space. Neither of those presents any credible hope for the future of social media. W Social plausibly could be a gateway to something better.

And does it make me sad that Ursula von der Leyen chose someone else’s network instead of mine? Uh… maybe a bit?