European Social Media is already here.

So, people are seeking European Social Media, good! Independence is always something I'll vouch for.

However, "W Social" isn't it. And you don't have to wait for EU Social Media, because as the EU Commission themselves has realized, it's already here.

European Commission (@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu)

3.35K Posts, 7 Following, 146K Followers · News and information from the European Commission. A project to foster our presence in the fediverse and support our commitment to European social media platforms based on open source technology. 🇪🇺 Official Mastodon account as verified by the official EU domain in our server’s address (https://europa.eu).

There it is! THE EU Commission on a European social media site, namely, their own Mastodon instance.

W Social

This is basically trying to be "European X", hyping themselves up as an open and european platform with digital sovereignty in mind. Under the hood, it's all just Bluesky's PDS and Social-App branded with a blue-and-white W logo.

Additionally, they were informed that the @eurosky.social project was already a thing, but ignored it.

In general "W Social" seems like a massive L to me, there's even reports that their staging environment had the "hosting provider" option that Bluesky usually has removed. There's also some hints that they might be connected to the swedish far right, but I haven't seen anything concrete yet.

Actually Good ATProto-based* Alternatives

Or at least, sort of ATProto-based

First up, the aforementioned Eurosky!

Eurosky is a nonprofit-led initative to get European-hosted ATProto infrastructure up and running, starting with PDSs and potentially later following up with more expensive infrastructure like a Relay and an AppView.

Projects like @blackskyweb.xyz have proven in the past that this is possible, too!

And then there's also projects like @wafrn.net , which has native Bluesky integration while also being multi-protocol, also allowing federating over ActivityPub

Both of these are hosted in the EU, and Wafrn is actually the largest, active Microblogging deployment, currently hosted in the EU!

If you check https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/map , you will find another PDS in spain with many more users than ours, but plugging it into PDSls you'll quickly find it's all smoke and mirrors.

So, I want to encourage everyone to try out these platforms and hosts instead of supporting "W Social", if you're interested in ATProto.

But if you don't care about underlying tech being ATProto...

Mastodon! Yes, of course I had to mention it, but with several million users across many many Mastodon instances, and even some government institutions in Europe (like the EU Commission themselves, as well as public broadcasters in Germany), it MUST be mentioned that this German-based Company & NonProfit is already there to serve the need for an EU, sovereign Social Media platform.

It isn't perfect! There is many things to be improved in ActivityPub and especially how we implemented it, issues with federation jank and backfilling, as well as better migration come to mind.

But, it is independent, european social media. There, ya have it.

Funnily enough, someone made https://w-social.eu which you can use to find a Mastodon instance, which parodies the "W Social" homepage.