We have plenty of foss stuff ready to go and deployed. But we don’t want it. We want free ad supported American platforms. No one cares. It’s pretty annoying for the people that do, but alas.
I don't think people care AT ALL about FOSS, however, they do care somewhat about privacy and sovereignty.
But at the end of the day, they need to have the network of people they care about already on the platform and they need a smooth experience.
The moment the U.S. moved to ban TikTok, users immediately flocked to an even worse Chinese platform.
People don’t actually care about privacy or digital sovereignty — not when convenience and clout are on the line.
It's a matter of degree. The average Joe cares about privacy and tech sovereignty too, but not to the extent that he would sign off a platform where the rest of his friends are.
I try not to be cynical, but I honestly don't think they even care about that with all things being equal.
I'm talking about the 90+% of people, not the people we all probably know. It's not about elitism either, it's just human nature. People care about the ends, not the means.
Even with all things being equal, if you offer X covered in shinies, you will win over someone just offering X. Companies like Meta are very good at covering their products with shinies, and governments are not.
Hmm, well I don't know. Not everyone like the same kind of shiny stuff. And even if you like some kind of shiny, sometime a huge load of it is just too much of it. Even the most bling bling people will die if you really put them under a metal mountain of gold.
You might think smart people will better well balance than not the poison in their drug to keep their junky customer base just afloat so business have a perennial flow of serfs. But even smart people are humans and make errors. And even if they plan with error rate in mind, they can be overthrown by one of their many far more stupid rivals. The number of mindless wannabe will always largely exceeds the anticipation power of the sharpest minds.
Clearly most people just don't care about freedom at all in general. They claim they do, but then will argue against anything and everything that provides even the tiniest measure of it.
Most people don't have integrity, and are moderately failed educations. They are doing whatever they do in more of a mimic fashion than actually understanding anything.
Centralised platforms have strong economic incentives to invade privacy.
Its not really about FOSS vs proprietary. FOSS is better because it can be verified, but, for example, Whatsapp is better than a FOSS platform that is not E2EE and not decentralised.
Ideally we would use decentralised, E2EE encrypted FOSS.
Governments also like centralised platforms because they enable surveillance.
No one cares as long as the end product is worse and doesn't satisfy the users' requirements. If we want people to use non-American alternatives we need to build alternatives that are straight up better, which is exactly what the Chinese managed to do with TikTok.
Yeah, and their response is also not related to the topic at hand. We are not arguing about moving away from US-controlled platforms because we are measuring what is "better". We are talking about leaving US-owned platforms in order to have a sovereign alternative.
Speaking as someone from Europe i remember the time we switched from a local social media site to Facebook on mass because Facebook was a better experience.
So a better platform is a must have if the EU wants the digital sovereign social media to have any traction. Most people just don't care enough about abstract concepts like digital sovereignty to move to a worse platform.
> Most people just don't care enough about abstract concepts like digital sovereignty to move to a worse platform.
Companies care about it, which by extension should make some of their employees care as well.
(Saying this "out loud" made be realize one thing: maybe I should stop trying to make "get out of Twitter and come to Mastodon" happen, and get Communick to focus on companies and recruiters that want an alternative to LinkedIn?)
It's just network effects. The real dirty secret of youtube is that it pays well relative to the other platforms, which ensures the vast majority of creators are on there, which in turn makes it the easiest platform to discover new content you like as a consumer and to be discovered as a new creator.
Privacy isn't the vector that is able to disrupt this (although it is a nice feature). This will get disrupted when some combination of the following tips the scales on a new platform enough to make the gulf in discovery small:
- google screws with the search enough to make it hard to discover content users want (they are already 20% of the way to unusable at this point and getting worse every year),
- Someone makes an even worse for addiction platform that siphons the younger generation off who doesn't want to be on uncoool old guy's platform (i.e. what tiktok did to facebook/insta but also to some extent to youtube).
- Someone spends a crazy amount of money to pull creators off youtube onto their platform (nobody has spent enough money as diversely yet. spotify tried this half heartedly with rogan and twitch has tried it half heartedly with a few streamers but hasn't fixed their rev sharing so they are basically poison to everyone not big enough to get a sweetheart deal contract)
Other than the points already made in replies, there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.
Every so often I get curious about something like Mastadon or Bluesky because it comes up here again. So I head over to see whatsup, and it's just post after post about how terrible Twitter is, and how badly it's doing now. Okay, I get it, you moved from Twitter because of blah, can you move on to all the things you _wanted_ to post on Twitter now?
I don't know which circles you visit, but out of my discover feed only one was lamenting about the old internet. Nobody was talking about other social media, the topics that dominated was stock market, stock market, and more stock market.
> there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.
If you only go check it after there is some major news that get people talking about it, then yes you'll probably end up seeing mostly this annoying meta-conversation around the Fediverse.
However, if you manage to stick around just a bit longer you will see that there is a tiny-but-growing number of people who are using Mastodon/Lemmy/Peertube "just" because they have found enough interesting people and conversation.
There is also nothing stopping you from taking initiative and starting the conversation around other, "better" topics. I made a habit of posting at least 3-5 links every day to Lemmy. You can always push out some introduction post on Mastodon with some relevant hashtags to see if you can help bootstrap a community, etc.
Not true on FB anymore, but a long way. What I see in my feed.
1. Racist meme - probably because I am visible ethnic minority so they hope it is rage bait. I continue to see a lot of wolf whistle racism on FB although I ignore it. A lot of it reads like it is written by someone who is not a native English speaker.
2. Sponsored post advertising a course for kids who want to be lawyers. Probably because I have a teenage daughter and I am an admin of two home education related groups. Not relevant to anything my kids wants to do though.
3. A post from a group I am in.
4. A stupid anti-home ed post - one of these ones where they take an image of a post somehwere else and mock it. More rage bait. It also talks about American stuff (you have school taxes, apparent?) and I am in the UK.
5. A map from a group I am not in that is copied from Our World in Data.
6. A sponsored post for a luxury bed.
7. A meme from a group I think is stupid, suggesting you encourage your daughters to dress modestly.
8. Pictures posted by a friend.
9. A post from a group I am in..
10. A post from someone I have never heard of.
That makes three determined by who I follow, to seven algorithmically chosen.
>I continue to see a lot of wolf whistle racism on FB although I ignore it. A lot of it reads like it is written by someone who is not a native English speaker.
I'm sure you had nothing like this in mind, but I found this humorous:
"There's a lot of racism on Facebook" "But I'm sure it's written by those illiterate foreigners"
Again, i'n certain you don't actually think like that, just letting you know how it can be misinterpreted because I'm above average sensitive about that (being ESL myself).
Yeah, FB got this bad over the last years. I was a big advocate for Facebook, I really saw the value in having a feed based on posts of people/pages I choose to follow. These days, it's full of absolute garbage, if I open it by mistake, I'm disgusted.
What do you have in mind? I am not aware of any foss platform, European or not, that is as accessible as Meta'a networks are. If you get asked about a server choice during the registration process, it's game over.
The sad thing is, we had social networks in Europe, things like Nasza Klasa and Hyves. But Facebook is ate them all, I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure why VKontakte survived, possibly because they became a blatant copy of Facebook as fast as they could.
Nasza Klasa (literally "our class", as in school) was crazy incompetent though. They had all social groups there - young and older kids, young adults, adults, even some elderly people - and they somehow randomly decided to focus purely on school kids, alienating everyone else. And since they were so bad at it, it became a meme, was not cool anymore and everyone left to facebook.
It's really a shame, I think it could thrive regionally until today . Big tech doesn't always win - for example also in Poland AWS tried and failed to win the market several times, because there's an existing platform that everyone uses already.
All the link I receive hosted by them will only show door kind of NDA or whatever you call a "click here to mindlessly accept all our ridiculous terms".
Meta's networks mostly inaccessible to the public. Only registered users - who IIANM are people who establish their identity vis-a-vis meta, with a phone number, or what-not - can access them.
This is a easy cynical view, except that we've already migrated en masse between platforms several times. The issue at hand is the network effect, and it also happens automatically with each new generation of "eww, my parents social network". What Europe would probably get if wanted, is a rolling creation of social networks that are active at the same time.
Free (as in beer) and centralized or giving the impression of working as a centralized system. That seems to mean it must be ad supported, or run on donations.
What doesn’t work is trying to invent some open/stabdardized/distributed system. I’m happy to be proven wrong but we haven’t seen that work because they invariably have some drawback that the centralized systems don’t, while too few care about their benefits.
I don’t think anyone cares strongly about the origin if it’s American or European.
Can the EU promotw a biz model where the max charge is 0.99€ a month and the annual renewal defaults to negative, with limits on the number of reminder messages ? I'd sign up for those without too much worry about handing out my credit card info.
Individual level action is insufficient to overpower network effects in the service of the public good of maintaining sovereignty. The desired outcome is just not connected to an individual's incentives to a strong enough degree. State action is needed.
It would take only one high-profile European institution to drop Twitter and set up their own server on the Fediverse - e.g, The Spanish "La Liga" running their own server for all the clubs and players eligible to play in UEFA - to get a good amount of people rushing to find out how to set up their own account.
Looks like an interesting read, I'll finish it in a minute, but I just want to say, as someone working in a medium profile public institution...
Yeah our PR team would love this idea. What would actually happen is that nobody would read our updates, except that one or two journalists who repost it immediately on Twitter and X.
A "medium profile public institution" can not make their own gravity, like La Liga can.
For them, I'd recommend to take a POSSE [0] approach: create their own instance and treat the other platforms as mere syndication channels. This would allow them to not lose any of their reach, but would also signal to everyone else that an exit path is available.
Free ad-supported European platforms would probably be acceptable. The issues are:
1) The EU would probably reject US-style moderation. They don't have the same level of tolerance for speech they disagree with. HN is up to what, its 3rd public moderator? The EU would probably have some sort of law that there must be some maximum number of mods per user if they had big social platforms. What if right-wingers say something without a mod looking over it? Europeans wouldn't stand for that sort of laxity or dang's obvious moderate bias.
