@_elena

Well done for digging into this, it's concerning how many corporations are trying to pretend to be the good guys.

@_elena Già mi puzzava alla frase "Il primo social europeo", perché allora che cazzo sarebbe Mastodon? Algerino?

@_elena

Fantastic work, as always Elena!

Great exposé!

@Ryoma123 gallico

@_elena didn't realise WEF Social was still a thing

@ikuturso

"the only thing Eurosky provides right now is a PDS"

So does W.

@petitcoeur

@_elena anytime you see a privacy policy page with anything more than we don’t collect your data you should run screaming .. and they have a very lengthy privacy policy.

Is this different than eYou ?

@hannes99 @petitcoeur pretty sure W will also launch with at least an app so they've got more (though still far from complete) services to provide instead of relying on Bluesky for even the basics.

@ikuturso @petitcoeur we will see tomorrow

@_elena Thanks for doing all the research and for writing this up!

@_elena

This was great, thanks!

And maybe it's because I'm old, but I would have gladly read a much longer article shining light into the dark corners of W.

@_elena WSocial and Eurosky.Social are not a fork of BlueSky. In fact all of them are AT protocol instances. Which btw. you could also host yourself. Basically very comparable with the many ActivityPub instances. I think we in the Fediverse should keep being fair.

Definitely better at AT protocol is, that you can move your account including your posts. You can even keep your handle if you have an own domain. Something that the Fediverse could do better.

@babetteknauer thank you Babette!

@_elena
This is truly an excellent piece! Thank you for conducting this important research, and for bringing this issue to the attention of the public. This is a very important topic!

And thank you so much for linking to my article

@_elena@mastodon.social

Good article, but I just want to correct one information from a quote you added to the article.

Technically is because setting-up/supporting/maintaining the firehose/relay layer is very expensive. Every single message would flow through there; creating the biggest firehose in Europe is such a power. So, it is easier to be controlled, and very unlikely to be replicated by other entities.

This is very outdated information. Currently, it's very cheap to run an atproto relay ( https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3mfkrfvy3ok2u ), there are multiple of them up and running https://pulsar.feeds.blue/ (both relays and firehoses). So this theory has no foundation. Though it is a centralization point of an app (if the app doesn't allow you to change your relay, because some Bluesky clients allow that) that can be used as an additional moderation point for the app, which can end up in censorship if things go evil (though so far relays only block spam networks).

@_elena@mastodon.social

What can be expensive is the AppView layer (kinda as an API for the app) when you are trying to process all the millions of users from the Bluesky microblog platform. And this layer can also be affected by moderation decisions from the provider.

For now only Blacksky has an AppView alternative as big as Bluesky's. But Eurosky and Northsky both have building an AppView in their roadmaps.

@michaelmathy @_elena why do people say such stupid things?

@_elena @pluralistic Wow, this is surprising. I don’t live in Europe, so I didn’t hear about W Social at all.

@ikuturso @_elena Yes, I hope it will not. The risk is real however, and this is essentially the status quo.

We should recognize how bad things really are. I feel the most danger is that people want to feel hopeful and they close their eyes on how the train tracks are laid down.

@_elena excellent investigation, thank you for putting the work.