Vysogota (@petko.me)

W Social? More Of An L, Actually **Disclaimer** : This article is based on my personal opinion of things I have found that are freely available on the internet and linked where relevant, it’s also based on my personal experience with the W Social app, the platform’s onboarding process and my 25+ years as a web developer. Your experience may vary and you should do your own research on the platform Back in the days when I was on _Threads.net_ I saw a post saying that a new “European” social media platform was dropping and you could pre-register for it. I think it was around late January/early February that I put my name down on the waiting list and then promptly forgot that the platform existed. Fast forward 5 months later and I get an email telling me that I am in a small and exclusive early access group can now sign up to the site. One problem – you need a passport or National ID. “ _Well, here we go_ ” I thought to myself. As someone who is ardently against forcing people into the realms of digital ID (which reminds me, I must cover that!) I was a bit worried about having to divulge my government name and date of birth — both of which I try to keep away from online spaces for obvious reasons. The app assured me though that all photos were kept locally on my phone and would not be sent into the digital ether so I figured I was safe(ish). On to the first hurdle – the need for ID. ## ID Requirements Are An Unjust Burden On The User I was asked to provide a passport in order to have my account “verified in minutes”. The problem? I have no idea where I have put my passport. It’s not in its usual “safe place” and I don’t know where it’s gone. Also, the UK doesn’t (yet) have a National ID card (and when one is introduced it’ll be digital meaning this whole current process will break) but I do have a driving licence and the app said I could use that — great! Or maybe not. I scanned my driving licence into the “W Identity App”, took an awful selfie and then took another awful selfie of me holding up my licence. But here’s the issue with this — because I wasn’t using a passport my account had to be “manually verified”. What does that mean? No idea, it’s not explained and it’s certainly not in keeping with the platform’s on-device verification — it can’t be, can it? So I sat there waiting for verification and was told I could leave the app and come back later. Which I did and was thrown back in to the verification system again, so I went through the process for a second time and got to the “processing screen” and I was thrown back to the start of the verification process _again_! Now once is a hiccup, twice? That’s not a feature, its a bug. I decided to leave it and see what a new day would bring so I closed out of the app which, as the verification process is allegedly **on my device** should shut down the this process, right? I mean the app isn’t running, it can’t verify anything or access my photos if it’s not in device memory. And yet 14 hours later it would appear I was verified(ish). So does that mean my drivers licence and photos were offloaded from my device to a server for someone to physically check? Because that wasn’t explained to me, I didn’t expressly agree to that and the whole process seems shady (and broken) as heck. And what would happen if I didn’t have a UK driving Licence? As I said I can’t find my passport and the UK doesn’t have a national ID so I wouldn’t be able to register unless I could meet someone **in person** for them to verify my identity! I don’t know about you but that is the shittest verification process I have ever come across. I get that you don’t want bots on the platform but you’re also discounting a large portion of people who don’t have IDs! What happens when you open access to the US? Only around half of the population has a valid passport[1]Legal Clarity: How Many US Citizens Have Passports: Stats & Trends and despite Trump’s best efforts the country doesn’t have a full on Reich-style ID card system in place. ## When Verification Doesn’t Mean Verified When I got notice that I was now verified I hopped on to the website to change my display name, photo and write a quick bio and welcome post — that’s the first thing everyone does on a new platform, right? Well not me apparently! Here’s what happens when I simply try to change my profile picture. What’s that? _Another_ verification loop? As a developer (who actually coded and ran my own social media platform before social media platforms were even really mainstream), this is **RIDICULOUS**. I am guessing that they only properly checked onboarding with passports (because everyone has one of those, right?) and using anything else knackers the system. Hardly the warm welcome I was expecting from Europe’s first open and transparent social media network. ## When First Isn’t First _W Social_ has made much of the fact that the platform is a European alternative to _Twitter_ (still not calling it _X_) and that they’re the first to do this. What _W Social_ _is_ the first to do is have a media presence that allows them to crow about being the first (more on that later), and just because you say it multiple times doesn’t make it true. _Mastodon_ allows you to select the instance your account is hosted on