2) The ad-supported aspect is likely to be problematic in the EU. The regulators seem pretty suspicious of that sort of thing.
3) A lot of the interesting people who were in Europe seem to get brain-drained to the US. Most of the interesting Europeans I know are US citizens because in the US they get paid well.
That's a lot of assumptions about what the EU would do. It's also a bit rich to hold the US up as a model of free speech at a time when liberal views are being actively censured.
As for the "most interesting Europeans are Americans" thing, that's such a strange statement that I'm not sure how to respond, other than that has not been my experience.
I don't think it's a lot of assumptions at all. You hear people decrying ad-supported websites all the time. When pressed on the issue they essentially resort to "well maybe these websites shouldn't exist then!", which isn't a solution.
You also hear a lot of Europeans cry out for censorship. They just think their kind of censorship will leave them alone. Until it doesn't. But they don't have to worry about it, since they're on American platforms anyway.
Hacker News is available in Europe, it doesn't even have (or need) a cookie banner. There is nothing here that would raise any eyebrows. Americans seem to misunderstand how "non-free" speech is in Europe.
It is mostly calls for violence, libel, and some historical oddities (holocaust denial in Germany) that are not allowed in public.
1. As much as I dislike the thought of law mandated overzealous moderation, you're probably right.
On the other hand, if doing this will let us avoid another genocide [1] maybe it's worth it.
2. We're concerned about privacy, but ad supported businesses are as popular as everywhere else (just regulated a bit more strictly). There's probably more fear of processing too much personal data and being sued, but it's good in my opinion as a customer.
3. Also true. But, assuming you're American, isn't the selection of Europeans your know biased? Anecdotally, most of the interesting Europeans I know are not American :).
The world doesn't need any more social platforms that detach people from touching grass and making real human connection, and at the same time act as a means to spread the current flavor of propaganda
Agreed. The genie isn't going back into the bottle. While connecting with that world has lots of downsides, it is also incredible and fascinating. Humanity does some amazing things, has amazing people, and social media does give us lots of glimpses of others.
The anti-social networking anti-online people need to do a lot better than their useless squalid whining & saying we should turn it off & touch grass instead. Get a little more creative than that, find something less than the polemic version to advocate for.
I've been thinking about this some time now. But not from the aspect of sovereignty.
Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified, possibly via personal ID / passport maybe at the town hall, no alias allowed, but the legal name, people will know who you are. All publicly readable without account.
This would give politicians, companies, journalists and citizens a way to have public "conversations", near real-time news updates just like on Twitter, but without the huge amount of garbage that comes from bots and people eagerly destroying the public discourse. Illegal comments (my mistake, criminal content) lead to direct consequences, maybe also with the one of setting the account to read-only mode.
You've not made an honest negative Google Maps review in Europe yet. I've received a takedown notice with threat of Lawyers.
Also, the UK/French and possibly other governments want to be able to read private messages and have law-enforcement tools made for free for them.
Public Opinion is free to issue in the EU, but doesn't go unpunished. Here an example and long legal battle most of us can't afford this famous talk show moderator had to face due to "Insulting a Majesty", the turkish president.
Don't even think of encryption, governments will request you build in backdoors for them. Social Networking is strictly controlled and locked down in the EU, hard to develop and maintain a product that you as a founder can goto jail for, if your users insult a majesty in some country.
A law had to be "cancelled" to repeal the extradition of Jan Böhmermann into prison in Turkey.
No DM, no need for encryption of messages. All conversation is public. Takedown notices will be from a real company or a real person to another real entity: if they're right, it has to be taken down. If not, not. I mean, the law would be pretty clear on that and if not, that would be a good time to set a precedence.
If Böhmermann wants to publish attacking satire, I guess it would stay up until courts decide otherwise.
Facebook and Google+ tried to do this with their realname policies. It doesn't work as well as one would expect:
• Toxic assholes are not deterred by their name being attached to what they're saying, because they think they're saying righteous things and/or fighting bad people who don't deserve any respect.
• People self-censor, because they don't want to risk upsetting some random violent stranger on the internet who can track them down.
• People who don't use their legal name publicly have trouble participating. This impacts transgender people, but also people using stage names/pen names, and stalking victims.
I think OP's point isn't to prevent toxic assholes from saying whatever righteous things and fighting whatever bad fight, but to limit bot/inorganic/foreign contributions from made up people - basically to make it "one person one voice".
I kind of like the idea of "one person one voice", but I have two problems with it, which I think will block me from accepting it.
One is that the cost of it seems much too high, even if you can change it to allow the use of chosen aliases (I don't think it matters what a "one person one voice" system calls an authenticated member). I don't really trust everyone who I have to give my ID details too, and this is just one more bit of stress for so little gain.
The second is that the benefits will never be realised. In an election, one person one vote doesn't work when half the population doesn't vote; you need almost everyone to come, otherwise it's the strongest opinions not the mainstream opinions that dominate. And I'm quite sure we'll see the exact same thing here, but in spades, and faster. If you don't like the opinion, you just don't show up. Once the centre of the social media is sufficiently different from the centre of the community, there will be the sort of bullying and self censorship you foresee and it will spiral out of control.
There's no need for real names, what is needed is that you can't create multiple accounts. This can be done without linking identities by using two unrelated parties. Party A is the platform and B is the authenticator, when creating an account on A you are sent to B to authenticate your identity and get a token to finish your account creation on A. As long as A and B are separate, A never knows the identity of the user and B doesn't know what the user represents himself on A.
People wouldn't use it, because Europe does censor speech. A German man was arrested for calling the vice chancellor an idiot, a British teen arrested for citing rap lyrics etc. The platform would be dead on arrival.
> Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified
Facebook tried this and as far as I can remember it was found illegal in Europe for a social network to require people to upload their ID, or use their real names.
I am not saying upload something and have the social network verify the identity. Maybe something like VideoIdent/IDnow could work. Basically: Get a license to comment, the way you get a license to drive.
I mean, this should not replace Twitter, but offer a less harassing environment.
What about if we leverage existing systems, say DNS and domains? Kind of lets people verify things belong to some known entity, and legal system already handles conflicts in the domain world, in case someone tries to impersonate and so on.
Forgive me if I'm not interested in such a platform. Here are some examples of "hate speech" in Europe:
British teen arrested for quoting rap lyrics.[0]
German man arrested for calling the vice chancellor an idiot ("dumkopf").[1]
French woman charged with insulting the president and faces a fine of $13,000.[2]
>In March 2018, Hasél was convicted by Spanish Special Court Audiencia Nacional in Madrid to a two-year prison sentence and a fine of €24,300 for insulting and slandering the Crown and using the King's image (for which he was ordered to pay a fine), for insulting and slandering State institutions (for which he was also ordered to pay a fine); /.../ The song was titled Juan Carlos el Bobón, which roughly translates as Juan Carlos the Clown, a wordplay on the former king's actual name, Juan Carlos de Borbón. In the song, Hasél recounts the former king's numerous scandals in a chronological order.[3]
You get a lot of hate for this, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't post there, but I am interested in reading discussions between politicians, journalists and scientists without all the fluff, ragebait, memes, spam and misinformation spread by bots and influencers collecting followers.
This kind of sounds like what you propose. Except maybe even more locked down
As a Spaniard, I will just wipe down my arse with your 1984-like comment. The least I want it's surveillance, neither from corporations nor from goverments.
> So what do you propose? That your king posts a comment and a troll brigade floods the thread?
Twitter is a broken model you are trying to fix with draconian surveillance.
Politicians/Statesman/ Corporations should not be on my 'social network'. They make a press release with their PR or do an interview and journalists should report on it.
My 'social network' should be my family, friends, neighbours, maybe some local social groups in my city.
This idea of immediate, direct communication from companies and governments is not a workable model with our social fabric.
What do I propose? FFS, I don't trust neither the leftist populists using sexism hysteria for its own profit nor the right wing 'everyone to the left it's either a Stalinist/Marxist/Terrorist'... for their own profit, too while they do tons of money laundering. And don't let me start on our Catholic Churches and lobbies.
This should be the perfect time for decentralized social media platforms, and people might be increasingly open to trying them. What do you think is the biggest roadblock? Is it poor UI and app availability? Deficient UX and content discovery?
I gave up Meta and X. But didn’t replace them because there aren’t enough people on alternatives. I just surf less. Probably better for my mental health that way.
that doesn't work for me. I need reddit, hkrnews, lemmy, etc. I don't mind it when accounts get lost there. I don't have any ego or personal advertising in this, i just like the community. Most people don't care if you know who they are in real life, I find only tiktokers, instagrammers, twitchers want that stuff. Mostly ones build around video and photographs. There is a clear distinction in online "social media" groups.
The article talks about manipulation from the US, but the examples are: Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American), Querdenkers (who were German), and Éric Zemmour (who is French). I mean is this seriously advocating for the censorship of protests coming from the German public?
What these people want is censorship that only allows progressive arguments to flourish. They already have all the laws that make non-progressive speech forbidden, but they are struggling to apply them to companies that are the other side of the pond. Having social networks here would allow them do to so easily. To that I have to say no thanks.
> Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American),
Saying that the manipulation was done by the UK because Cambridge Analytica happens to be Brittish completely misconstrues what happened.
> Cambridge Analytica was working for United States Senator Ted Cruz using data harvested from millions of people's Facebook accounts without their consent
> Facebook later confirmed that it actually had data on potentially over 87 million users, with 70.6 million of those people from the United States.
"Running these platforms will be getting cheaper with time too."
Most cloud systems that make scaling of platforms easier are American too. We (Europeans) aren't behind just in social media, but in most of the IT industry, and way too many critical elements of the total stack don't have reliable European counterparts.
