Stephen Downes

The tagline says it well: "this is "an article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up." Leaving aside internal European politics, it's worth noting that W Social was launched at Davos with a lot of fanfare (while Eurosky, the European Bluesky instance, set up a side event, and Mastodon, also based in Europe, went unmentioned). There's a lot more in the article, but as Elena Rossini says, "W Social is set to launch tomorrow May 9th on Europe Day. As it happened when it was first announced in January, it is likely to receive a lot of uncritical, superficial press coverage. Please exercise critical thinking and try to look at the reality behind its hype." (p.s. I'm stealing the 'written by a human' image from this page :) ).