I Do Not Accept Your TOS

A new social media platform for Europe was announced this week at Davos. The open social community was... not impressed.

Quite unimpressed.

I understand the frustration. I feel it myself. People have been working on the problems W claims to address for years, thanklessly. Many of us doing so see little funding to support these efforts. Seeing an new entrant walz in with seemingly yet another closed platform feels like a slap in the face. Closed platforms are not the way! I'm done with platforms! Replacing one platform with another does nothing to address the root problems with modern social media. Putting the server in Europe does not change power dynamics. It doesn't give users more freedom or ownership. It would be effectively social-web greenwashing.

Would be.

I don't know W's brand strategy. I don't know their moderation strategy. I don't know why they are pursuing ID verification. Their mission is sound though. It's why the @eurosky.social initiative was created, to establish social media infrastructure in Europe for Europeans. It is a concern of European sovereignty to not be subject to the US and the whims of its tech giants.

And yet, the announcement of W made no mention of Eurosky, Mastodon, AT Protocol, or any other efforts for better social media. It erases the years of development in open social products, especially the once which were made and are operated in Europe. Take a look at W's landing page. It literally draws a circle around Europe, declaring there are no social apps from Europe.

Then came the plot twist.

The observant folks at @atprotocol.dev , namely @knowtheory.net , noticed that W might not be a closed platform after all. Screenshots of their demo reveal familiar handles from the ATmosphere. You can find those screenshots in the post linked above. I won't include them here as they are not confirmed and we have better evidence to look at. Further investigation revealed the W Social staging site running a live deployment of a fork of the Bluesky client.

Bluesky

That's a live service running on the wsocial.eu domain. That can't be faked. But wait, there's more! The W Social PDS was also discovered.

So it appears W is launching with a fork of Bluesky's social-app client and account hosting on their own PDS. Supposedly, access to hosting on their PDS is contingent on the user verifying their European government ID.

Why W mentioned none of this in their announcement is beyond me. Again, I know nothing about their strategy. However, now that we know what we are working with, let's get into what this means for social media at large and the ATmosphere ecosystem.

W is a good sign

A funded competitor to Bluesky, participating in AT Proto, is fantastic news. They were able to sell their vision to investors. They evaluated the technologies on the market and chose the AT Protocol. The fact that all this happened without the community even hearing about it means that all this effort is working. The ATmosphere needs to grow to succeed. More players in the space is good. It represents providing more people with more choice.

Usually when choosing between social platforms, you have to make tradeoffs. One platform might have more people you want to engage. The other might have more respectful moderation policies that you care about. In the ATmosphere, you don't have to make a tradeoff. You can use the service which has better moderation and still reach the accounts you want, even if they host their account somewhere else and agreed to some other TOS than you.

You don't have to like their policies

W Social's policies are significantly different from others both in the ATmosphere and beyond. Several of those policies will be popular with their target demographic. Some of them might be unpopular. Personally, I think requiring identification is antithetical to user safety and free speech.

But this is the beauty of open protocols.

Everything posted on W will be visible in other Bluesky apps. Bluesky, Blacksky, Anisota, Witchsky. We don't know yet what the W Social app will ingest from the rest of the network. The important thing is, you don't have to choose W to interact with W accounts. You will be able to like, mention, reply to W posts from within your ATmosphere client of choice. W users will also be free to utilize any other client or app they wish, not just wsocial.eu. W social accounts will be able to use other apps like Leaflet, Tangled, Flashes, Skylight, Popfeed, and more. Accounts created on the W Social PDS will be free to move to another account host whenever they like.

W will launch as a fully functional and active social app, bootstrapped by the ATmosphere.

If W's rules are your nightmare, good. Someone else will like them, and now they have a place to go in the social web. When interoperation is the default, more diversity of products expands the addressable market.

So put down the pitchforks. Let's welcome the W team into the fold. I hope to see them at AtmosphereConf 2026 .