In my country 19 years ago we had a social media platform that for a long time was dominating and Facebook basically didn't exist internally. But that was long ago, now they are gone and everyone is on Facebook. On the other hand, if a change happened once it can happen twice.
This was realised and raised longer than 20 years ago, the primary problem being the decisionmakers who own the money have never cared beyond the 'Quarter'. The nerds are in pocket.
Taxpayer-funded public television that's already a thing in many European countries could be a decent model. No ads and much better incentive alignment. When you pay for it you are the customer not the goods.
In my country public TV is decent with good programming and neutral political tone.
When we speak of dominant social networks today however they are runaway adtech cesspools, outright owned by malicious actors, or a combination thereof. That recurring "good stuff becomes shit stuff when getting popular" effect that people lament so much is in no small part caused by adverse profit seeking incentives. There is no dopamine, addiction and hence money in keeping your timeline chill, unpolarized, attached to median human reality rather than freak circus and not riling you up with ragebait.
And naturally anything created by man can be undone and subverted and it can be done to public media as well. This risk however does not outweigh a demonstrably pathetic status quo of the fiery pits of existing social media platforms.
Depends on whether they are reasonably independent. This works pretty well for e.g NRK, YLE, DR etc. Government can’t have a say in short term (less than an election cycle) funding, or who’s leading the Public Service company or similar. There can be no possible leverage from politicians, that’s the key.
. The job of public service like any media is to be critical of power.
The first sign of a country sliding towards being a non-democracy is political tampering with public service.
Depends on the government. Poland for example was ok with criticising the government on the national tv for many years, until the last swing to "law and order".
So there are no guarantees even if it works without censorship currently.
("law and order" means PiS, the previous rolling party) I think this is the biggest issue - the temptation and the power to take over the national media is always there, and all it takes to dismantle all the checks and balances is one determined filling party.
In the other hand, the US manages to control it's completely privatized media, so maybe being publically funded is not the issue.
It seems to me, this is less a technical challenge, but more of a cost challenge. Bandwidth and storage is not free. Freemium works for private business communities (Slack, Discord, Teams, etc.), yet public communication is monetized by attention (FB, IG, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit etc.).
Has someone done work on finding viable alternatives to the attention-based business models? As long as it's free, users will switch, but costs need to be managed somehow.
There seems to be two kinds of irony here going in two ways, I feel.
The anti-globalists by their actions seem to be creating a reaction which is leading to less global collaborations. Note the title uses the word "Sovereignty". Sovereignty is becoming more important as a reaction against the anti-globalism movement by those who want to support everyone anywhere working together over thin borders between peoples. In other words, isolationism breeds an isolationist reaction. We might see a stronger European identity versus others as a reaction against America's declaration of their identity over others.
Secondly, on an environmental front, we are seeing a move towards the reduction in global trade and travel between nations, and a reduction in developing world pollution as developed nations manufacture more things closer to home. So there's an irony in that the anti-environmentalists are causing a reaction that will help the global environment!
I do not see the irony as it just isolates the US from the rest of the world. Of course it is a loss for globalization without the US but I don't see that the rest of the world follow the US to isolate itself.
Yes I see what you mean. I suppose the challenge then is to elevate European sovereignty at the same time as keeping free trade, open borders and free movement. In a way the article could be saying "the world needs its own non-US software" without the sovereignty bit.
The European Union should develop a technology sector of its own to compete with those of China and the USA, but its fragmentation makes it harder for the continent to gather the capital and the consumers to make it possible for big tech companies to be created and thrive. We'll see in the future if there is political will to change this.
> but its fragmentation makes it harder for the continent to gather the capital and the consumers to make it possible for big tech companies to be created and thrive
Compared to what? Europe isn't as fragmented as it used to be, and that it isn't possible to create big tech companies actually sound like a benefit to me, I don't want that. I personally prefer smaller companies, even if they don't take over the world, and it's a fairly popular sentiment at least around me in south-west Europe.
> I personally prefer smaller companies, even if they don't take over the world
Me too, but Europe should be able to compete and provide alternatives to Big Tech which requires bigger scale companies to also exist. I think it's in Europe's best interest to be able to compete in this global market and become a technological leader. It's about relevancy but also potentially about European security.
Isn't it basically like saying we need to compete with ugliest totalitarian states as their cutting edge mass manipulation and torture methods give them the most efficient tools against terrorists which threaten the stability of the regime that official statistics show as 102.7% approved by its citizens?
It's about what the article says: "to counter disinformation, protect democratic integrity, preserve cultural diversity, and reclaim control from US corporate and geopolitical interests".
A social media platform doesn't have the same networking effect when everyone speaks different languages. If you make a social media site in country A, and get everyone to use it there, happened a lot in Europe, but it doesn't spread to neighboring countries since all users spoke a different language.
This means that only really large countries can compete here since they start out with a big userbase and its much more likely for a smaller countries population to migrate to a large app than vice versa.
Where I live it took to after 2010 until American social media was more popular than local ones.
TikTok only succeed because it came from a large country then? A country that doesn't even speak english, nor any european language. Oh, that was because the Chinese government was behind it with much money and influence says the EU.
So Nestle can only succeed because it comes from Switzland? A non-european country within the EU. ARM succeeds because it is British and outside the EU.
Lets face it, the EU cannot create a) global cloud services (aka AWS), b) global search engine (aka google), c) global social media and d) global tech infrastructure (i.e. GPU chips). Only everyone else can do those things because .... well because the EU has so many separate cultures and languages. So cooperation is impossible.
EU can build giant particle accelerators, a space agency and a bureaucracy to stifle any innovation that isn't lead by some large established european consultancy company. EU can organise a huge increase in military spending. The EU can build fences around europe to ensure refugees don't get in.
But the EU cannot build a single search engine of global note. Yeck Google is simply too good. Even DuckDuckGo has managed to become a competitor but the EU? Too hard. Too fucking hard for the EU.
Fuck I'm sick and tired of hearing the poor EU complain about technology. It's been long enough and yet the EU cannot seem to compete. Remember when it came clear that the NSA was spying on European leaders? Well what has happened since? Nothing. Nichts. Rien. Niente. Nada. Nic.
The EU is rapidly becoming a giant open-air mueseum for tourists coming from countries that can do tech.
> TikTok only succeed because it came from a large country then?
And USA is going to buy TikTok, just like they did almost every European tech company. You don't see what is happening here, do you? Bigger tech companies eat smaller ones because software is much more prone to networking effects than other industries.
> Fuck I'm sick and tired of hearing the poor EU complain about technology
You are the one complaining, I just explained why it happened like it happened.
> Lets face it, the EU cannot create d) global tech infrastructure (i.e. GPU chips).
AMSL is European, you are just wrong here, the whole worlds tech industry depends on AMSL. Europe is very strong in many industries, just not software. It is USA that can't do tech hardware, its all made in Europe and Asia now.
At least we Europeans have the tools to build chips ... unfortunately we don't use those tools.
Why is that? Because no EU country has a large enough userbase? Or is because regulation to protect our "environment"? Or did someone forget to click "yes accept all cookies" GDPR banner?
Just look what's happening to the food industry in the US thanks to regulations.
When a loaded guy in the US dies sooner than the low class in Spain, something it's really wrong with your nutrition, healthcare and tons of troubles to be able to walk to a nearby store.
European here. You know nil about Europe. Europe has been using English as the de facto language in tech/science since decades. Sorry if I burst your American bubble.
My Mastodon server (n=1) is hosted in Frankfurt on a free VM and doing good since 2 years. Automatic updates via docker compose and crontab. I can recommend this solution.
> And to achieve that they need to realize that all the regulation they aimed at facebook can only be satisfied by entities that have facebook's money.
I disagree with your claim. Can you tell me why you think that is?
You can still sell advertisement without collecting and processing large amounts of personal data. I would claim that it's even better if your ads are based on the in-page content, than users' personal information.
At the same time, legislation such as Digital Markets Act applies to large entities (currently singled out), and further compliance is going to apply to new platforms when they become "large enough".
After Boeing became big enough to become a national security risk, the EU worked together and set up Airbus.
I want the EU to recognize the Microsoft/Intel/Amazon cluster as an even bigger national security risk, get some vision, and set up a competitor. It isn't even that hard, choose some OSS tools, give a core cluster to different countries and pour money into upgrading the quality enough and deploy some hardware. Then require EU governements to use them.
EU has almost no AI, yet is the world leader in AI .... regulation. No upstart social network would have the funds to ensure GDPR compliance and all the other rules that get added along the way. If someone has a business idea for one, they move to the US cause it's easier to start. Mistral AI is expanding to California. The solution would be less bureaucracy and regulation.
DeepMind was EU based, for example, before Google bought them. When I worked three, they were still London based (and in EU). Are they American now? American capital controls most of the AI, but that doesn't mean Europeans are incapable of AI research.
Also I think the push for AI alignment is American. At least three AI alignment people somehow always think that forcing I to adopt American values of the only correct and moral thing to do. Isn't that similar?
Facebook's engagement algorithms directly contributed to the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar[1]. Meta refused to take responsibility and argued that it's up to governments to regulate social media, not Meta. Then they opposed all efforts to regulate them.
People didn't care.
However, the current poop-storm the U.S. has caused is making a lot of people wake up care about precisely this sort of thing. e.g. Canadians have finally realized that being more economically engaged North-South with the U.S. than East-West with other Canadian provinces is a very dumb thing that makes Canada extremely vulnerable to a foreign power that can no longer be relied upon. Measures that have been long viewed as "good ideas" are finally being enacted.
Don't say, "Nobody cares about FOSS alternatives to American social media." They haven't, until now. Now is a unique moment in history and the perfect time to switch.
Social media platforms are online communities. Their biggest asset is not algorithms or servers, but the people using them. What is Facebook or Twitter or Reddit without the users? Nothing. Invest your time and effort in the alternatives now. This is a rare opportunity.
