- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
Y’all will enjoy this: https://w-social.eu/
If it’s not federated then it’s not a good thing.
Anna Zeiter, CEO of W
Oh goodie. Useful idiots need scumbags profiting off of their stupidity to get onboard.
This just looks like a Simpsons episode… but I don’t remember which one.
will require identification and photo validation
With all the privacy issues in the past few years, it’s “dead on arrival” as they say.
Yup. It will fail spectacularly.
Too bad cuz it could have legit beaten Xitter.
If distributing child pornography can’t get people off Xitter, nothing will.
It will probably fail silently, if it doesn’t pick up enough momentum. * Sad failed platform noises *
W formerly known as useless garbage nobody asked for.
Any for-profit company will have to comply with this, unfortunately.
But none of them ever asked me for a photo or ID.
Are you in the EU?
Yes of course.
Uh, Mastodon exists?
I’m assuming they want to compete with X/Twitter.
… so you don’t think Mastodon is a worthy competitor?
How about Bluesky?
I like Mastodon but it can’t compete with X. The lack of discoverability is non-starter for many. Its greatest benefits are also its biggest barriers to mainstream appeal.
Bluesky says it’s decentralized, but at the end of the day it’s an American company.
They just aren’t the right tools for this particular job. What this “W social” wants to be is “European Twitter”.
The lack of discoverability is non-starter for many.
The Fediverse significantly lacks behind on the Content Discoverability technology.
I guess this is because there was a loud public outcry in the last 20 years that whoever makes your feed (this is called an “recommendation algorithm” or abbreviated “the algorithm”) has a lot of political power to decide what you see and what you don’t see, and that’s frowned upon. Because everybody that has power over what you see and what you don’t see is bad. That is why nobody wanted to provide an recommendation algorithm for the fediverse, because they would expose themselves to wild accusations. There should be an open-source recommendation algorithm, though; I’m sure of it.
the “lack of discoverability” is the only reason we’re talking about this problem in the first place. algorithms have utterly fucked the world and if no one stops them we’re beyond fucked so the fact that someone thinks it’s bad and is unwilling to try using a platform you need to curate your own content on (like reddit before it went to shit) is just people willingly stepping into the lions mouth.
Then it sounds more like they want to be the European next Bluesky.
what in particular do you mean by lack of discoverability?
like, i want to see posts from communities that i already subscribed to, but because there’s more than 1000 communities on the fediverse and i’m only subscribed to a small countable subset of them, i inevitably lose out on a lot of content. (The “all” feed sucks unfortunately). So how to solve this?
Well, parent poster was talking about Mastodon, you seem to be talking about threadiverse platforms like Lemmy. One thing that applies to both and every single platform that is large enough for that to happen is that you’re always going to lose out on a lot of the content because there is just too much content for one person to look at. It isn’t actually that difficult to subscribe so much that you get past that point in my experience.
For the Mastodon-type fediverse microblogging platforms there’s some things that can help when trying to sift through the more popular stuff more (and less) similarly to how an algorithmic timeline would do it. Boost bots that track what’s trending and tools like Phanpy that allow you to check out what has been boosted the most in your recent timeline. There’s also starter packs (currently a fedidevs third party feature but will be added to Mastodon in the future too) and Sharkey antennas that let you watch for keywords over all the posts that flow through your instance. When it comes to things that aren’t here yet but are being worked on Fediscovery seems very promising.
Maybe some of that stuff should exist for Lemmy etc. too or maybe the “all” feed could be improved.
If they built out a Mastodon network with government support, then it would.
will require identification and photo validation
Straight from the book “How to kill your app before launch”, page 1.
data privacy at its core
Looks like they haven’t seen the obvious conflict with requiring id + photo, unless they plan on manually review every application.
After reading the article, it sounds like they’re just making yet another xitter clone with the hopes that govt figures will use it. Govts could just spin their own mastodon or similars for a similar effect.
After reading the article, it sounds like they’re just making yet another xitter clone with the hopes that govt figures will use it.
Nothing puts me off more than advocating for a new product or set of technology without reasonably comparing it to already-existing technology. They should dedicate a section of their homepage to an explanation what’s the difference between their system and Mastodon.
Yup. Nothing and I say nothing makes a service less secure for privacy than requiring your ID and photo. That data will get leaked. It always does.
Most of EU countries has some sort of electronic identification system (in Italy SPID and CIE). You can simply ask to validate against it when creating an account and then you are good. You are verified and there is no dato to be leaked aside the data you decide to put into the system.
Considering the amount of bots and trolls everywhere I can see a certain appeal on an app that requires an id verification to be honest.
There needs to be high-quality discussion about how to make sure that users of social media platforms are humans instead of bots, but it needs to be a discussion happening in the open and not behind closed doors.
Right now, the approach is to not talk about it and assume that verification can only happen via photo. It could also be done in different ways, such as using a QR code that you get at a supermarket; or by only allowing 1 user account per physical device (which would make bot accounts expensive). There’s lots of possible ways and none of them are discussed.
But if they’re doing it half-assed as most services (send photo of passport, take a selfie), it won’t be a challenge for AI to generate random IDs and a matching avatar for photo/video verification. The only way this could work is if they’d verify your ID by reading the NFC chip inside the passport or ID card.
True. I’d be up for that, but honestly more for a real social network for friends and family, like Facebook once was, than for a debate forum like Twitter. That demand could maybe endure that it would remain a friends only network…
They figured it out. They damn well know they are going to spy on everyone with this.
to ensure that its users are […] who they claim to be
I dont’t want that either. Maybe for verified accounts this makes sense, but not for the average shitposter.
I hate X, but good luck with this:
The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be,
Europeans will absolutely not fight back on it and will comply willingly with zero hesitation, unfortunately
Lol, what? Nobody will use this.
deleted by creator
Spyware disguised as a “social media platform”, hard pass.
cough cough Mastodon.
deleted by creator
https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission
It has over 3k posts and 145k followers. Mastodon posts don’t federate to lemmy unless they tag a lemmy community
I stand corrected. Thank you.
If you don’t delete your comment next time, others can see what stands corrected ;-)
Clicking the original link shows 0 subscribers and 0 posts on a two year old community.
The shit some people will go to to avoid an open platform.
Isn’t this just some random company trying to cash in a little from controversy surrounding Xitter?
Yes, and stupid people are going to lap it up.
They named themselves W but those draconian ID requirements are an L
There is no future in social media unless it’s decentralized. Gonna assume this is dead on arrival.
You didn’t read the text? It says decentralized.
I have little faith that means what you think it means.

I am staying on mastodon for the micro blogging, not interested in centralized shit. Also, recommander systems are a plague.













