W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data

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 from the worlds of politics and journalism. I am about to cover its biggest scandal yet, which puts into question W Social’s core promise: “Trust your feed”.A quick recapW Social was announced out of nowhere at Davos this past January. The media frenzy around its soft launch was awe-inducing: European decentralized networks like Mastodon or Eurosky never received a fraction of the attention W Social commanded - even if at the time W Social didn’t have a single user and kept details about its technical infrastructure secret. People quickly found evidence that W Social was a hard fork of the open network Bluesky, based on the AT protocol. Weeks before its beta launch it…