Here's the thing. You can't force people to use a social network. Literally no one cares about this stuff.
There's a reason why there are like 5 social networks while thousands of people want to "make the next Facebook."
If Meta is a threat, then ban it. People will cry and maybe then new alternatives may emerge. But you still need skilled people who'd rather work for you than accept Facebook's $400k offers. Good luck with EU funding.
Make a social network for politicians and journalists, also open to everyone else who then wants to comment on their discussions, but with their real identity.
EU Directive to mandate the creation of a Truth and Democracy Committee that will run a social media platform financed by a EU-wide tax on everything "obviously not good for you".
The average person doesn’t care about this. The ones complaining about “influence” are the ones in power who don’t want that power threatened. Our motorcycle racing group in Spain — they’re all on Insta and WhatsApp and perfectly fine about it. They aren’t saying “we need to get off these platforms because of Brexit or whatever.” They use these platforms to talk about and coordinate among people with shared interests. X works very well in Catalonia as well — usually where people get breaking alerts and information on freeway closures, weather alerts, etc. it works great — most people don’t care about the politics.
The article is more about "European sovereignty" and not individual countries with the premise that EU countries are more aligned with each other than the US.
Chat Control vs the US surveillance state would be a more appropriate comparison and the US surveillance state only wants access to unencrypted data, but leaves you free to encrypt.
> Economic extraction
Trumpian logic.
> Erasing Europe’s diversity
The opposite is true. I can watch shows from all over Europe in the original language on Netflix, follow journalists from all over europe on Twitter, subscribe to r/europe on reddit.
I am getting tired of the the tropes such as this one: Europe is pro-privacy and the US is anti-privacy. This is simply not true.
It may have been true a while ago but this time has come and gone.
> While the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enshrines privacy as a fundamental right, US platforms remain bound by laws like the CLOUD Act, which grants American authorities access to data stored anywhere in the world. In 2022, the European Data Protection Board fined Meta for transferring EU user data to US servers, citing risks of NSA surveillance. Despite the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, experts warn that European data remains vulnerable to US intelligence overreach.
The EU is currently looking at breaking EtoE so that it can unleash an AI system to detect suspicious messages and images in your chat message, emails, private conversations with loved ones and so on. That's for our own good of course. Nothing nefarious here.
> US platforms siphon billions from Europe’s digital economy. In 2022, Meta reported €4.3 billion in EU revenue but paid an effective tax rate of 8.5% through Irish loopholes—€2.5 billion less than standard EU corporate rates. Google and Apple similarly route profits through tax havens, depriving European governments of funds needed for tech innovation.
I won't deny that Meta at al are using loopholes to reduce their tax bills but saying that this money would be used to fuel tech innovation is just not credible. Most likely, this cash would be used to plug the government's deficits and build weapons.
Also whoever wrote this probably forgets that there are costs associated with that revenue. If there was such a social media platform in Europe with the same scale at Facebook, it would required 10s of thousand of people to maintain and develop.
Considering the overall cost of an employee in Europe, I am not certain that there would be much left to tax after all these costs had been paid.
> US platforms homogenize culture by privileging English-language content aligning with the worldview of the current US presidential administration and US billionaires.
That is also false, if you are on Facebook for example you can join local groups that are in your own language. Same for your News feed. On X (although I go there rarely), my feed is composed of posts in 3 different languages.
If people see mostly content in English ,it is probably because those things are more interesting than other pieces of content in their own language.
As for the worldview, would this person have a problem with the worldview that people support if this worldview was the official worldview of the EU? I think not!
> Moreover, the EU is a regulatory superpower which can use legislation to support homegrown social media platforms. For example, the EU can mandate US “gatekeeper” platforms (per the Digital Markets Act) to interconnect with European alternatives, allowing cross-platform interactions.
And here we are back to the same old thing once again. More regulations and more coercion. If the EU can't compete, no problem, we will just force every foreign company to do our bidding because we can't win without forcing them to give us a leg up. Is that the European destiny that this person is talking about?
And here is another thing that reeks of self-contraction: we should not use the US platforms but we should force the US platforms so that they may help jump-start our own platforms despite the fact that the US platforms are bad except when we need them.
This is a really disjointed post that makes very little sense in my opinion.
Wait until you discover Patriot Act and people being deported today because of "Anti-American" comments in social media such as being opposed to Trump.
Mastodon’s distributed nature makes it hard to adopt and find friends and services. Explaining why it is so hard to use to non tech people is really not easy to do. It is a platform for nerds and its complexity will gatekeep others unfortunately.
Bluesky model is working better.
I have accounts on both and BlueSky is more active and widely adopted while Mastodon has only geeks/nerds on it.
You can disagree with this assessment but it is what I see.
Nobody needs social media. It's a fad. There were times without it. While we didn't live in caves. Now the smombies don't even see the shadows on the wall, because they are in another thrall. Both aren't needed. Maybe a solar-storm will reset that shit. Maybe something else. One way or another, I don't bother.
That people will spend more time online is a pretty safe bet in my eyes. From there it follows people will want to communicate. There's no future without some form of social networks. You're commenting in one right now.
Actually, no, not at all, and the creation of the phrase claiming social media to be a democratization of communication is wonderfully crafted manipulation. It is the opposite, it is gossip, as in the first false negative is free and any counter truth is expensive to the point of being impossible. It is the perfect communications medium for a powerful subculture to render the rest of culture babbling idiots. Which is what we have today. The "news" reports on emotional fronts, and the factual information of civilization's operations are opaque beyond a stock value. The "news" is truly talking heads, not actually giving actionable information, unless that action is a paralysis of fear. We have a plethora of tyrannical fiefdoms - the corporations the majority of humans are employed and maintained on stagnant wages rendering them 1-2 paychecks away from total loss of their accumulated wealth. The civilization is a farce, cruel, and immature to the point of insanity.
I don’t think the widespread adoption - or lack thereof - is a good indicator for being a fad or not being one. That being said, I don’t think social media is one.
However, the original commenter is right by saying that social media is far from being a necessity.
Generally I also understand the increasingly negative sentiment towards social media and the assumption that it does far more harm than it does good doesn’t seem far fetched anymore
> However, the original commenter is right by saying that social media is far from being a necessity.
We need something to allow people to organize around friends/topics/places and discover ideas, share, make sense of the world, act, etc. Reddit, Facebook, and twitter served those needs. I prefer social media over traditional newspapers that are very top down.
Smaller forums and chat servers did that just fine prior to Google shoving them to page 500+ them in favor of the government created platforms and unified narratives. [1]
In a sense, nothing beyond food, water and basic shelter is a necessity. Humans of the same species certainly lived somehow without whatever tech we can think of, including fire and clothing.
That said, I deleted my FB and TW/X account and while I don't miss their toxicity, I am more isolated than ever. I noticed that even for older people, their willingness to meet in person has gone down and their ability to reply to e-mails, including purely coordinational ones, is seriously shot.
You may be right, but in that case Europe sorely needs legislation to wind down the use of social media by governments for communicating towards citizens.
Put a simplified and unified UI in front of Usenet with RGB LED's and put it on everyone's refrigerator, car infotainment accident distraction panel, smart watch, smart toilet. Have Carls Jr. fund it. Implement text-to-speech and speech-to-text. Talk to all your family and friends over Usenet via the smart watch, toilet, etc... What devices did I miss?
I mean, honestly, if we're ever going to figure out what parts of these platforms are beneficial and which are harmful, we really need to start being more specific about what we're talking about.
And I hardly think you can call something as long-lived as social media of any form a 'fad'
Web forums are not social media, but I can see how they might be confused.
HN is more link aggregator / web forum than what the term social media has come to represent. I will grant you that the term 'social media' literally could cover any media that is social, but that's not historically how it has been applied.
Here there is no algorithmic bubble curated by engagement algorithm. Any attention is managed by the human brain, which is way healthier for the individual as they aren't being manuipulated into addictive engagement and groups as it tends less to form highly refined group think bubbles.
He's right, social media is the a big cause of the current unrest, not something that must be saved.
I would agree that communication platforms should probably not be open to spying or manipulation, but end-to-end encryption goes a long way there. The remaining problem is access being turned off, which can be solved by not relying on government controlled infrastructure (like electricity grid, networks, etc.).
So the person is right. The answer isn't a new site, it is more in person comms as redundancy.
How do you define social media? The use of algorithms to drive engagement? HN does use algorithms, though, such as upvotes/downvotes/flags influencing which stories/comments are seen more, and then there's the second chance pool. These algorithms may be more basic than those of, say, Facebook, but they are there. So what's the difference?
Incentives for what, exactly? Have more followers, which by itself only makes one feel good through validation of others? Validation other platforms that don't have followers still manage to achieve?
Certainly, but this can be said of quite literally any business endeavor - but I don't see people getting up in arms about other types of business in such an abstract sense - there aren't large groups of people calling for us to ban video games entirely [0], but we do advocate for, at the least, mitigating harmful practices such as loot boxes.
0 - Yes, some people do, but I think we can agree it's not nearly as popular a view as those pushing against 'social media'
We have plenty of foss stuff ready to go and deployed. But we don’t want it. We want free ad supported American platforms. No one cares. It’s pretty annoying for the people that do, but alas.
I don't think people care AT ALL about FOSS, however, they do care somewhat about privacy and sovereignty. But at the end of the day, they need to have the network of people they care about already on the platform and they need a smooth experience.
The moment the U.S. moved to ban TikTok, users immediately flocked to an even worse Chinese platform. People don’t actually care about privacy or digital sovereignty — not when convenience and clout are on the line.
It's a matter of degree. The average Joe cares about privacy and tech sovereignty too, but not to the extent that he would sign off a platform where the rest of his friends are.
I try not to be cynical, but I honestly don't think they even care about that with all things being equal.
