Notes on W Social

To organize my thoughts on W Social:

I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that they’re for-profit and closed-source. That isn’t an issue in itself (in my opinion); it did bother me that taking back ad revenue from the US comes across as their top priority based on their public launch in Brussels the other day, but that would just be a reason for me to avoid them personally.

I think it’s good that they’ve made no effort to hide that they’re for-profit. The having-been-open-source-and-then-quietly-going-closed-source thing is not a good look, though, especially when they’re based directly on other people’s open-source work.

The emphasis on ad revenue and their having an algorithm that prioritizes their users does make me worried that it’ll just be Twitter/X all over again, just with the money flowing toward Europe rather than the US.

It does however seem problematic that the European Commission has chosen to move multiple official accounts there. They’re advertising—or appear to be advertising—for a for-profit company (e.g., that Instagram Stories video posted by Ursula von der Leyen), and they’re going against their own declared support for open-source projects when the option exists, one that was recommended by their own research center, even.

I am of course talking about Eurosky, who think that the EU should actually be running their own PDS, which I agree would make the most sense. Surely it’s possible if they’re already running their own Mastodon instance.

I would say that this bullet point is the European Commission’s problem and not W Social’s, but unfortunately I think it helps increase negative sentiments regarding W Social itself.

The security concerns present the biggest red flag of all. Because they’re requiring identity verification, it’s inevitable that they’re facing extra scrutiny regarding their security, and things really do not look good at all so far.

I also get the impression that most of the people involved (with the presumable exception of the devs in Ukraine) don’t really understand how ATProto works at all. As in, even less than I do, and I’m definitely not an expert of any kind. It’s obviously understandable that the average user won’t necessarily know how it works, but you should at least know the basics if you’re responsible for “a new social media platform” (or an app/service of any kind that’s open to other people) on ATProto.

Because they don’t seem to understand how ATProto works, they probably also don’t understand that their main claims are self-contradictory. They can’t guarantee that they’ve verified every account that a W Social user will see if they’re also seeing content from the rest of ATProto. If they limit the posts to ones from verified accounts on W Social, they can’t truthfully say that they’re interoperable with the rest of ATProto.

The lack of understanding makes the whole thing look like a cash grab with no real interest in their users’ experience. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong.

They’re making other ostensibly false claims that make me feel suspicious of their motives in general. Again, maybe they’re lying, maybe it’s just because they don’t know what they’re doing.

They say that W Social and W Identity are completely separate entities, but W Social AB owns W Identity AB’s domain; both are registered under We Don’t Have Time AB’s address; both have the same CEO (Anna Zeiter) and the same board chair (Ingmar Rentzhog). Maybe the parts that matter are kept separate, but because of the lack of transparency, we have to make assumptions based on limited public information.

They show Mayor Sadiq Khan’s account @london.gov.uk on their promotional website, but it isn’t even on W Social (yet). Maybe the account is scheduled to be moved to W Social at some point, but they shouldn’t show the account on the website until it’s at least on their PDS. Based on the Greta Thunberg incident, Ingmar Rentzhog does not have a good track record for this kind of thing.

They’re also showing inflated numbers on the promotional website. Maybe it’s a bug, maybe it’s another lie. I spot-checked one post myself; as of 10:43 PM on June 23 in Japan, it has 69 replies, 4 reposts, and 65 likes on the promotional website, whereas the real post has 3 replies, 6 reposts (including 1 quote post), and 71 likes.

EDIT: More info here.

View post on Bluesky

I’m not sure whether the following numbers come from W Social, but I’m also not sure where else they would get them. I was leaning toward giving them the benefit of the doubt until I learned about the inflated reply count on the posts on the promo website.

They’ve been reported to have 50,000 or 55,000 users (published on June 17 and 19), but there were only about 1,300 accounts on their PDS as of June 19. Either they’re counting their waitlist as current users or are leaving room for misinterpretation to that effect. This seems particularly dishonest when I’m seeing multiple users who signed up for the waitlist before they learned that they have to submit their passports and are having second thoughts.

One of the sources (a podcast by EUobserver) also reported the parent company’s investors as the number of investors that W Social’s CEO Anna Zeiter was able to bring in.

Sources

Quit* W Social (by あ) — Semble

W Social and the European Commission (by あ) — Semble

I have an incomplete draft for a proper blog post about this in Japanese sitting in Mochott, but I haven’t decided whether to publish it or not. I’ve seen a few users mentioning W Social in Japanese, but not all that many, so maybe it’s better left obscure.

Additional notes (June 24)

I forgot to add that they’re much less clear than, say, Eurosky about how much of their tech actually is in Europe, with the promotional website only saying that their PDS is in Europe, but they just created a new FAQ page that has clarifications on the more technical points, including how much of their infrastructure is still in development and currently rely on Bluesky. It’s all in one long paragraph (for that page) and not the easiest thing to read, but it’s one step in the right direction.