Dear Fedi friends,

It may be time for a re-introduction: I'm Elena, an Italian creative (writer, photographer, filmmaker) living in Paris, France.

You may have initially gotten to know me for my advocacy for the Fediverse (like my Fedi intro video: https://blog.elenarossini.com/fediverse-video/ or my blog or my Fediverse stock photo). So, you may have been a bit confused lately, over all my critical posts about the new network W Social. Why do I keep bringing it up?

I believe that W Social - and its required, companion app W Identity - are an existential threat to the Fediverse. So I'm fighting tooth and nail to oppose and resist them.

Why? The European Commission has enthusiastically embraced this new hard fork of Bluesky that requires age verification. Even Ursula von der Leyen advertised the launch of W Social in between G7 meetings last week.

I have MOUNTAINS of evidence of poor planning, extremely lax security, use of U.S. Big Tech platforms for something that purports to be "based in Europe, for the world."

Why is it a threat for the Fediverse? The only way to make sense of the European Commission's embrace of this platform is that maybe it sees it as a trial run for MANDATORY age verification for social media across the European Union.

No Fediverse app has infrastructure in place to comply. And if a mandate is introduced, it would spell the end of the open social web and internet anonymity... like Chat Control, but basically killing the Fediverse.

I find it EXTREMELY disturbing to see the enthusiastic embrace of W Social by the European Commission. It took them YEARS to change their website footer and add Mastodon and Bluesky instead of X. In the span of 5 weeks, they replaced the Bluesky logo (a butterfly) with the "W" from W Social.

All my posts about W Social from last week went viral. My articles have been quoted in articles in French, Dutch and German news sites (https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-social/).

I have held back from sharing more evidence I found because I don't want to appear like a bully who promotes pile-ons. I'm a nice, sweet person, I promise! I take ZERO pleasure in writing about W Social, but I have unwittingly become an expert on them - after researching them for 5 months. So here I am.

I will keep investigating them. If you don't want to hear about this topic anymore - I would understand - you can mute the hashtags #Wsocial and #DubyaSocial (that's a pretty apt way to describe them IMHO).

Peace out.

#introduction #reintroduction