The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be
Kind of them to get that out of the way in the first sentence. No further reading required.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Lol, why not blood samples? IDs and photos can be faked by AI but not blood...yet.
Lol, why not blood samples?
Could just mail in a stool sample.
What was that movie with the gentic id stuff, gattaca? Yeah, shouldn't give them too many "good" ideas....
I refuse to use anything that doesn't allow authentication via bunghole print. It's just more convenient.
A SmartPipe^tm^ subscriber in the wild?
You're wishing a glorious doom upon us, my friend.
Honestly, I prefer this.
I can stand behind my words.
Ah man, I almost got excited for a second...
this is the best thing about it read on,
whereabouts in st petersburg are you from
What a dumb name. This whole Twitter -> X rebranding was stupid to begin with, why would one imitate that?
Also - Mastodon?
Mastodon needs a complete rebranding. Name change, logo, UI, and made to be even easier for the average consumer to use, before it's even considered a competitive microblog site.
Does it? Also there is so many frontends to choose from and so many other projects. What normal people needs to realize is that they are played and the whole "But there is so much choice" argument is stupid. Imagine going to the shop where there is one type of bread called bread (super easy to use, without crust so people without teeth can chew), one type of milk (cause with bother with people having different preferences), one type of pasta etc. The more choice the better and federated networks offer exactly that. You can walk into the store and choose product you like for whatever reason. But no matter what type of bread you choose, you can still make sandwich. And this whole "W" thing is an easy money grab. Create some media attention, grab VC/European funding and create shitty clone noone will use, then say "Well looks like US corporate offerings are better afterall. Oh look democrats are back".
So the user is just stupid eh 😉
It's like choosing a linux distribution. When you know how the fediverse works, it's easy, but when you don't, you don't want to hear that "it's just like email!!".
It has to just work without any kind of choice what so ever, IMO, or loads of people just won't bother. Look at Signal, slick as hell, still people prefer big corp stuff...
What I'm trying to say is convenience is king.
They have a cute logo and posts being called toots is the best thing ever. No idea what you'd want to change on Mastodon
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Oh for the love of. Just invest in the fucking Activity Pub and similar FOSS Decentralized systems people.
Germany has been running official mastodon instances for politicians and government offices for years
I'm all for it. I think it was the initial vision for the internet and web, and we got sidetracked by growth and commercialization. I do have to wonder if such a move did happen, a sudden shift of mainstream to here (in general, the Activity Pub's various forms), could it handle it? Fast growth was a huge hit with the Reddit migration(s), and that was "just" Reddit.
I think what will happen is the big name corporate sites will collapse and the amount of online users will drop to just folks that have a use or passionate interest.
They went for the protocol used by Bluesky. But apparently disabling federation.
Y?
Y U NO Z?
I was hoping they’d call it Twitter
Imagine Elon isn’t letting that trademark expire. Only valuable thing left from that $54b.
Just revoke the trademark in Europe
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requiring user identification and photo verification
And so they've failed before they've begun.
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requiring user identification and photo verification to prevent bots
Can't wait until the next next big thing: "F", for "Fuck you".
I know that's not going to be popular around here, but I am kind of curious what an "everyone is a confirmed user" social media site would actually look like, compared to the "whoever has the most bots gets shoved to the top of the rankings" cesspool we have now.
Social media was a mistake. We should have stuck to small forums. Same with real life tbh. Shit, have I become an anarchist now?
Bots will simply use a random id card from the millions of stolen ids
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America bad so switch to EU. Oh no, EU bad now, so switch to something else?
Just use something decentralized, fucking hell. Stop having such blind loyalty to countries.
mastodon is also european.
Yeah it's a stupid title. Some people are trying to make the most of the moment and start their own social network.
This makes it sound like this is an EU-mandated social network.
Yet another attempt at a "lesser evil" just how bluesky appeared to exist. Its essentially the same thing but wrapped in a "European made" wrapper, even it's policies are the same.
Europe has the capacity to make good software yet garbage like W gets the spot light. Instead of glorifying the aspect that it is European made, consider the quality it provides.
Mastodon is the perfect example here as it both satisfies quality standards and isn't based in fascist america.
Outstanding move by mastodon
They should have called it XXX.
Or XOFF
They should have named it Wayland...
Europe is trying to lock down the internet, connect everything said, every page viewed, to every account and ip by id and likeness, into databanks and combine it and every other piece of information on you to run through half baked ai threat detection to create secret social scores.
So you can yay getting rid of x, you are still surrendering to tech, to palantir type companies making those social scores. Hope you support Israel, aren't an environmental protester for starters. Better correct your wrongthinks europe.
But the kids, we have to institute mandatory colonoscopies to protect them, nevermind those kids will fall victim en masse to the surveillance state past despots couldn't even dream of, run by the worst people.
they are also likely using palintir to achieve it too, i remember it being peddled to the eu for a few months already.
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Bluesky's original "invite only but each person can invite" makes way more sense for bot management than "requiring photo identification" that can't be verified and can be generated by ai.
Interestingly they're basing it off the Bluesky atproto architecture. Seems like they're keeping controlled sign-ups and setting the appview to only index (and only display) their own users.
And if they don't break protocol compatibility, others could have a "read-only view" of their network from servers / clients that federate (comparable to a lemmy server which would reject incoming messages but still let you browse)
W - EU I guess😭
Why recreate shit
The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be
but worse? Repost to !diwhy@lemmy.world?
[X] is not a ‘public square’ – it now resembles a deepfake pornography website, and a one-way broadcast system for Musk himself
And why are they trying to make the competition sound better?
Left X when it was Twitter. Currently using Mastadon, Lemmy, Piefed. Will try W.
Let's support W and see how it goes.
It’s a start but They better cut off oracle and palantir too or this is just smoke and mirrors. Pro genocide pro mass surveillance pro mass incarceration Larry Ellison is behind the digital id that EU governments keep trying to shove down your throats.
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