Good morning Fedi friends.

elena@aseachange.com

Is anybody curious about how the #WSocial experiment is going?

You know, the private, for profit "European answer to X" endorsed by the European Commission, which is a fork of Bluesky and has quietly gone closed-source before its beta launch (à la #TruthSocial)?

I've got numbers for you!

Nearly two months in, W Social has almost the same number of accounts as #Eurosky... You know, the European fork of Bluesky that does NOT require government IDs to post.

W Social: 23.5k accounts
Eurosky: 24.8k accounts

In order to post on W Social you need to provide your government ID and go through a 13-step verification process. So far 4.5k accounts are verified but only 2036 (as of this morning) have ever published a single post or reply.

There is a handy website - https://pdsls.dev - that allows you to monitor the "firehose" of any ATproto-powered PDS.

Inspired by @pallenberg and his awesome videos (example: https://mu.social/profile/palle.eurosky.social/post/3mskkqrrc522l) I have been comparing the live activities of the two networks.

The difference is SHOCKING.

W Social is largely a zombie, dormant network, with a high number of accounts that do not interact. Eurosky by contrast shows very lively activity.

The screenshot I grabbed yesterday shows a side-by-side comparison of their firehose over a 27 minute period.

W Social had a total of 240 events (follows, likes, posts...) whereas Eurosky registered 7596 events in the same time interval.

A couple of days ago I downloaded their PDS and saw that 67,8% of their accounts have 0 follows, 0 followers and 0 posts. That's what I mean when I call it a "zombie network."

W Social's CEO says they plan to start monetizing by introducing ads in 2027.

WITH THESE NUMBERS?!?

Sure Jan.

I love how with the transparency of open data you can't really use the standard playbook of CEO hype and hubris. Because we can all see their numbers. And they are BAAAAD.

I have been feeling very strong second hand embarrassment for the European Commission and especially Ursula von der Leyen - who went so far as to publicize the W launch in between G7 meetings in June. I wonder how they feel about it... and if they are even aware of how badly the network is doing right now.

I suspect the network can be on life support for a year or two but things aren't looking good.

Thought you should know!

For my series of articles about W Social, check out: https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-social/ I may have another one coming in the fall...