I'm talking about the 90+% of people, not the people we all probably know. It's not about elitism either, it's just human nature. People care about the ends, not the means.
Even with all things being equal, if you offer X covered in shinies, you will win over someone just offering X. Companies like Meta are very good at covering their products with shinies, and governments are not.
Hmm, well I don't know. Not everyone like the same kind of shiny stuff. And even if you like some kind of shiny, sometime a huge load of it is just too much of it. Even the most bling bling people will die if you really put them under a metal mountain of gold.
You might think smart people will better well balance than not the poison in their drug to keep their junky customer base just afloat so business have a perennial flow of serfs. But even smart people are humans and make errors. And even if they plan with error rate in mind, they can be overthrown by one of their many far more stupid rivals. The number of mindless wannabe will always largely exceeds the anticipation power of the sharpest minds.
> I don't think people care AT ALL about FOSS
Clearly most people just don't care about freedom at all in general. They claim they do, but then will argue against anything and everything that provides even the tiniest measure of it.
Most people don't have integrity, and are moderately failed educations. They are doing whatever they do in more of a mimic fashion than actually understanding anything.
Centralised platforms have strong economic incentives to invade privacy.
Its not really about FOSS vs proprietary. FOSS is better because it can be verified, but, for example, Whatsapp is better than a FOSS platform that is not E2EE and not decentralised.
Ideally we would use decentralised, E2EE encrypted FOSS.
Governments also like centralised platforms because they enable surveillance.
or they can just talk to their network IRL :)
If everyone is locked up in the same prison, then the network of people they care about is on the platform.
... but you're not wrong, I'm afraid.
No one cares as long as the end product is worse and doesn't satisfy the users' requirements. If we want people to use non-American alternatives we need to build alternatives that are straight up better, which is exactly what the Chinese managed to do with TikTok.
Moving from American companies to Chinese ones does not qualify as any progress in the "How much of my online presence do I own" metric.
That’s not what the person you’re replying to said
Yeah, and their response is also not related to the topic at hand. We are not arguing about moving away from US-controlled platforms because we are measuring what is "better". We are talking about leaving US-owned platforms in order to have a sovereign alternative.
Speaking as someone from Europe i remember the time we switched from a local social media site to Facebook on mass because Facebook was a better experience.
So a better platform is a must have if the EU wants the digital sovereign social media to have any traction. Most people just don't care enough about abstract concepts like digital sovereignty to move to a worse platform.
> Most people just don't care enough about abstract concepts like digital sovereignty to move to a worse platform.
Companies care about it, which by extension should make some of their employees care as well.
(Saying this "out loud" made be realize one thing: maybe I should stop trying to make "get out of Twitter and come to Mastodon" happen, and get Communick to focus on companies and recruiters that want an alternative to LinkedIn?)
It's just network effects. The real dirty secret of youtube is that it pays well relative to the other platforms, which ensures the vast majority of creators are on there, which in turn makes it the easiest platform to discover new content you like as a consumer and to be discovered as a new creator.
Privacy isn't the vector that is able to disrupt this (although it is a nice feature). This will get disrupted when some combination of the following tips the scales on a new platform enough to make the gulf in discovery small: - google screws with the search enough to make it hard to discover content users want (they are already 20% of the way to unusable at this point and getting worse every year),
- Someone makes an even worse for addiction platform that siphons the younger generation off who doesn't want to be on uncoool old guy's platform (i.e. what tiktok did to facebook/insta but also to some extent to youtube).
- Someone spends a crazy amount of money to pull creators off youtube onto their platform (nobody has spent enough money as diversely yet. spotify tried this half heartedly with rogan and twitch has tried it half heartedly with a few streamers but hasn't fixed their rev sharing so they are basically poison to everyone not big enough to get a sweetheart deal contract)
Other than the points already made in replies, there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.
Every so often I get curious about something like Mastadon or Bluesky because it comes up here again. So I head over to see whatsup, and it's just post after post about how terrible Twitter is, and how badly it's doing now. Okay, I get it, you moved from Twitter because of blah, can you move on to all the things you _wanted_ to post on Twitter now?
I don't know which circles you visit, but out of my discover feed only one was lamenting about the old internet. Nobody was talking about other social media, the topics that dominated was stock market, stock market, and more stock market.
> there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.
If you only go check it after there is some major news that get people talking about it, then yes you'll probably end up seeing mostly this annoying meta-conversation around the Fediverse.
However, if you manage to stick around just a bit longer you will see that there is a tiny-but-growing number of people who are using Mastodon/Lemmy/Peertube "just" because they have found enough interesting people and conversation.
There is also nothing stopping you from taking initiative and starting the conversation around other, "better" topics. I made a habit of posting at least 3-5 links every day to Lemmy. You can always push out some introduction post on Mastodon with some relevant hashtags to see if you can help bootstrap a community, etc.
[0]: https://communick.news/u/rglullis?page=1&sort=New&view=Posts
As with most[^1] social platforms, what you see is determined by who you follow.
[^1] "Most" may be an overstatement these days.
Not true on FB anymore, but a long way. What I see in my feed.
1. Racist meme - probably because I am visible ethnic minority so they hope it is rage bait. I continue to see a lot of wolf whistle racism on FB although I ignore it. A lot of it reads like it is written by someone who is not a native English speaker.
2. Sponsored post advertising a course for kids who want to be lawyers. Probably because I have a teenage daughter and I am an admin of two home education related groups. Not relevant to anything my kids wants to do though.
3. A post from a group I am in.
4. A stupid anti-home ed post - one of these ones where they take an image of a post somehwere else and mock it. More rage bait. It also talks about American stuff (you have school taxes, apparent?) and I am in the UK.
5. A map from a group I am not in that is copied from Our World in Data.
6. A sponsored post for a luxury bed.
7. A meme from a group I think is stupid, suggesting you encourage your daughters to dress modestly.
8. Pictures posted by a friend.
9. A post from a group I am in..
10. A post from someone I have never heard of.
That makes three determined by who I follow, to seven algorithmically chosen.
>I continue to see a lot of wolf whistle racism on FB although I ignore it. A lot of it reads like it is written by someone who is not a native English speaker.
I'm sure you had nothing like this in mind, but I found this humorous:
"There's a lot of racism on Facebook" "But I'm sure it's written by those illiterate foreigners"
Again, i'n certain you don't actually think like that, just letting you know how it can be misinterpreted because I'm above average sensitive about that (being ESL myself).
Of course I did not intend that. In think its significance is that it is intended to be rage bait, rather than being written by genuine racists.
That's an ingestion problem
Yeah, FB got this bad over the last years. I was a big advocate for Facebook, I really saw the value in having a feed based on posts of people/pages I choose to follow. These days, it's full of absolute garbage, if I open it by mistake, I'm disgusted.
What do you have in mind? I am not aware of any foss platform, European or not, that is as accessible as Meta'a networks are. If you get asked about a server choice during the registration process, it's game over.
The sad thing is, we had social networks in Europe, things like Nasza Klasa and Hyves. But Facebook is ate them all, I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure why VKontakte survived, possibly because they became a blatant copy of Facebook as fast as they could.
Nasza Klasa (literally "our class", as in school) was crazy incompetent though. They had all social groups there - young and older kids, young adults, adults, even some elderly people - and they somehow randomly decided to focus purely on school kids, alienating everyone else. And since they were so bad at it, it became a meme, was not cool anymore and everyone left to facebook.
It's really a shame, I think it could thrive regionally until today . Big tech doesn't always win - for example also in Poland AWS tried and failed to win the market several times, because there's an existing platform that everyone uses already.
What do you mean with "as accessible"?
All the link I receive hosted by them will only show door kind of NDA or whatever you call a "click here to mindlessly accept all our ridiculous terms".
> that is as accessible as Meta'a networks are.
Meta's networks mostly inaccessible to the public. Only registered users - who IIANM are people who establish their identity vis-a-vis meta, with a phone number, or what-not - can access them.
This is a easy cynical view, except that we've already migrated en masse between platforms several times. The issue at hand is the network effect, and it also happens automatically with each new generation of "eww, my parents social network". What Europe would probably get if wanted, is a rolling creation of social networks that are active at the same time.
Free (as in beer) and centralized or giving the impression of working as a centralized system. That seems to mean it must be ad supported, or run on donations.
What doesn’t work is trying to invent some open/stabdardized/distributed system. I’m happy to be proven wrong but we haven’t seen that work because they invariably have some drawback that the centralized systems don’t, while too few care about their benefits.
I don’t think anyone cares strongly about the origin if it’s American or European.
Can the EU promotw a biz model where the max charge is 0.99€ a month and the annual renewal defaults to negative, with limits on the number of reminder messages ? I'd sign up for those without too much worry about handing out my credit card info.
Individual level action is insufficient to overpower network effects in the service of the public good of maintaining sovereignty. The desired outcome is just not connected to an individual's incentives to a strong enough degree. State action is needed.
Once again, I urge people to read Taleb before giving in to apathy:
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
It would take only one high-profile European institution to drop Twitter and set up their own server on the Fediverse - e.g, The Spanish "La Liga" running their own server for all the clubs and players eligible to play in UEFA - to get a good amount of people rushing to find out how to set up their own account.
Looks like an interesting read, I'll finish it in a minute, but I just want to say, as someone working in a medium profile public institution...
Yeah our PR team would love this idea. What would actually happen is that nobody would read our updates, except that one or two journalists who repost it immediately on Twitter and X.
A "medium profile public institution" can not make their own gravity, like La Liga can.
For them, I'd recommend to take a POSSE [0] approach: create their own instance and treat the other platforms as mere syndication channels. This would allow them to not lose any of their reach, but would also signal to everyone else that an exit path is available.
[0]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
What are you talking about? The FOSS social media platforms are my favourite place to talk about FOSS social media platforms and no other topics.
