W Social uncovered: the reality behind the hype

Interesting post on WSocial's announcement and its aftermath: "The contrast between the media hype and the reality was so jarring, that I decided to start collecting evidence and share what I found".

• An accurate summary of the "disbelief and a touch of anger" created by the launch, particularly how they presented Bluesky as American whilst not mentioning they were a fork of bluesky: on "the staging page for W Social ... If you clicked on the "x" to close that preview window, you would see a Bluesky feed"
• A rather lovely comparison between WSocial and Eurosky, the launch of which "has been slowly and carefully planned out, online and behind the scenes... a very well prepared team of experts", whereas "if you visited the website of W Social on its launch day... Any 14-year-old with an hour to spare and a free Canva account could have designed something more professional looking."
• An interesting thesis: "maybe W Social is banking on mandatory age verification for European users"
• Amateurism in basic security work: when they scrapped their Bluesky branding, they nuked their SSL certificate. Very interesting contradiction between "They are asking for your most sensitive data... and yet have a cavalier attitude towards security... early blunders were really shocking to me."
• Amateurism in fact-checking: after Davos, a lot of media assumed it was "an official initiative by the European Union.... This went on for TEN DAYS - with zero fact checking by media organizations or corrections by W Social".