so you can choose one in Europe if you want, and _Eurosky_ is a European non-profit federated platform (more on that later too) with all of their servers based in Europe. While _BlueSky_ will host your account on one of their PDS (Personal Data Servers)[2]Bluesky: PDS Entryway in America (which makes sense as it’s an American company), if you’re not happy with that you can easily migrate your _BlueSky_ account to _Eurosky_ ‘s European based servers[3]Eurosky: One Account. Dozens of Apps. Open to Everyone. So for _W Social_ to say it’s the “first” or “only” EU-based social media platform, is misleading at best and deliberately hiding the truth at worst. ## When Your Platform Isn’t Yours _W Social_ has also made much of the European credentials of the platform. Except the underlying code isn’t European. It’s based on an open-sourced fork of _Bluesky_ which created the _ATProto_ backbone this all works on. What this means is that the developers of _Bluesky_ have made the underlying code that runs their platform free to access for literally anyone. Yes, _anyone_! All you have to do is visit the Bluesky-Social Github repository[4]Github: Bluesky-Social and you can download the code and host it yourself. Of course, it’s a bit more technically involved than that but if you have the time and patience you too could host your own _Bluesky_ instance. And in keeping with the nature of open-source, _W Social_ had their code on a publicly accessible github repo too[5]WayBackMachine Capture: showing the W Social ATProto repo present in Github, until it was deleted which is rather a strange thing to happen to an open-source based project[6]Current W Social Github Repo showing ATProto has been removed. Now, we could argue that they had to remove the _W Social_ github repo to hide the the code that runs their verification system. Except that is a completely separate entity from the _W Social_ platform — it’s a standalone app that “talks” to the _W Social_ instance. And all you would have to do is keep that part of your site out of the github repo so for it to be nuked is suspicious to say the least and hiding the platform’s origins at worst. Again, more smoke and mirrors. ## When Your Users Aren’t Even Yours Either As I mentioned earlier _Bluesky_ , _Eurosky_ and _Mastodon_ are what’s known as “federated” platforms. But what does “federated” mean? Essentially (and not to get too much into the technical aspects of it which is outside the scope of this opinion piece) a federated platform means that you, the user, owns your data. This means all of your posts and followers are tied to _you_ , they’re not embedded on the platform you’re currently using. So basically I can post on _Bluesky_ and have users on _Mastodon_ , _Eurosky_ , _W_ and (to a certain extent) _Threads_ see the same post and interact with it on the platform they are happy with. And if you’re not happy with a platform you can migrate your content and your followers over to a new one and they’ll still see your posts as if nothing has changed. _Editor’s Note_ : I’ve mentioned _Threads_ here and while you can post to the fediverse (the name of the combined federated platforms), it’s unclear about migrating accounts and moving followers due to the way it’s so integrated with Instagram. I’d class _Threads_ as federated-lite as opposed to a fully federated platform. So anyone can move to _W Social_ and not have to start from scratch in terms of followers, but this also means it’s very easy for users to leave too — especially if the platform isn’t working as expected, or doesn’t take off as the founders hope. ## When Grassroots Isn’t Grassroots _W Social_ CEO, Anna Zeiter, claims that she decided that Europe needed to separate itself from US Tech giants after US Vice President JD Vance railed against Europe, called us Europeans backwards and claimed that our free speech is being stomped on[7]IL Foglio Europeo: Inside W, the European social network where “being human” matters. This sounds lovely, doesn’t it? One woman standing up against US Tech Bros by banding together a small group of likeminded people to rally together and build something with European values at the core. Except as we’ve seen it’s not European code at the core, it’s straight out of Seattle, Washington in the United States![8]Wikipedia: ATProto[9]Wikipedia: Bluesky Social PBC. But don’t let minor things like that keep you down, right! And then there’s the massive reach _W Social_ seemed to get out of nowhere. No, in order to really prove your grassroots credentials, why not launch it at the World Economic Forum in Davos — a closed-door event where membership can cost anywhere over $60,000 up to an eyewatering $620,000[10]Market Realist: Only the World’s Top Political and Business Figures Can Attend Davos? And it how about starting with the backing of a for-profit media platform — _We Don’t Have Time_ — as your largest investor, and while you’re at it why not make their founder your chairman as well[11]We Don’t Have Time: About Us? The media’s reporting didn’t cover this financial backing (now numbering around 15 different Nordic-located investors according to some sources). Instead they leaned into the “European” nature of the platform, heavily implying (with some outright saying) that the