On Friday October 9th, German journalist Gavin Karlmeier released the latest episode of his podcast “Haken dran” and shared an exclusive scoop: an anonymous source discovered that the social media company W Social is publishing to the world wide web the legal names, nationalities and approximate dates of birth of...

A year ago I published an article about GoToSocial, a fediverse microblogging software (think of it as an alternative to Mastodon or Sharkey) that I had been using and loving. That is still very much the case, a year and a half after I first started using it:GoToSocial empowers you to have your own home on the...

⚠️A heads-up: the following article covers a major technical issue that W Social has been experiencing since June 22 (for 7 consecutive days). As I also discuss a possible solution to this problem, by the time you read this post the issue may have been resolved. But questions remain about how the situation has been...

The new social network W Social - which purports to be a healthier alternative to Elon Musk’s X, “made in Europe, for the world” - would be a fascinating case study for future business school seminars. Its debut has been messy, filled with controversies - and yet, it has been embraced by high profile personalities...

In the past few months I have unwittingly become an expert on all things W Social: the microblogging platform that is a fork of Bluesky and bills itself as Europe’s alternative to X, with identity verification “to fight bots and misinformation” and data hosted in Europe “to promote European digital sovereignty”. Why...

I have been thinking a lot about the meteoric rise - out of nowhere - of a new player in the social media space: W Social, a platform soft-launched at Davos built on the promise of becoming the European answer to X. Earlier this month I published a long article about its surprise unveiling. And yet, I felt there was...

In January my corner of the social web was abuzz with the surprising announcement at Davos of a new social network: W Social, which aspires to be an alternative to X, based in Europe, with "identity verification to fight disinformation." Its goal? To foster social sovereignty for European citizens, away from the...

When I started self-hosting essential digital services via YunoHost in December 2024 I was taken aback by how easy and smooth the process was. Something that had appeared daunting to me just days before became a child’s game. A catalog with hundreds of free-open source apps available at the click of a button. It was...

In the brave new year of 2026, most European public institutions, politicians and infrastructure services (transportation, official weather services, alert systems) continue to broadcast their communications on a closed, proprietary social network owned by the world’s richest man: X (formerly known as Twitter). This...

Dear friends,I’d love to share with you what I’ve been up to this month.First up:✏️ Writing: A newbie's guide to self-hosting with YunoHostI published part 4 in my “newbie’s guide to self-hosting with YunoHost” that discusses backups:A newbie’s guide to self-hosting with YunoHost. Part 4: backupsThe fourth article...

I had the pleasure of sharing with you all the steps it takes to set up and run your own essential internet services with the help of YunoHost. Fun fact - and sorry I'm addressing this point only now but the right way to pronounce "YunoHost" is Why-You-No-Host (Y-U-NO-Host). In the first couple of months of using...

You know how some of your most vivid memories go back to moments when you were scared or you tackled a difficult thing for the first time? Well, I still remember the fear and trepidation I felt when I was about to install and set up my first self-hosted app: the microblogging app GoToSocial. This was back in...