W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty(blog.elenarossini.com)
226 points by nemoniac 1 day ago | 143 comments
tl;dr: The European Commission, ECB, and their presidents (von der Leyen and Lagarde) have migrated their ATproto accounts from Bluesky to W Social, a Swedish for-profit Bluesky fork that markets itself as Europe's sovereign alternative to X. Around the same time, W Social quietly removed its public GitHub repository, suggesting it has gone closed-source—contradicting the EU's recently announced open-source push and bypassing Eurosky, a transparent non-profit alternative. Critics note W Social's advisory board includes Big Tech figures tied to PayPal and Sam Altman's Tools for Humanity, raising concerns it's another surveillance-capitalism play dressed up as digital sovereignty.
HN Discussion:
  • W Social has been shady from the start, with weak verification claims and suspicious origins
  • Eurosky is the better transparent alternative being unjustly ignored by press and politicians
  • W Social is effectively an EU Truth Social for politicians wanting platform control
  • W Social's for-profit corporate structure makes it unlikely to succeed as sovereign infrastructure
  • ~European 'digital sovereignty' is just protectionism dressed up in strategic language