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Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W (cybernews.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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European organizations are about to launch their own social media platform, W, amid rising tensions with the United States.

The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be, Danish news media outlet Politiken.dk reports.

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[–] 44 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

It's kinda sad.

The European Commission even has their own Mastodon instance (https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/), but it seems they can't get any of the Commission employees or Parliament MPs to use it. It only has 10 accounts and from what I can see, only one "real" active user, Veronica Gaffey the Director-General, for Digital Services (DIGIT), who isn't even posting on her real account but under the title @EC_DIGIT_director_general

As far as I know none of the EU member countries have their own Mastodon servers and most politicians at least here in Sweden seem to be using either X or (the technically minded "progressives") Bluesky, while they complain about American Big Tech.

As always with politicians, actions don't correspond to rhetoric.

Regarding this "W" social media launch though - There's a post on the CEO's LinkedIn about a "pre-launch" in Davos, and that links to an German article saying the same thing - but there's no link to this launched site anywhere. ¯\(ツ)/¯

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    There are a bunch of governmental servers for the countries as well - both France, Germany and the Netherlands have one afaik. But they're in a similar situation - leaders and politicians prefer their accounts hosted on something else.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Ah, thanks I wasn't aware of those instances. I guess it's the same old, same old story as always - politicians (in general), even in EU are not really looking to do the "right thing". They're looking to do the most populistic thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    The politicians go where the people are, not the other way around. It sounds weird but I think a social media platform has to be a good place for folk with low tech literacy to post and chat about cute cat videos before it can ever be politically relevant. I've yet to come across a fedi client that I think my mom in her 60s could handle/would find appealing, and I kinda think you need something like that for widespread adoption. If you had a fedi client like that and some incentive to sign up like free lotteries run on the eu server for the first few months to catalyze a critical mass of users, I bet you'd have a fighting chance at breaking away from US social media walled gardens

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    As far as I know none of the EU member countries have their own Mastodon servers and most politicians at least here in Sweden seem to be using either X or (the technically minded “progressives”) Bluesky, while they complain about American Big Tech.

    Ireland has Mastadon.ie, it's not official but it is at least a server there.

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