I just refreshed the #WSocial website and it's showing a MAJOR redesign... with a label at the top stating "built on the open AT-protocol."

This is the first time ever they acknowledge this – I know, as I've been visiting their website for MONTHS and also never heard about this in any interviews. So the claims in my exposé stand (the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine would confirm this).

Of note: they changed their URL from wsocial.eu to wsocial.news

BTW thanks for all your feedback ️

@_elena still no mention of Mastodon or the Fediverse, LOL. That .news TLD really brings back to memory that failed attempt to capture the Xodus and the short-lived post.news experiment (shut down in 2024)

Post News, the a16z-funded Twitter alternative, is shutting down | TechCrunch

Post was backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and tech commentator, but the platform never disclosed how much it raised.

TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

Taking bets on how long W will last!

@_elena on LinkedIn I asked if it would speak activitypub. No answer yet after 2 days. That's bad for a hot launch...

@_elena that’s better. I still think the thing will fail. I also highly suspect it is vibe-coded, at the very least the website front-end is.

@meneer they are based on a different protocol... Bluesky's ATproto, so it's normal they won't implement ActivityPub. Remains to be seen if BridgyFed can be enabled for their accounts

@_elena AT Proto ? sad

@_elena Their website is so laggy on mobile. High quality engineering

@_elena @jwildeboer High time we all start to follow that account

@_elena

I didn't pay attention to Davos so I missed it. To many rich people high-giving each other for being rich.

Thank you for digging into what is going on behind the scenes. Are the investors just more techbros, just European?

@_elena

And sadly, https://w-social.eu doesn't exist any more ;(

@_elena

Félicitations, Elena Bly* Rossini.

(* Nellie Bly, trailblazing female figure in investigative journalism.)

@_elena yes, I noticed the (probably only temporary) redirect to wsocial.news, too. They must have set it only today in the afternoon, as confirms https://web.archive.org/web/20260506062956/https://wsocial.eu/public/signup, too.

More things I noticed:

1) they advertise with random Bluesky posts as one from Annalena Baerbock, also the "topic chart" refers to Bluesky, while some very first WSocial server posts exist.

2) they explicitly advertise an article about W Social from the now pro-Russian, far-right German newspaper "Berliner Zeitung".

@_elena

3) they indeed list the (current!) German Federal Government's Data Protection Commissioner Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider as part of their team - that's shady AF.

@mpb they didn’t receive any public money - it’s all private funding