Jan Lindblad 0:50 [No speech][Speaker:JOHN_LINDBLAD] All right. 0:51 Okay. 0:51 Hi, camera. 0:53 Hi, everybody. 0:54 I'm John Lindblad. 0:56 I'm from Wsocial. 0:57 And if you heard the previous session from Gander, there's going to be a lot of similarities here. 1:03 WSocial is also a new social medium being started up in the same sort of context that we just heard. 1:09 And we are also very adamant about the ability to be able to trust your feed and maybe quiet things down a little bit. 1:17 So we sort of want to go back to what the golden age when Twitter was new and actually useful where we had common understanding and global discussion that we could really participate in in a useful way. 1:31 We are all for real humans, quality journalism, and open debate. 1:38 So why now? 1:39 Well, I don't need to go into this so much. 1:42 You— we already know the situation in the world and in Europe, just as here in Canada. 1:47 There is a lot of strong feelings about having something that's independent and that nobody should be able to shut down. 1:54 But we don't want to be separatist just like most other people. 1:56 We want to be part of the whole ecosystem here, but not being dependent on certain pieces here that we don't control. 2:10 So I'll mention some core principles. 2:12 So we are hosted in Europe, both when it comes to ownership and the actual hosting and all the services. 2:19 We verify humans. 2:19 I'll come back to that. 2:22 We want to be open and transparent, so show exactly what we are doing and why we are doing things. 2:29 We want to allow free speech according to European laws and norms. 2:34 We don't want to be interfering in what people say and stuff. 2:38 Everybody should have their voice. 2:40 That's why we go back to these verified humans. 2:43 Anybody who is a human should have this democratic right to say whatever they want. 2:48 Then as a participant in this network, you also have your right to choose what to listen to or not listen to, of course. 3:03 So democracy is very important to us. 3:04 We want to be good @proto citizens. 3:09 We are pretty new to this, so if we goof, let us know. 3:13 We of course wanted to start on @proto both from the sort of political point of view, this is the right thing to do, but it's also just as we noticed cold start problem without 40 million users would be difficult. 3:28 So it's a no-brainer really. 3:28 Okay, verified humans. 3:29 You have already seen this. 3:35 This is a solved problem, right? 3:38 You just check that box and we know it's human. 3:41 Maybe. 3:41 No, so we really want to verify that your users are human. 3:44 We will allow bots and organizations and things like this too, but they will be marked as such. 3:48 This is an organization, this is a bot, and so on. 3:55 So we actually go all the way to scanning passports or ID documents. 3:58 So when you click on that little ID badge next to your name, you will be able to see things about who you are. 4:07 You will see at least right now it's only showing that you are human, but it will show more things about you that you want to share. 4:14 You can also be anonymous here. 4:15 You don't have to share your real name. 4:18 But we will know that you are a human. 4:22 And how can we know that you're a human and not knowing who you are? 4:29 Actually, I have this PDS call here. 4:33 You can see that when you get your profile, you can tell that somebody is a human here. 4:40 Yeah, we are building the whole system up into two separate domains. 4:45 We have one part of the system, actually a separate company, that is running something called WIdentity. 4:52 And WIdentity, that's the one that's scanning your passport and storing locally in the phone who you are. 4:56 It will know your nationality, birth date, full name. 5:02 In some countries, it will know your Social Security number. 5:07 It will have the face of your photo— photo of your face. 5:12 But it will not share that with WSocial. 5:14 So WSocial is a separate app, separate company. 5:16 That knows, of course, everything that you know about your online life, your posts, your friends, your likes, and all that. 5:27 But they will not know who you are. 5:28 The only thing that unifies these two is this UUID, 32-digit hex random number, basically. 5:32 So if you are on the DID side, identity side, you will know that this is a human, but not who it is on social media. 5:43 On WSocial, you will know that this is somebody that's a real human, but not who that is. 5:48 We also bring over nationality and birth year. 5:52 Or actually, that's— we are planning to. 5:55 We are not doing that right now. 5:59 And optionally, somebody who really wants to verify, I am really this person, should have an ability to verify that this is my real name. 6:09 If they want to. 6:10 Some people might want to. 6:12 Who are we? 6:13 We are about 2 dozen people spread out over Europe. 6:19 WSocial is incorporated in Stockholm. 6:21 Or actually, it's not incorporated. 6:24 It's a foundation. 6:25 So it's a foundation that owns these 2 companies, the WIdentity company and the WSocial company. 6:31 We have a CEO, Anna Zayter. 6:37 She has a background as privacy executive at eBay. 6:39 And she has a PhD in free speech and data, GDPR, and all those things, legal kind of background. 6:45 And I'm just a developer. 6:46 Business model. 6:47 Okay, so we will have some advertisements at some point in the future, we think. 6:53 And having verified human users is a good thing because the advertisers typically want to pay more for ads for humans than for ads for bots. 7:00 And we also, since we have this identity app that really knows who you are and you can connect that up to wallets and banks and stuff, it would be easy for us to add micropayments. 7:11 So that's really something that we're working on, especially for news media. 7:20 So we want to work with the news media. 7:24 We have negotiations ongoing with a number of different European media houses for how we should not steal their content, but really provide a platform for their content. 7:38 So we want to redistribute, work together with media sites. 7:41 What did we do? 7:42 Okay. 7:42 We launched this project in January in Davos. 7:48 And within one week of the announcement, we noticed on our social media monitoring dashboards that we had 1 billion social media views of posts that mentioned WSocial. 8:00 So some attention seems to have come our way. 8:03 Yeah. 8:04 And we are— we're just taking in the first few users this week. 8:09 We want to scale it up a little bit slowly to see that our infrastructure holds up. 8:18 And the next steps here, so around May timeframe or so, we think that we will be opening up for the waitlist. 8:25 We have a waitlist and then open up for anybody without any sort of invitation codes around that time. 8:30 And what we hope to do with you here is, of course, we want to say hello. 8:36 We are glad to be here among Atproto friends. 8:39 And if anybody wants to come with some ideas, proposals, questions, or whatever it is, just say hello, come to me, and we'll talk. 8:46 This talk is coming to an end, so it will have to be offline or afterwards. 8:52 We really want to be good at product citizens, and since we're new to this, we're probably going to do a few things wrong. 9:00 I already, during this couple of days here, noticed a few things that I should have done differently. 9:07 We'll fix that. 9:07 Whenever you see something that's a bit strange or perhaps even bad, let us know. 9:12 And we know that a lot of the things that we aspire to do on Ad Proto is already maybe happening somewhere, like for example, permission data and stuff like that. 9:22 So let us know when we should be taking part of something like that. 9:38 And we also have a few ideas, especially around this when it comes to account certification, verification, and account types. 9:26 So this is a human account. 9:28 We want to have some sort of commonly agreed-upon way to express that so that everybody in the atmosphere can tell. 9:36 Wish us luck. 9:37 Excellent. 9:38 Thank you very much. 9:39 Continuing on with our international panel here, we've got our friends from Japan.