@_elena @mpb true, they instead pay the German Federal Data Protection Commissioner

@chewie @_elena VERY SAD!

@_elena wondering how do they expect people to pronounce it... If it's supposed to be "double-you-social", it's a bit of a silly choice for something supposedly made for a very linguistically diverse community...

@_elena Seems like your exposé triggered this change of mind.
Powerful woman

@juergen nah, W Social was just a Bluesky instance in the beginning (several users tested it), but the moment you beginn to alter the code and to implement ID verification, it becomes less interoperable and a fork.

@_elena

@hannes99 No, it will not become less interoperable, they change the way you can create an account: It will need ID verification. Even if it is a fork does not mean it is less interoperable. Same as with ActivityPub, there are many independent Projects and also bunch of forks of those projects. Still you can communicate between all of them.
As long as WSocial or Eurosky supports AT Protocol, they can communicate.
As I said, we should keep being fair.

@_elena

@stragu ha! This is a brilliant point, I hadn’t even thought about it

@fablog ha! I don’t think it was me but glad they are being more transparent about it

@juergen but you can't freely move your account anymore, contrary to what you stated before. W Social wants to limit anonymity and free social media on their own platform at the one hand, but grant access to Bluesky posts on the other, to become more relevant.

@_elena

@hannes99 Let’s wait how this evolves. Seems you have a glassball that I don’t have.

@_elena

@hannes99 And btw. also in the Fediverse you cannot move freely. Every instance has it’s own rules to allow registration. Some allow direct registration, others need to manually approve or even do not allow new members at all. That’s all fine, isn’t it?

Same for federation, look how different the block lists on Fediverse instances are. You really need to take care before you register with a new instance.

Stay fair!

@juergen wenn du deinen Account von einer Platform ohne ID-Check zu einer mit ID-Check frei umziehen könntest, wäre der ID-Check nichtig

@juergen I got it. You advocate for W.

@_elena there's also https://europetalking.wsocial.news/, maybe only since today.

@stragu @_elena
I'd been wondering which language to 'hear' the name in ...

@hannes99 did you see this @leavex ? seems a ripoff of your work https://europetalking.wsocial.news

@hannes99 @_elena I think it's some kind of an advisory board that they've tried to fill to the brim with influential government connected people so not really on the payroll probably but it could still be a conflict of interest

@_elena it's pretty interesting they still really want to avoid saying "Bluesky" and only say "AT-proto".

Almost every other project goes as far as including "sky" in their name and repeatedly mentions Bluesky because that's the thing some people might know at this point so it's good marketing...

Except if you're trying to present yourself as the new European social platform that replaces the US ones such as Bluesky I guess.

@ikuturso yes, because her role is to protect privacy – and ID checks are quite the opposite of that. But even if she worked for Mastodon, that would still be a conflict of interests, imho.

@_elena

@alpacamale you mean Monnett?