Free ad-supported European platforms would probably be acceptable. The issues are:
1) The EU would probably reject US-style moderation. They don't have the same level of tolerance for speech they disagree with. HN is up to what, its 3rd public moderator? The EU would probably have some sort of law that there must be some maximum number of mods per user if they had big social platforms. What if right-wingers say something without a mod looking over it? Europeans wouldn't stand for that sort of laxity or dang's obvious moderate bias.
2) The ad-supported aspect is likely to be problematic in the EU. The regulators seem pretty suspicious of that sort of thing.
3) A lot of the interesting people who were in Europe seem to get brain-drained to the US. Most of the interesting Europeans I know are US citizens because in the US they get paid well.
That's a lot of assumptions about what the EU would do. It's also a bit rich to hold the US up as a model of free speech at a time when liberal views are being actively censured.
As for the "most interesting Europeans are Americans" thing, that's such a strange statement that I'm not sure how to respond, other than that has not been my experience.
I don't think it's a lot of assumptions at all. You hear people decrying ad-supported websites all the time. When pressed on the issue they essentially resort to "well maybe these websites shouldn't exist then!", which isn't a solution.
You also hear a lot of Europeans cry out for censorship. They just think their kind of censorship will leave them alone. Until it doesn't. But they don't have to worry about it, since they're on American platforms anyway.
Hacker News is available in Europe, it doesn't even have (or need) a cookie banner. There is nothing here that would raise any eyebrows. Americans seem to misunderstand how "non-free" speech is in Europe. It is mostly calls for violence, libel, and some historical oddities (holocaust denial in Germany) that are not allowed in public.
1. As much as I dislike the thought of law mandated overzealous moderation, you're probably right.
On the other hand, if doing this will let us avoid another genocide [1] maybe it's worth it.
2. We're concerned about privacy, but ad supported businesses are as popular as everywhere else (just regulated a bit more strictly). There's probably more fear of processing too much personal data and being sued, but it's good in my opinion as a customer.
3. Also true. But, assuming you're American, isn't the selection of Europeans your know biased? Anecdotally, most of the interesting Europeans I know are not American :).
[1] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup
[dead]
The world doesn't need any more social platforms that detach people from touching grass and making real human connection, and at the same time act as a means to spread the current flavor of propaganda
We need an alternative to the monstrosities that we have
It’s there. It’s called community, neighbors, friends. The outside.
No. We need to let them die
The way to kill something is to take its nutrients (users).
Agreed. The genie isn't going back into the bottle. While connecting with that world has lots of downsides, it is also incredible and fascinating. Humanity does some amazing things, has amazing people, and social media does give us lots of glimpses of others.
The anti-social networking anti-online people need to do a lot better than their useless squalid whining & saying we should turn it off & touch grass instead. Get a little more creative than that, find something less than the polemic version to advocate for.
I've been thinking about this some time now. But not from the aspect of sovereignty.
Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified, possibly via personal ID / passport maybe at the town hall, no alias allowed, but the legal name, people will know who you are. All publicly readable without account.
This would give politicians, companies, journalists and citizens a way to have public "conversations", near real-time news updates just like on Twitter, but without the huge amount of garbage that comes from bots and people eagerly destroying the public discourse. Illegal comments (my mistake, criminal content) lead to direct consequences, maybe also with the one of setting the account to read-only mode.
You've not made an honest negative Google Maps review in Europe yet. I've received a takedown notice with threat of Lawyers.
Also, the UK/French and possibly other governments want to be able to read private messages and have law-enforcement tools made for free for them.
Public Opinion is free to issue in the EU, but doesn't go unpunished. Here an example and long legal battle most of us can't afford this famous talk show moderator had to face due to "Insulting a Majesty", the turkish president.
Don't even think of encryption, governments will request you build in backdoors for them. Social Networking is strictly controlled and locked down in the EU, hard to develop and maintain a product that you as a founder can goto jail for, if your users insult a majesty in some country.
A law had to be "cancelled" to repeal the extradition of Jan Böhmermann into prison in Turkey.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair
- https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2017/kw22-de-m...
No DM, no need for encryption of messages. All conversation is public. Takedown notices will be from a real company or a real person to another real entity: if they're right, it has to be taken down. If not, not. I mean, the law would be pretty clear on that and if not, that would be a good time to set a precedence.
If Böhmermann wants to publish attacking satire, I guess it would stay up until courts decide otherwise.
[dead]
Facebook and Google+ tried to do this with their realname policies. It doesn't work as well as one would expect:
• Toxic assholes are not deterred by their name being attached to what they're saying, because they think they're saying righteous things and/or fighting bad people who don't deserve any respect.
• People self-censor, because they don't want to risk upsetting some random violent stranger on the internet who can track them down.
• People who don't use their legal name publicly have trouble participating. This impacts transgender people, but also people using stage names/pen names, and stalking victims.
I think OP's point isn't to prevent toxic assholes from saying whatever righteous things and fighting whatever bad fight, but to limit bot/inorganic/foreign contributions from made up people - basically to make it "one person one voice".
I kind of like the idea of "one person one voice", but I have two problems with it, which I think will block me from accepting it.
One is that the cost of it seems much too high, even if you can change it to allow the use of chosen aliases (I don't think it matters what a "one person one voice" system calls an authenticated member). I don't really trust everyone who I have to give my ID details too, and this is just one more bit of stress for so little gain.
The second is that the benefits will never be realised. In an election, one person one vote doesn't work when half the population doesn't vote; you need almost everyone to come, otherwise it's the strongest opinions not the mainstream opinions that dominate. And I'm quite sure we'll see the exact same thing here, but in spades, and faster. If you don't like the opinion, you just don't show up. Once the centre of the social media is sufficiently different from the centre of the community, there will be the sort of bullying and self censorship you foresee and it will spiral out of control.
There's no need for real names, what is needed is that you can't create multiple accounts. This can be done without linking identities by using two unrelated parties. Party A is the platform and B is the authenticator, when creating an account on A you are sent to B to authenticate your identity and get a token to finish your account creation on A. As long as A and B are separate, A never knows the identity of the user and B doesn't know what the user represents himself on A.
People wouldn't use it, because Europe does censor speech. A German man was arrested for calling the vice chancellor an idiot, a British teen arrested for citing rap lyrics etc. The platform would be dead on arrival.
> Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified
Facebook tried this and as far as I can remember it was found illegal in Europe for a social network to require people to upload their ID, or use their real names.
I am not saying upload something and have the social network verify the identity. Maybe something like VideoIdent/IDnow could work. Basically: Get a license to comment, the way you get a license to drive.
I mean, this should not replace Twitter, but offer a less harassing environment.
What about if we leverage existing systems, say DNS and domains? Kind of lets people verify things belong to some known entity, and legal system already handles conflicts in the domain world, in case someone tries to impersonate and so on.
We need pseudonymity. Access only by court order like phone numbers.
Why? There's nothing to gain from it. You'd have to stand by your word on that network.
There is. A troll brigade from Yekaterinburg can’t just hop on and do their jobs. Hate speech can’t be freely spread.
Forgive me if I'm not interested in such a platform. Here are some examples of "hate speech" in Europe:
British teen arrested for quoting rap lyrics.[0]
German man arrested for calling the vice chancellor an idiot ("dumkopf").[1]
French woman charged with insulting the president and faces a fine of $13,000.[2]
>In March 2018, Hasél was convicted by Spanish Special Court Audiencia Nacional in Madrid to a two-year prison sentence and a fine of €24,300 for insulting and slandering the Crown and using the King's image (for which he was ordered to pay a fine), for insulting and slandering State institutions (for which he was also ordered to pay a fine); /.../ The song was titled Juan Carlos el Bobón, which roughly translates as Juan Carlos the Clown, a wordplay on the former king's actual name, Juan Carlos de Borbón. In the song, Hasél recounts the former king's numerous scandals in a chronological order.[3]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/03/30/woman-face...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Has%C3%A9l
You wouldn’t be able to post there as an American.
I don't think this attitude is going to create the next big social media platform.
Good luck with your Stasi/Gestapo wannabes there. We are fed up with neocons, fascists and stalinists.
Perfect, then it's simply not for people like you. But you’re still free to read along if you're interested in what others have to say.
Which is possible with domains, even anonymity is possible, with the right registrar.
You want to be able to have alts. So if you can easily get as many domains as you want, sure.
You get a lot of hate for this, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't post there, but I am interested in reading discussions between politicians, journalists and scientists without all the fluff, ragebait, memes, spam and misinformation spread by bots and influencers collecting followers.
This kind of sounds like what you propose. Except maybe even more locked down
Stripe Identity is 1.25 € per verification.
As a Spaniard, I will just wipe down my arse with your 1984-like comment. The least I want it's surveillance, neither from corporations nor from goverments.
That's how you get mafias for free.
So what do you propose? That your king posts a comment and a troll brigade floods the thread?
You're free to link to his posts (or copy them) from the new network on Twitter if that gives you the kind of discourse you prefer.
> So what do you propose? That your king posts a comment and a troll brigade floods the thread?
Twitter is a broken model you are trying to fix with draconian surveillance.
Politicians/Statesman/ Corporations should not be on my 'social network'. They make a press release with their PR or do an interview and journalists should report on it.
My 'social network' should be my family, friends, neighbours, maybe some local social groups in my city.
This idea of immediate, direct communication from companies and governments is not a workable model with our social fabric.
What do I propose? FFS, I don't trust neither the leftist populists using sexism hysteria for its own profit nor the right wing 'everyone to the left it's either a Stalinist/Marxist/Terrorist'... for their own profit, too while they do tons of money laundering. And don't let me start on our Catholic Churches and lobbies.
So, get these lobbies out there right now.
[flagged]
Well, it was a a wrong way to say it: "criminal content". That was what I meant.
This should be the perfect time for decentralized social media platforms, and people might be increasingly open to trying them. What do you think is the biggest roadblock? Is it poor UI and app availability? Deficient UX and content discovery?
