Hacker News

Not marketers, lobbyists

The marketers or the so far unnamed private investors.

Mastodon is too secure and private for them.

The company is "W Social AB", meaning "aktiebolag" which in Swedish is what you in the USA would call an LLC or "joint stock company.

So they are 100% looking to monetize and turn a profit.

I wouldn't call it shady, but closed source, for-profit sounds accurate.

> The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network?

This is so stupid. It’s really like truth social. Having a private company with closed source pretending to be open and sovereign (whatever that means), adding ID verification by scanning your passport, it’s like.. gasoline for conspiracy theories. They’re so incredibly tone deaf. It’s like being back in the early 2000s when the older generation didn’t understand the internet. But it’s 2026…

Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like. That would at least serve some value. You can’t have both the social part and the control of the narrative.

Saw that interview, too. Biggest red flag to me was the claim, that they would use the mandatory id-document only to initially verify your'e not a bot - then discard it and they would "not store anything". Very hard to believe.

Indeed a very odd sight between WC matches. I don't normally watch much TV, but I think this warrants further investigation and inquiry.

No mention of long-term stake of EU in ActivityPub platforms either, as if W would be our savior.

Public broadcasters in .de and .at have generally become very shady. To me it seems they dont have to pretend to do good journalism anymore, because they are financed by a mandatory fee per household anyway. It started to be very visible during COVID times. Unfortunately, since then, it only got worse.

And probably stuffed with tax money. As usual.

Are you alluding to the association of "W" with George W Bush?

Not sure that's really a thing outside the USA. And as far as I heard that reference, it was always pronunced "Dubya" not "Double-You"

Yeah, based on the people and organizations moving there, RedSky would be more appropriate.

it's actually a double-v as in "the vvitch"

Its about restricting replies to sycophants.

Given how bad X was as a company/product name, basing your own company name off that certainly seems like an interesting choice. X at least has the fact it's rebranded Twitter bringing in attention.

we need a Y social that's just a static website encouraging us to go outside.

It will serve it's primary purpose of separating criticism from direct association with EU politicians posts. They also hate community notes.

This thread is the first time I've even heard of "W Social" so I have no specific insight into their naming, but I'd assume it comes from (gaming/lifestyle) streaming culture where "chatters" will often say "W <thing>" (good, win) or "L <thing>" (bad, lose) as short-form feedback on how they feel about <thing>.

Note that “instance” is Mastodon-brained and is a wrong way to think about atproto. The correct parallel is RSS / Google Reader.

Atproto has two types of things: hosting and apps.

- Hosting is like RSS. You can host your data on your own server and broadcast from it. It’s just an open source Docker container.

- Apps are like Google Reader. They aggregate from all hosts and usually build an index so they can show a rich view over the network. That’s what Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, etc, so.

So there is no “instance”. There’s hosting and there’s apps.

In addition to Eurosky there's also Blacksky, Northsky, and Anisota. Plus dozens of other non-microblogging apps. AT is growing pretty quickly now.

EU had more money than China yet shipped fewer dominant software platforms

On the other hand, the currently overwhelmingly dominant Bluesky app and infrastructure can control what users see, presenting a centralized chokepoint. It’s nice to own your data but if your social circle uses a single centralized app to view it, shrug.

> Which decentralised instance?

any of them

all of them

I suspect they didn't actually make many changes at all. Their product is literally a rebranded version of Bluesky, to the point the original test login didn't even change the background image or text.

> Call me when the Fediverse has a search function that actually fucking works.

Actually that's a feature. If search doesn't work, there is less incentive for bots polluting others people searches.

On the other hand, search works so bad than even connecting to people you know on other networks is painful.

I have entirely different experiences and I haven't seen much hating — but having read this, perhaps indeed mastodon isn't for you :-)

ATProto is centralized.

And what is that experience of yours? Do you have experience from deployments with many independent atproto data servers and relays federating together?

Or do you have experience from bluesky, meaning you're only interacting with one central server and none of the complexities of federation come into play?

No, not necessarily. Mastodon is actually "social media", as opposed to twitter/X, bluewhatever, facebook, or any other commercial outlet, to be honest, all of these have become "feeds" of promoted content designed to maximize "engagement".

Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.

You’re posting that on HN. I consider HN to be social media but lacking the most pernicious features (ads, algorithmic feeds) and benefitting from both strong moderation and self-policing. But it gets to do that by being funded from extrinsic sources, which is itself a compromise.

If they filter you at the relay or appview level that doesn't work.

I am quite happy with people I follow on Mastodon. Sure, various politicians might not be there, but those are not people I want to hear from.

The rest of your comment seems to be pure speculation, so.

How can you know there's nobody worth following on Mastodon?

> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.

So? I don't use social media to receive curated, hourly dispatches from Barack Obama or Taylor Swift (or, more likely, their account managers). And it might feel important to get the latest rage bait and memes from Elon - it's almost like being friends with the world's first trillionaire - but is it really a good use of your time?

I think a healthier way to use social media is to have two-way interactions with some reasonably stable social circle; less about "people who matter" and more about "people who matter to you". Mastodon certainly has the critical mass to make this possible.

I could name so many projects or people. The Rust language? KDE? Comics like War and Peas, or David Revoy's works? Hackers like Foone, Mara Bos? Technology Connections!

Countless cute kitten pics. Minimal hate or bigotry in my feed. Don't have to log in. Don't even have to sign up. Finite scroll on the homepage.

Terry Tao, Bert Hubert, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), Bunny Huang are just a few in my feed. But Mastodon is more about peer-to-peer communication than celebrities farming engagement indeed.

No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH

Threads is just another node that connects to ActivityPub, there is no "road" to enshittification.

Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.

I, for one, want to choose for myself whether to block other instances or not. You seem to not tolerate this opinion.

A "main instance" is contrary to the whole idea of a Fediverse anyway.

> Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.

This obviously is total nonsense.

Tell me you don't understand the point of Mastodon without telling me you don't understand the point of Mastodon.