Looks like W is being built on ATProto.
Doing a pure EU PDS is great; hopefully they do a Webview too, so that moderation and trust and safety aren’t at the behest of US Bsky.
That’s something that may cause some grief in Europe. Moderation in ATproto is opt-in. You don’t have to subscribe to a US moderation service or any moderation service. One will probably want someone to filter spam, harassment, or content that one finds objectionable. But moderation according to EU regulations is about removing content that other people don’t want you to see. I’m not sure if that’s going to be super popular.
For non-believers in that format of social media, is ATProto good or bad?
The basic building block of the Fediverse is the instance, right? Every instance is its own self-contained, centralized social media service that optionally interacts with other instances. EG Trump’s Truth Social is a Mastodon instance that does not federate.
ATProto takes a more radical approach. Everything is modular. There is no instance or anything that is complete in itself. It’s more like the WWW. You can make websites in different ways. These are made findable through search engines like Google or Bing, which are not affiliated with companies offering web hosting.
ATProto takes everything apart. It tries to avoid choke points or lock-in as far as possible to thwart monopolies. You have a server that stores your data (posts, etc …), called a PDS. You can move your data to a different server. An identity provider tells others where your account is at any moment. A relay collects all the posts that people make and makes them available for further processing. This can be used to create algorithmic feeds, or moderation (aka labelling). These things are independent of each other and can be independently offered by different parties. You can pick and chose which to use, though there isn’t a whole lot of choice yet.
ETA: No idea what W wants to offer in that regard.
Thanks for taking the time to explain.
Follow-up question : doesn’t ATProto run into the same issue as Bluesky for example, where even though the protocol allows for decentralization, the vast majority of users are on the same servers, thus negating the pros of decentralization?
I feel like this would be the case here where one server will contain all the modules.
The company Bluesky Social PBC created the microblogging service Bluesky and the ATProtocol. It’s like the company Mastodon created the microblogging service Mastodon. There are other services built on ATproto that are EG like Reddit/Lemmy. But these have not taken off significantly.
The ecosystem is mature enough so that you can participate in Bluesky without using services offered by Bluesky Social PBC and without making sacrifices. For the most part, you can move without abandoning your account.
It is true that the servers are mostly run by the Bluesky company, but so what? Email is mostly run by Google and no one seems to think that’s a problem.
More and more people are moving away from tech giants because of their shitty behaviour. So I think it is important to note how the data is used and stored, thus my follow-up question.
Thanks for the detailed response.
how the data is used and stored
That’s a tricky one and will potentially cause a lot of problems to open social media in Europe. Just know that there is no such thing as “looking” at a post, comment, or profile. It gets downloaded to your device and stored for as long as it’s needed, or maybe longer.
I understand that. Just like Lemmy where all the instances that are federated have a copy of the posts and comments you make.
However, you have the option to create your own instance and federate or not with any community you want.
If there is one mega instance, deferating from it effectively kills the social media. Thus my train of thoughts.
More and more people are moving away from tech giants because of their shitty behaviour. So I think it is important to note how the data is used and stored, thus my follow-up question.
Thanks for the detailed response.
Bluesky itself is behind ATProto
Make of that what you will
I didn’t know that.
So, my main takeaway is that ATProto basically splits user authentication and content storage and feed algorithm? Like, these are 3 separate things?
You can have your own authentication server at home that basically just says that you are you (similar to a cryptographic identity), then you can store your content on google cloud and then use a 3rd-party feed algorithm?
The option to self-host your identity piggybacks on the DNS-system. A certain domain name resolves to the server where you store your ATProto identity. As long as you control the domain name, you control your identity. The ATProto identity is simply a pointer to where you currently store your data that your followers/contacts can use to find your content (IIRC).
The non-selfhosted alternative is a central identity service run by Bluesky. Unfortunately, the identity cannot be moved for obvious reasons. It would be good if there were some more options there. In principle, if the ATProto identity was tied to the government identity, that would make it moveable and non-hijackable. For some people, celebrities and such, that would be a good option.
Regardless of whether you selfhost your identity, you can selfhost a Personal Data Server (PDS), which stores your data and makes it available to the network. The PDS can move, cause that’s what the identity is for.
Feeds and other stuff is again independent.
thank you. that’s indeed fascinating to contemplate about.
Uh, Mastodon exists?
I’m assuming they want to compete with X/Twitter.
If they built out a Mastodon network with government support, then it would.
… 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”.
Then it sounds more like they want to be the European next Bluesky.
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.
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.
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.
They named themselves W but those draconian ID requirements are an L
Spyware disguised as a “social media platform”, hard pass.
I know Europe might seem like a country of you’re illiterate, but um it isn’t. W is a Swedish company with a dumb idea at the core of its app
Oh sorry, I forgot Sweden is in Africa. Or that referring to an app as European implies that Europe is a country. Luckily there are still people like you to educate us all /s
cough cough Mastodon.
@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu
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.
This just looks like a Simpsons episode… but I don’t remember which one.
We are?
Hold my hand and let’s say yes together.
Nah , pub is better ,talking to real persons
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.
Y’all will enjoy this: https://w-social.eu/
Should’ve named it Y or Z. You know, like +1…
Should just have said it stands for Wordfeud, which would be commical.
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.