Timing. They weren’t the first to hit it big.
I gave up Meta and X. But didn’t replace them because there aren’t enough people on alternatives. I just surf less. Probably better for my mental health that way.
The speed of light. Nothing truly dezentralized will ever be faster then the client-server model.
I guess a 10 minute delay for content delivery is fine for most cases - shouldn't be the biggest issue, right?
Social media is a misnomer. We should be calling them personal advertising services. The commercial part just makes the money.
that doesn't work for me. I need reddit, hkrnews, lemmy, etc. I don't mind it when accounts get lost there. I don't have any ego or personal advertising in this, i just like the community. Most people don't care if you know who they are in real life, I find only tiktokers, instagrammers, twitchers want that stuff. Mostly ones build around video and photographs. There is a clear distinction in online "social media" groups.
The article talks about manipulation from the US, but the examples are: Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American), Querdenkers (who were German), and Éric Zemmour (who is French). I mean is this seriously advocating for the censorship of protests coming from the German public?
What these people want is censorship that only allows progressive arguments to flourish. They already have all the laws that make non-progressive speech forbidden, but they are struggling to apply them to companies that are the other side of the pond. Having social networks here would allow them do to so easily. To that I have to say no thanks.
> Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American),
Saying that the manipulation was done by the UK because Cambridge Analytica happens to be Brittish completely misconstrues what happened.
> Cambridge Analytica was working for United States Senator Ted Cruz using data harvested from millions of people's Facebook accounts without their consent
> Facebook later confirmed that it actually had data on potentially over 87 million users, with 70.6 million of those people from the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
It was very much a story of manipulation in the US being done by Americans, even if there were Brittish people involved too.
Your own source contradicts that claim?
"Progressive" is not how I would describe it.
[dead]
[flagged]
I don’t remember saying that or anything that remotely resembled that.
Would have been useful thinking if realised some 20 years ago
The second best time to plant a tree is now. Running these platforms will be getting cheaper with time too.
"Running these platforms will be getting cheaper with time too."
Most cloud systems that make scaling of platforms easier are American too. We (Europeans) aren't behind just in social media, but in most of the IT industry, and way too many critical elements of the total stack don't have reliable European counterparts.
We don’t need Amazon. Hetzner, Nix, Elixir is enough to build a Social network.
In my country 19 years ago we had a social media platform that for a long time was dominating and Facebook basically didn't exist internally. But that was long ago, now they are gone and everyone is on Facebook. On the other hand, if a change happened once it can happen twice.
This was realised and raised longer than 20 years ago, the primary problem being the decisionmakers who own the money have never cared beyond the 'Quarter'. The nerds are in pocket.
2005 is incidentally when StudiVZ was founded.
Taxpayer-funded public television that's already a thing in many European countries could be a decent model. No ads and much better incentive alignment. When you pay for it you are the customer not the goods.
What incentive alignment? In my country the publicly founded TV that I'm obligated to pay for each month is completely biased.
Tax founded/public != real/useful.
Also: I am NOT a "customer": since it's tax founded I am EXTORTED to pay for it.
A customer is someone who has the option to CEASE buying it. I do not have that option.
In my country public TV is decent with good programming and neutral political tone.
When we speak of dominant social networks today however they are runaway adtech cesspools, outright owned by malicious actors, or a combination thereof. That recurring "good stuff becomes shit stuff when getting popular" effect that people lament so much is in no small part caused by adverse profit seeking incentives. There is no dopamine, addiction and hence money in keeping your timeline chill, unpolarized, attached to median human reality rather than freak circus and not riling you up with ragebait.
And naturally anything created by man can be undone and subverted and it can be done to public media as well. This risk however does not outweigh a demonstrably pathetic status quo of the fiery pits of existing social media platforms.
So that prevents censorship? Seems like anything critical of the government would not be allowed.
Depends on whether they are reasonably independent. This works pretty well for e.g NRK, YLE, DR etc. Government can’t have a say in short term (less than an election cycle) funding, or who’s leading the Public Service company or similar. There can be no possible leverage from politicians, that’s the key. . The job of public service like any media is to be critical of power. The first sign of a country sliding towards being a non-democracy is political tampering with public service.
Depends on the government. Poland for example was ok with criticising the government on the national tv for many years, until the last swing to "law and order".
So there are no guarantees even if it works without censorship currently.
("law and order" means PiS, the previous rolling party) I think this is the biggest issue - the temptation and the power to take over the national media is always there, and all it takes to dismantle all the checks and balances is one determined filling party.
In the other hand, the US manages to control it's completely privatized media, so maybe being publically funded is not the issue.
It seems to me, this is less a technical challenge, but more of a cost challenge. Bandwidth and storage is not free. Freemium works for private business communities (Slack, Discord, Teams, etc.), yet public communication is monetized by attention (FB, IG, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit etc.).
Has someone done work on finding viable alternatives to the attention-based business models? As long as it's free, users will switch, but costs need to be managed somehow.
There seems to be two kinds of irony here going in two ways, I feel.
The anti-globalists by their actions seem to be creating a reaction which is leading to less global collaborations. Note the title uses the word "Sovereignty". Sovereignty is becoming more important as a reaction against the anti-globalism movement by those who want to support everyone anywhere working together over thin borders between peoples. In other words, isolationism breeds an isolationist reaction. We might see a stronger European identity versus others as a reaction against America's declaration of their identity over others.
Secondly, on an environmental front, we are seeing a move towards the reduction in global trade and travel between nations, and a reduction in developing world pollution as developed nations manufacture more things closer to home. So there's an irony in that the anti-environmentalists are causing a reaction that will help the global environment!
I do not see the irony as it just isolates the US from the rest of the world. Of course it is a loss for globalization without the US but I don't see that the rest of the world follow the US to isolate itself.
Yes I see what you mean. I suppose the challenge then is to elevate European sovereignty at the same time as keeping free trade, open borders and free movement. In a way the article could be saying "the world needs its own non-US software" without the sovereignty bit.
The European Union should develop a technology sector of its own to compete with those of China and the USA, but its fragmentation makes it harder for the continent to gather the capital and the consumers to make it possible for big tech companies to be created and thrive. We'll see in the future if there is political will to change this.
> but its fragmentation makes it harder for the continent to gather the capital and the consumers to make it possible for big tech companies to be created and thrive
Compared to what? Europe isn't as fragmented as it used to be, and that it isn't possible to create big tech companies actually sound like a benefit to me, I don't want that. I personally prefer smaller companies, even if they don't take over the world, and it's a fairly popular sentiment at least around me in south-west Europe.
> I personally prefer smaller companies, even if they don't take over the world
Me too, but Europe should be able to compete and provide alternatives to Big Tech which requires bigger scale companies to also exist. I think it's in Europe's best interest to be able to compete in this global market and become a technological leader. It's about relevancy but also potentially about European security.
Isn't it basically like saying we need to compete with ugliest totalitarian states as their cutting edge mass manipulation and torture methods give them the most efficient tools against terrorists which threaten the stability of the regime that official statistics show as 102.7% approved by its citizens?
It's about what the article says: "to counter disinformation, protect democratic integrity, preserve cultural diversity, and reclaim control from US corporate and geopolitical interests".
Compared with the United States, with Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.; and with China, with Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Ping An, etc.
Bigger companies have better economies and scale and can develop better tech…
Strangely this diversity within Europe does not seem to be a problem for companies active in armaments, cars and food supplies.
A social media platform doesn't have the same networking effect when everyone speaks different languages. If you make a social media site in country A, and get everyone to use it there, happened a lot in Europe, but it doesn't spread to neighboring countries since all users spoke a different language.
This means that only really large countries can compete here since they start out with a big userbase and its much more likely for a smaller countries population to migrate to a large app than vice versa.
Where I live it took to after 2010 until American social media was more popular than local ones.
TikTok only succeed because it came from a large country then? A country that doesn't even speak english, nor any european language. Oh, that was because the Chinese government was behind it with much money and influence says the EU.
So Nestle can only succeed because it comes from Switzland? A non-european country within the EU. ARM succeeds because it is British and outside the EU.
Lets face it, the EU cannot create a) global cloud services (aka AWS), b) global search engine (aka google), c) global social media and d) global tech infrastructure (i.e. GPU chips). Only everyone else can do those things because .... well because the EU has so many separate cultures and languages. So cooperation is impossible.
EU can build giant particle accelerators, a space agency and a bureaucracy to stifle any innovation that isn't lead by some large established european consultancy company. EU can organise a huge increase in military spending. The EU can build fences around europe to ensure refugees don't get in.
But the EU cannot build a single search engine of global note. Yeck Google is simply too good. Even DuckDuckGo has managed to become a competitor but the EU? Too hard. Too fucking hard for the EU.
Fuck I'm sick and tired of hearing the poor EU complain about technology. It's been long enough and yet the EU cannot seem to compete. Remember when it came clear that the NSA was spying on European leaders? Well what has happened since? Nothing. Nichts. Rien. Niente. Nada. Nic.
The EU is rapidly becoming a giant open-air mueseum for tourists coming from countries that can do tech.
> TikTok only succeed because it came from a large country then?
And USA is going to buy TikTok, just like they did almost every European tech company. You don't see what is happening here, do you? Bigger tech companies eat smaller ones because software is much more prone to networking effects than other industries.
> Fuck I'm sick and tired of hearing the poor EU complain about technology
You are the one complaining, I just explained why it happened like it happened.
> Lets face it, the EU cannot create d) global tech infrastructure (i.e. GPU chips).
AMSL is European, you are just wrong here, the whole worlds tech industry depends on AMSL. Europe is very strong in many industries, just not software. It is USA that can't do tech hardware, its all made in Europe and Asia now.
> AMSL is European
At least we Europeans have the tools to build chips ... unfortunately we don't use those tools.
