@aral @_elena Please repost my message so that my children can be fed.

@aral @_elena

obviously the techbros have their fascist claws in it already

@aral @_elena

“My fear is that W Social is just another for-profit Big Tech startup that happens to be based in the EU. We don’t need that. We don’t need more European surveillance capitalists and people farmers. We need ethical alternatives working for the common good.”

With a right wing dominate EU Commission we will not get that.

W Social is an antisocial Walled Garden for a
Right wing Peer Group
seemingly seeking to fully controll EU and turn it in to a mimicry of usa under trump.

@aral @_elena Is it even legal for the EU (European Commission, European Central Bank, European Parliament, EU Council, European Committee of the Regions, von der Leyen, Costa, Lagarde, Metsola) to promote a private for-profit at the expense of others (Eurosky, Leafplaza)? Can they go to court and claim damages?

@_elena @aral

“W Social have taken down the public repo of their app: https://github.com/w-social-eu. You can still look at the last state from early March in the archive, but right now it's no longer public. That means that the European Commission has factually migrated their data from an open source platform (Bluesky) into a closed source platform (W Social).”

🙄 They want control. Transparency seems a threat for them. The wrong mindset to start with.

I have this nagging fear that we're really close to a "walled web" coming to full fruition, where people who refuse to verify their identity are just locked out of the web, like with the vaccination pass during the height of the covid pandemic. Trying to browse any site if Cloudflare is down or their captcha service isn't working is probably a good indication of what it's going to be like. Also just trying to access information on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram without an account, or any paywalled news site. I can't really see any other endgame with all of the OS level age verification laws being proposed everywhere and similar discussions going on in the EU and UK, and now the W Social promotion where "verified humans" is the selling point. Protecting the kids from the evils of the internet and you from the bots. Aaaaah, I miss the 90s.

CC: @_elena@mastodon.social

#privacy

@aral @_elena Why don't we ask @hpod16 ? Maybe she can help instead of us here all running around and being all panicky :D

@aral @_elena If Europe can’t get this right, no wonder it feels so hopeless here in Canada expecting our politicians to migrate away from American big tech.

@aral thank you again for your EXCELLENT analysis Aral!

BTW did you see this? 😮

https://mastodon.social/@_elena/116764738020685078