platform had financial backing from the European Commission i.e. EU Taxpayers (which it didn’t) and as far as I can tell, no one affiliated with _W Social_ did much to assuage this misrepresentation. Again, the platform’s roots are not as grassy-looking as they would like you to believe. So if they’re hiding the fact they’re based on a pre-existing **American** platform, haven’t divulged that the majority of the publicity they’re getting is from _We Don’t Have Time_ ‘s platforms (which owns 27% of _W Social_[12]We Don’t Have Time: Annual Report 2025 (PDF)) — a _media_ company, and how the idea even came about the question becomes: what else are they hiding? ## Profit Over Privacy After digging about on the internet for a bit to see what information I could find on _W Social_ and it’s origins (and to see if anyone else was experiencing the same verification bugs I was), I came across a series of enlightening posts by Elena Rossini — the unofficial font of knowledge on all things _W Social_. I highly recommend you head over and view her series of posts covering the platform which pointed me in the direction of some of the information contained here. As part of her own research, Rossini found a rather telling quote she assigns to Anna Zeiter, allegedly made at the Monaco AI Conference 2026 which suggests that the company wouldn’t be above allowing [13]European AI companies to train on _W Social_ ‘s user data – for a fee of course! Now you’ll note that I used the words “allegedly and “suggest” because unfortunately we only have Elena’s word for this as the video has been scrubbed from the internet which is not suspicious in the slightest, right? So as well as the possibility that _W Social_ will make revenue from allowing AI Bots to scrape your data, despite being a platform that is based on verified humans that **bans** AI Bots (pot, kettle, black methinks), they’re also going to run adverts. This is nothing new, they state that these ads are going to be context based rather than personalised[14]Pathfounders: Will W be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s social media dominance? but that’s probably more to do with tightening EU regulations around targeted advertising rather than being altruistic and pro-user. Context-based ads show you an advert based on the surrounding content, rather than your personal interactions with content on the site (or off the site like Meta does). So that sounds great, right? More privacy to you! Well, no. Because what _W Social_ might be looking to implement is exclusive paywalled content[15]Pathfounders: Will W be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s social media dominance? — so much for a free and open platform, right? And not only that, they may even track what you’re reading and how much of it you read in order to entice publishers to the platform[16]Pathfounders: Will W be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s social media dominance? , they’ll then pay publishers based on the amount of content consumed, down to how much of an article you read! Again, not very user-centric privacy focused, right? Also, remember when Elon Musk changed how payments on _Twitter_ worked so if you had a post pop-off you’d get more money because of the adds attached to your viral hit? What did that do to the platform? Caused a surge in rage bait/click bait posts that actively encouraged people to spread misinformation because they’d get a bigger payout[17]Marketplace Tech: How content creators profit from rage-baiting. Hardly the best business model to follow. ## Open But Not Open, Private But Not Private – _W Social_ Has Failed Before It’s Started I can understand the reasons behind people building _W Social_ — _Twitter_ still has too much say in our consumption of content. Here in the UK, the majority of the Government’s communications are done through _Twitter_. For some reason they refuse to move from there over to _Threads_ , _Mastodon_ or _Bluesky_ even though they can cross-post — maybe someone needs to explain Buffer and Hubspot to them. Do I think they’ll move or even post on _W Social_? No. To be honest with you, I don’t see the point or the need in the _W Social_ platform with the _Twitter_ /_Meta_ alternatives we already have simpler access to. While the _W Social_ experiment could be considered noble by some, I am just personally seeing it as a cash-grab by a few people looking to leverage their existing connections and social clout in order to make a bit more money while diluting people from existing sites like _Bluesky_. Add in to that the barriers to entry for people who don’t have easy access to accepted ID, don’t want to share their ID with goodness knows who (I am regretting my choice now), or can’t even do the most basic things on the platform due to their own self-inflicted bugs thanks to a broken verification system and you have a recipe for disaster. _W Social_ will be tumbleweeds once the initial excitement has waned, the exclusivity bump they got by making the waitlist or onboarding small numbers at a time failed to help _Bluesky_ — in fact it actively hindered their early expansion and market share growth[18]TechCrunch: Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative Bluesky hits the App Store as an