W Social: Hello World!

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Hello World! :slight_smile:

This category is for discussing W Social, a new member on the AT-protocol federation.

Launched in conjunction with the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 19, 2026, the project has sparked a lot of praise, interest, rumors and slander. In fact, our social media monitoring console registered 1 billion post views (across all the main social media) for posts mentioning #wsocial within the first week.

As I write this, W Social is not yet open for business. There is a waitlist on wsocial.eu. The code we are running is pretty much the standard open source PDS etc., but all our servers and user data storage are within Europe by European service providers.

Another major differentiator between most social media and W Social is that we are implementing strict user verification. To combat the trend with massive numbers (majority on several platforms) of bots pretending to be humans, users on W Social have to sign up with passport scanning level of verification, common with banks etc.

In order to not fulfill Orwellian nightmares, we are doing the user verification in a separate app, W Identity. This app knows exactly who each user is, but does not share this information with W Social. The only thing W Social gets to know is that it is a verified user identified by a UUID. W Identity, on the other hand has no way of knowing which UUIDs map to which W Social users.

W Social is incorporated in Sweden. Right now we are about a dozen people spread around Europe, half of which are technical. I am a developer responsible for the W Social integration with W Identity.

We intend to be good AT-proto citizens, and hope to play well with everybody else here. We are new to this stuff, so likely to make more than a couple of stupid mistakes. When we do, please feel free to reach out and let us know.

I understand this post probably sparks more questions than it answers, but I am happy to share and discuss what we are up to, as time permits. We are hoping to learn a lot from the community and shape this together with many of you.

Best Regards,
/Jan Lindblad

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Welcome! Glad to have you and the W team here. It’s quite reassuring to hear that y’all intend to be first class participants in the atproto ecosystem. Hope to see y’all in Vancouver!

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Hello @janlindblad.bsky.social I think the world definitely could use a social network without bots, and with less anonymous trolling and harassment. This will be an interesting experiment and I can imagine public figures and journalists might fancy it. Good also that W will be on atproto and not in a silo technology: you get to immediately have 40+ million users!
Cant wait to see a badge “vetted by W Identity as legit” appear on atproto apps :slight_smile: But I could also see abuse such as data enrichment crawlers to feed CRM services, so… Curious! Welcome and don’t hesitate to reach out and share over here!

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Welcome @janlindblad.bsky.social! Thanks for dropping in and introducing yourself.

Will anyone from your team be joining us in Vancouver in March? I am one of the organizers and we could make room for a talk. Email us at hello@atmosphereconf.org if you want more info.

I also know that several different groups are planning on doing some verification. There are a couple of different ways to do that, that have been requested to do that without having to limit it to a single PDS.

I’ll ping you when I post it, that might be helpful as you figure out your own model.

Please feel free to use here as a resource if you have questions. The Atmosphere is still growing quickly and there are lots of code and infrastructure solutions emerging that we can either build together or at least learn from.

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Thanks for a great call today Jan; very happy to see you promptly made your way over here to connect further :smiling_face:

Two existing threads on here you’ll find interesting:

By @kjetil.kjernsmo.net & @attpslabs.com.

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Thanks for the warm welcome and ample suggestions for things to look at!
Exactly what I was hoping for :sunflower:

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Welcome Jan!

We’re very glad you’re here, and quite curious about how the W-approach!

Attestations seem like an important space, and certainly there are orwellian approaches like World’s eyeball orbs, so very curious to see other approaches and alternatives to eyeball scanning.

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Hi! Great stuff, @janlindblad.bsky.social !

Indeed, we’re thinking in similar terms over here, I’d love to chat one day.

There seems to be some differences in thinking though:

  1. We decided to not have very strict boundaries, public spheres tend to have flexible boundaries, you have a debate, people come together, some might be within a clearly defined group, but some are outsiders, people might be pushed off, some form counter-publics over time (I’d argue, we are such a counter-public). So, architecturally, it should be open, but the verification, that we agree is extremely important, needs to be present, but it can be present in form of metadata (labels, checkmarks, badges)
  2. We decided to not do an app, we’d rather try to develop infrastructure for whatever apps people would do.
  3. We decided to not do a separate infrastructure, not put up our own PDSes and stuff. It is several reasons for this, one is that I am concerned that we won’t set off networks effects if we fragment on that, another is to not enforce boundaries on a technical level (see point 1. :smiley: )

But then, we’re all vaporware, you’re much more concrete, which I highly appreciate. I’d love to see how it works out!

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