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.
I wish Europe would just embrace the fediverse. The techno oligarchs are not your friends and most of them are invested in the US.
dont get me wrong, but the fediverse from techinical perspective sucks ass, idk what fuck the they were cooking with these protocols
It’s a lot harder to demand your government ID on a federated platform.
This is what’s frustrating me the most.
We have a working infrastructure. It’s open source. Please adopt.
I am somewhat-cynically wondering if the optimal political strategy is to sit on Twitter (which has more European voters to see one’s actions) and loudly complain about a lack of Twitter alternatives (which probably scores points with European voters) than to actually use a Twitter alternative.
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)/¯
Ireland has Mastadon.ie, it’s not official but it is at least a server there.
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.
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.
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
I hear that the only users of twitter in Denmark are: tech bros, journalists and politicians
And politicians wanna be where the journalists are
There’s actually a project that tracks EU MEP’s and their X activity https://leavex.eu/politicians/
Same here, Europeans should not make the same mistakes. Public discourse should not be in the hand of a private company. No matter if its European, us-American or Asian.