European organizations are about to launch their own social media platform, W, amid rising tensions with the United States.
The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be, Danish news media outlet Politiken.dk reports.
I wish Europe would just embrace the fediverse. The techno oligarchs are not your friends and most of them are invested in the US.
It’s kinda sad.
The European Commission even has their own Mastodon instance (https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/), but it seems they can’t get any of the Commission employees or Parliament MPs to use it. It only has 10 accounts and from what I can see, only one “real” active user, Veronica Gaffey the Director-General, for Digital Services (DIGIT), who isn’t even posting on her real account but under the title @EC_DIGIT_director_general
As far as I know none of the EU member countries have their own Mastodon servers and most politicians at least here in Sweden seem to be using either X or (the technically minded “progressives”) Bluesky, while they complain about American Big Tech.
As always with politicians, actions don’t correspond to rhetoric.
Regarding this “W” social media launch though - There’s a post on the CEO’s LinkedIn about a “pre-launch” in Davos, and that links to an German article saying the same thing - but there’s no link to this launched site anywhere. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I hear that the only users of twitter in Denmark are: tech bros, journalists and politicians
And politicians wanna be where the journalists are
There’s actually a project that tracks EU MEP’s and their X activity https://leavex.eu/politicians/
As far as I know none of the EU member countries have their own Mastodon servers and most politicians at least here in Sweden seem to be using either X or (the technically minded “progressives”) Bluesky, while they complain about American Big Tech.
Ireland has Mastadon.ie, it’s not official but it is at least a server there.
There are a bunch of governmental servers for the countries as well - both France, Germany and the Netherlands have one afaik. But they’re in a similar situation - leaders and politicians prefer their accounts hosted on something else.
Ah, thanks I wasn’t aware of those instances. I guess it’s the same old, same old story as always - politicians (in general), even in EU are not really looking to do the “right thing”. They’re looking to do the most populistic thing.
The politicians go where the people are, not the other way around. It sounds weird but I think a social media platform has to be a good place for folk with low tech literacy to post and chat about cute cat videos before it can ever be politically relevant. I’ve yet to come across a fedi client that I think my mom in her 60s could handle/would find appealing, and I kinda think you need something like that for widespread adoption. If you had a fedi client like that and some incentive to sign up like free lotteries run on the eu server for the first few months to catalyze a critical mass of users, I bet you’d have a fighting chance at breaking away from US social media walled gardens
Same here, Europeans should not make the same mistakes. Public discourse should not be in the hand of a private company. No matter if its European, us-American or Asian.
It’s a lot harder to demand your government ID on a federated platform.
This is what’s frustrating me the most.
We have a working infrastructure. It’s open source. Please adopt.
more fedi in europe than usa already. https://fediverse.observer/fediversestats
SWR just made a whitepaper on it, its coming.
dont get me wrong, but the fediverse from techinical perspective sucks ass, idk what fuck the they were cooking with these protocols
Well, it’s not perfect but it’s better than the way federation works on twitter, or X, Bluesky, or — we can probably assume — on W.
The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be
apparently we are now supposed to think that that is a good thing, huh
Not something for general users but, for organisations and public figures, having a platform with only verified entities is valuable.
For general users: Mastodon and the Fediverse.
I am a huge proponent of privacy, anonymity and freedom of information and I also totally support this idea.
A public place where people have to speak as their public selves is useful to have and doesn’t mean other spaces have to be removed. Especially for official communication from public entities, I prefer them to use this than some other sites that are rampant with bots, imposters and the like.
it will kill the project in the cradle
X is no longer a public square
A group of 54 members of the European Parliament called for European alternatives to the dominant social media platforms on Monday.
IIRC the EC actually paid for some of the development of Kbin (now Mbin) with a grant.
[The initiative to create the social media platform W] (https://politiken.dk/nyhedsbreve/mine/nyhedsbrev_politiken_edition/art10698001/Danes-consumption-of-ADHD-medication-sets-new-record) is supported by an advisory board and former ministers and business representatives, primarily from Sweden.
Welp, that URL’s borked.
Hey now. We had W in the early 2000’s. Was just as racist as X. Maybe more.
Why would we want another Twitter? Look at the first one. Screw that. Maybe social media should not exist in that format for a reason.