invite-only app[19]Fast Company: Everyone wants to leave X. So why aren’t they on Bluesky?. So what now? I have a nice _W Social_ handle, and that’s about it. You can see my profile here, although there’s not much to look at as I can’t do anything with it thanks to the verification glitch. But then I have my own personalised _Bluesky_ handle that **_I_** control (follow me — I post hot takes on Trump’s Truth Social posts and random gifs, you’ll love it!) so a fancy, short _W Social_ handle doesn’t really mean much to me. The lack of transparency is also concerning — hiding the _We Don’t Have Time_ connection (or not making it overly obvious) is a bit of a red flag for me, as is not outright denying the alleged European Commission connection when it first started makes me question the actual integrity and reasons behind this organisation’s existence. This lack of transparency (despite whatever values the company claims to have) coupled with the muddied and contradictory stories about how the idea of the platform’s existence came to be is also very strange to me. _Bluesky_ is also immeasurably faster than _W Social_ despite _W_ using servers based in Sweden so should be fast for me here in England but it’s as slow as molasses. Sure, they kept their promise to keep the code hosted in the EU, but what does that matter if it’s slow and clunky — even with no one using the site? I also have a nice little niche over on _Bluesky_ with random Star Trek and movie friends as well as those with political hot takes (hello if you’re reading this!) and while I could move them over with me to _W Social_ , why should I? I see no incentive to do so. It was a nice experiment, but I think it’s dead on arrival. I’ll keep my handle though — maybe I can sell it in a few years to some famous “Katy”😆 #### Reference: How I found Server Locations In the interest of transparency here is how I verified the server locations of the _Bluesky_ and _W Social_ Instances I am on. Firstly, I checked where my Server Endpoint was for both services Here’s _Bluesky_(personally identifiable data redacted but you can find it if you really want to — that’s the nature of the Fediverse): So here we can see the serviceEndpoint (where I land when I access my account) is lionsmane.us-east.host.bsky.network. We then take the serviceEndpoint address and do a lookup to see what the IP Address of the server I’m on (think of the IP address as the home address of the server that links the domain name — lionsmane.us-east.host.bsky.network — to the actual physical machine it’s sitting on). So here we have the “home address” of the server where my _Bluesky_ data is held. We can then look up the IP Address and see the physical location of the server: So from this we can see my _Bluesky_ account is held on a server in Virginia. And if we do the same with my _W Social_ account? I post this here not to dox or cause issues, this is public information available to anyone. This is being included to show that I have done my due diligence and researched claims made by _W Social_ regarding server locations and to verify that my _Bluesky_ data wasn’t being held in a EU-based data centre. Katy Whitton Katy is the editor-in-chief of FlippingHeck.com a blog about Self-Improvement, Productivity and Small Business Tips. When she’s not working, she enjoys gaming, making music and Reviewing Things. www.katywhitton.co.uk #### Can You Support Katy's Work? If you are able to, it would be great if you could make a donation. Your donations will go towards covering hosting costs as well as enabling me to continue my research and provide explainers to everyone. #### Stay Up To Date If you'd like to know when a new article is published, please follow Politically Inclined on Threads, BlueSky or Mastadon. #### References[+] References ↑1 | Legal Clarity: How Many US Citizens Have Passports: Stats & Trends ---|--- ↑2 | Bluesky: PDS Entryway ↑3 | Eurosky: One Account. Dozens of Apps. Open to Everyone ↑4 | Github: Bluesky-Social ↑5 | WayBackMachine Capture: showing the W Social ATProto repo present in Github ↑6 | Current W Social Github Repo showing ATProto has been removed ↑7 | IL Foglio Europeo: Inside W, the European social network where “being human” matters ↑8 | Wikipedia: ATProto ↑9 | Wikipedia: Bluesky Social PBC ↑10 | Market Realist: Only the World’s Top Political and Business Figures Can Attend Davos ↑11 | We Don’t Have Time: About Us ↑12 | We Don’t Have Time: Annual Report 2025 (PDF) ↑13 | European AI companies to train on _W Social_ ‘s user data ↑14 | Pathfounders: Will W be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s social media dominance? ↑15 | Pathfounders: Will W be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s social media dominance? ↑16 | Pathfounders: Will W be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s social media dominance? ↑17 | Marketplace Tech: How content creators profit from rage-baiting ↑18 | TechCrunch: Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative Bluesky hits the App Store as an invite-only app ↑19 | Fast Company: Everyone wants to leave X. So why aren’t they on Bluesky? The short URL of the present article is: https://www.politicallyinclined.net/o28r https://www.politicallyinclined.net/w-social-more-of-an-l-actually/