Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are…

So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that ­– cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is).

Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social.

That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.)

The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…)

So @_elena calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹):

mu.social/profile/elenarossini…

Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger:

> “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial…)

Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in.

These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want.

🤡🤡🤡

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity.

> “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³

But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it.

Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control?

And if so, why can’t they even get that right?

Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead.

Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them.

So, yeah, how’s your Monday going?

¹ e.g., mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116770333…, etc.

² aseachange.com/@elena/statuses…

³ blog.elenarossini.com/the-unto… (from the YouTube video that they since deleted. Nice transparency there, clowns.)

⁴ Run this script in Node 18+ to reproduce the numbers from their PDS yourself: codeberg.org/aral/gists/src/br… Also see blog.elenarossini.com/w-social… and blog.elenarossini.com/w-social…

#WSocial #EU #sovereignty #socialMedia #socialNetworking #mastodon #fediverse #activityPub #ATProto #startups #EUCommission

W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data

W Social's tagline is "Trust Your Feed" but the company's landing page displays inflated engagement metrics - a misrepresentation that contradicts its own promise.

^{Elena Rossini}

Aral Balkan

2026-06-18 09:11:20

Needless to say, do not sign up for W or give them your ID information no matter how simple they eventually manage to make it.

You simply don’t need to.

You’re already in a far superior – non-corporate, federated – space.

Do not sign up for W. And warn your friends.

The only time you have any power to stop this is now. If they succeed in gaining network effects, you will be as powerless to stop them as you are with X.

And yes, they’re just another venture capital funded surveillance capitalist, people farmer, and burgeoning Nazi Bar. They just happen to be based in the EU. (As Nazi Bars traditionally have been.)

#WSocial #NoWNoX #surveillance #capitalism #BigTech #VC @_elena mastodon.social/@_elena/116770…

RE: mastodon.social/@_elena/116929…

Installed #yunohost yesterday on my Proxmox home server to fiddle around and was about to deploy #GoToSocial. But this "Danger" Box in the docs, saying the domain will be taken forever by this instance of GTS scares me. Or is this the case for every #ActivityPub Server anyway?

I thought, only the full handle like "@user@social.domain.net" can be problematic when being refused because of caching and generated keys. Any experience with that? docs.gotosocial.org/en/v0.22.0…

#selfhosting

Elena Rossini 🌈

2026-07-16 11:52:18

Working on a brand new post for my series "a newbie's guide to self-hosting with #YunoHost" - showing people how to set up their own #GoToSocial microblogging instance.

Sorry it's been taking a while: I started over when I realized most people use subdomains... and I'm doing a thorough step-by-step explainer that any newbie could follow - I hope 😅

The whole series is available here:

🔗 : blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbie…

#SelfHosting #MySoCalledSudoLife #blog

A newbie's guide to self-hosting with YunoHost

Here is a 5-part guide about how to get started self-hosting essential internet services with the YunoHost system

^{Elena Rossini}