Why BlueSky 🦋 Needs W Social 🇪🇺 To Succeed

So, unless you have been living under a digital rock or distracted by wannabe dictators demanding ownership of allied lands, you probably missed hearing about a new European social network called W (which was highlighted at the Davos convention).

https://twitter.com/ishaantharoor/status/2013347866840912106?s=61

Currently, there is a working version of W Social online (props to @quillmatiq for posting a link), & W Social is thankfully embracing decentralization by adopting a protocol rather than building yet another siloed social network.

We’ve heard that the initial launch is going to be a fork of the Bluesky social-app (link to open source code on Github) – the main app that the Bluesky team runs and maintains, and that people use on web, iOS, and Android.

By pitching itself as an alternative to X – with potential features around verification and photo ID – this is a “microblogging clone”. Great! One more product option that people can use with their ATProto accounts, picking and choosing between app interfaces, moderation, verification, and features. […]

At last year’s ATmosphere conference, we welcomed Free our Feeds, which blossomed into IndieSky, the EuroSky initiative, and now the Modal Foundation, a Dutch-based foundation that is part of the roadmap of Free our Feeds.

— Via AT Protocol Dev

Room To Breathe‽

Although it is awesome that W Social is embracing the Atmosphere (even if it is via fork), what the Bluesky bros & gals need is another major player in the game, as too many users are still on the flagship site.

According to Are We Decentralized Yet (created by @ricci), the Atmosphere—while technically decentralized—is still primarily running through BlueSky. Compare & contrast that with the Fediverse (based on ActivityPub) which is mostly decentralized).

What the Atmosphere really needs right now is another major player in the game, as right now Bluesky is holding up most of the sky for the Atmosphere (pun intended).

The world (at least the Western nations) might be embracing unstable times in the near future, so relying on centralized social networks for communication is not in the best interests of free-thinking citizens.

If bad actors attempted to subvert the flagship sites of every major Fediverse & Atmosphere site by:

• Flooding the sites with disinformation, co-opting the community
• Knocking sites offline via hack attacks
• Using politics to seize servers & or domains
• Physically attacking the internet cables or building hosting the data for the sites

…the Fediverse overall would be crippled; however, it would survive. Meanwhile, the Atmosphere—although technically decentralized—would be crushed.

Decentralization helps mitigate threats from bad actors and reduces the risk of attack. Hopefully W Social succeeds, as having multiple decentralized platforms running concurrently is a better for everyone (at least in the long term).

@BrennpunktUA they have a fork of the Bsky social-app client codebase, and from what it looks like they're still using the Bsky AppView in the backend. That said, their users are on their own PDSes, which is the most important aspect of data ownership for users.

AppViews take time to build, and most new projects start with Bsky's client to get an easy jumpstart to test features out.

@darnell @ricci

@BrennpunktUA@mastodon.social @darnell @quillmatiq yeah I actually find this fact fairly positive.

Still not clear to me how serious or likely to succeed they are, but this is actually a good way to start

@BrennpunktUA it's not a 1-1, but this almost akin to someone starting their Mastodon instance with the default Mastodon codebase, then customizing it from there. Everyone starts somewhere!

@darnell @ricci