Why is that? Because no EU country has a large enough userbase? Or is because regulation to protect our "environment"? Or did someone forget to click "yes accept all cookies" GDPR banner?
> Europe is very strong in many industries,
Regulations being an up & coming one.
Just look what's happening to the food industry in the US thanks to regulations.
When a loaded guy in the US dies sooner than the low class in Spain, something it's really wrong with your nutrition, healthcare and tons of troubles to be able to walk to a nearby store.
European here. You know nil about Europe. Europe has been using English as the de facto language in tech/science since decades. Sorry if I burst your American bubble.
My Mastodon server (n=1) is hosted in Frankfurt on a free VM and doing good since 2 years. Automatic updates via docker compose and crontab. I can recommend this solution.
Where you get the free VM from?
A US company I don't want to name here.
Europe needs multiple competing social media platforms.
And to achieve that they need to realize that all the regulation they aimed at facebook can only be satisfied by entities that have facebook's money.
And thus, they're adding barriers to entry that ensure they won't have multiple competing social media platforms.
> And to achieve that they need to realize that all the regulation they aimed at facebook can only be satisfied by entities that have facebook's money.
I disagree with your claim. Can you tell me why you think that is?
You can still sell advertisement without collecting and processing large amounts of personal data. I would claim that it's even better if your ads are based on the in-page content, than users' personal information.
At the same time, legislation such as Digital Markets Act applies to large entities (currently singled out), and further compliance is going to apply to new platforms when they become "large enough".
Eh, not the privacy regulations. The stuff like the UK's whatever act that basically requires forums to have a lawyer on retainer.
Or strict time limits on removing content that put a lower limit on staff.
After Boeing became big enough to become a national security risk, the EU worked together and set up Airbus.
I want the EU to recognize the Microsoft/Intel/Amazon cluster as an even bigger national security risk, get some vision, and set up a competitor. It isn't even that hard, choose some OSS tools, give a core cluster to different countries and pour money into upgrading the quality enough and deploy some hardware. Then require EU governements to use them.
The article is using Europe and the European Union interchangeably so I’m not sure who the subject is.
If the 27 EU members than backdoor actors like Hungary are a bigger problem.
EU has almost no AI, yet is the world leader in AI .... regulation. No upstart social network would have the funds to ensure GDPR compliance and all the other rules that get added along the way. If someone has a business idea for one, they move to the US cause it's easier to start. Mistral AI is expanding to California. The solution would be less bureaucracy and regulation.
DeepMind was EU based, for example, before Google bought them. When I worked three, they were still London based (and in EU). Are they American now? American capital controls most of the AI, but that doesn't mean Europeans are incapable of AI research.
Also I think the push for AI alignment is American. At least three AI alignment people somehow always think that forcing I to adopt American values of the only correct and moral thing to do. Isn't that similar?
Facebook's engagement algorithms directly contributed to the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar[1]. Meta refused to take responsibility and argued that it's up to governments to regulate social media, not Meta. Then they opposed all efforts to regulate them.
People didn't care.
However, the current poop-storm the U.S. has caused is making a lot of people wake up care about precisely this sort of thing. e.g. Canadians have finally realized that being more economically engaged North-South with the U.S. than East-West with other Canadian provinces is a very dumb thing that makes Canada extremely vulnerable to a foreign power that can no longer be relied upon. Measures that have been long viewed as "good ideas" are finally being enacted.
Don't say, "Nobody cares about FOSS alternatives to American social media." They haven't, until now. Now is a unique moment in history and the perfect time to switch.
Social media platforms are online communities. Their biggest asset is not algorithms or servers, but the people using them. What is Facebook or Twitter or Reddit without the users? Nothing. Invest your time and effort in the alternatives now. This is a rare opportunity.
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Here's the thing. You can't force people to use a social network. Literally no one cares about this stuff.
There's a reason why there are like 5 social networks while thousands of people want to "make the next Facebook."
If Meta is a threat, then ban it. People will cry and maybe then new alternatives may emerge. But you still need skilled people who'd rather work for you than accept Facebook's $400k offers. Good luck with EU funding.
Make a social network for politicians and journalists, also open to everyone else who then wants to comment on their discussions, but with their real identity.
The World needs decentralized internet independent from big tech
"counter disinformation, protect democratic integrity, preserve cultural diversity"
So we need a way to censor things we disagree with.
Yes propaganda is a very real threat and being able to counter it is important.
Of course every platform censors things, it just varies about what is acceptable and what isn't.
Nerds mostly lack empathy so they cant understand why distributed tech/mastodon doesnt get adopted by non technical people
Same is true for every country.
Europe needs sovereign, authentic and non selfcensoring citizens.
Yes but how?
EU Directive to mandate the creation of a Truth and Democracy Committee that will run a social media platform financed by a EU-wide tax on everything "obviously not good for you".
Yes, this is sarcasm...
Just put up some lemmy servers and mastodon servers. Why make it hard? We all need to go out and touch grass more anyway.
The average person doesn’t care about this. The ones complaining about “influence” are the ones in power who don’t want that power threatened. Our motorcycle racing group in Spain — they’re all on Insta and WhatsApp and perfectly fine about it. They aren’t saying “we need to get off these platforms because of Brexit or whatever.” They use these platforms to talk about and coordinate among people with shared interests. X works very well in Catalonia as well — usually where people get breaking alerts and information on freeway closures, weather alerts, etc. it works great — most people don’t care about the politics.
So if Romania launches a wildly popular social media site, that’s good for Spanish sovereignty?
The article is more about "European sovereignty" and not individual countries with the premise that EU countries are more aligned with each other than the US.
It’s a European alternative so yes. It operates in a legal framework where Spain makes the rules rather than in one where they don’t.
Be careful not to appear "far right" by putting your own country above the EU...
If EU member launches it, it’s good for the EU
> GDPR vs the US surveillance state
Chat Control vs the US surveillance state would be a more appropriate comparison and the US surveillance state only wants access to unencrypted data, but leaves you free to encrypt.
> Economic extraction
Trumpian logic.
> Erasing Europe’s diversity
The opposite is true. I can watch shows from all over Europe in the original language on Netflix, follow journalists from all over europe on Twitter, subscribe to r/europe on reddit.
This article is just a propaganda piece.
I am getting tired of the the tropes such as this one: Europe is pro-privacy and the US is anti-privacy. This is simply not true.
It may have been true a while ago but this time has come and gone.
> While the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enshrines privacy as a fundamental right, US platforms remain bound by laws like the CLOUD Act, which grants American authorities access to data stored anywhere in the world. In 2022, the European Data Protection Board fined Meta for transferring EU user data to US servers, citing risks of NSA surveillance. Despite the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, experts warn that European data remains vulnerable to US intelligence overreach.
The EU is currently looking at breaking EtoE so that it can unleash an AI system to detect suspicious messages and images in your chat message, emails, private conversations with loved ones and so on. That's for our own good of course. Nothing nefarious here.
> US platforms siphon billions from Europe’s digital economy. In 2022, Meta reported €4.3 billion in EU revenue but paid an effective tax rate of 8.5% through Irish loopholes—€2.5 billion less than standard EU corporate rates. Google and Apple similarly route profits through tax havens, depriving European governments of funds needed for tech innovation.
I won't deny that Meta at al are using loopholes to reduce their tax bills but saying that this money would be used to fuel tech innovation is just not credible. Most likely, this cash would be used to plug the government's deficits and build weapons.
Also whoever wrote this probably forgets that there are costs associated with that revenue. If there was such a social media platform in Europe with the same scale at Facebook, it would required 10s of thousand of people to maintain and develop.
Considering the overall cost of an employee in Europe, I am not certain that there would be much left to tax after all these costs had been paid.
> US platforms homogenize culture by privileging English-language content aligning with the worldview of the current US presidential administration and US billionaires.
That is also false, if you are on Facebook for example you can join local groups that are in your own language. Same for your News feed. On X (although I go there rarely), my feed is composed of posts in 3 different languages.
If people see mostly content in English ,it is probably because those things are more interesting than other pieces of content in their own language.
As for the worldview, would this person have a problem with the worldview that people support if this worldview was the official worldview of the EU? I think not!
> Moreover, the EU is a regulatory superpower which can use legislation to support homegrown social media platforms. For example, the EU can mandate US “gatekeeper” platforms (per the Digital Markets Act) to interconnect with European alternatives, allowing cross-platform interactions.
And here we are back to the same old thing once again. More regulations and more coercion. If the EU can't compete, no problem, we will just force every foreign company to do our bidding because we can't win without forcing them to give us a leg up. Is that the European destiny that this person is talking about?
And here is another thing that reeks of self-contraction: we should not use the US platforms but we should force the US platforms so that they may help jump-start our own platforms despite the fact that the US platforms are bad except when we need them.
This is a really disjointed post that makes very little sense in my opinion.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Wait until you discover Patriot Act and people being deported today because of "Anti-American" comments in social media such as being opposed to Trump.
There is Mastodon already, with the servers in the EU.
Mastodon’s distributed nature makes it hard to adopt and find friends and services. Explaining why it is so hard to use to non tech people is really not easy to do. It is a platform for nerds and its complexity will gatekeep others unfortunately.
Bluesky model is working better.
I have accounts on both and BlueSky is more active and widely adopted while Mastodon has only geeks/nerds on it.
You can disagree with this assessment but it is what I see.
I've never seen Europe flex as much as they have over the past few weeks.
Trump has really encouraged Europe to spread their wings.
Nobody needs social media. It's a fad. There were times without it. While we didn't live in caves. Now the smombies don't even see the shadows on the wall, because they are in another thrall. Both aren't needed. Maybe a solar-storm will reset that shit. Maybe something else. One way or another, I don't bother.
That people will spend more time online is a pretty safe bet in my eyes. From there it follows people will want to communicate. There's no future without some form of social networks. You're commenting in one right now.
It's not a fad, it's the commercialization of gossip, one of humanity's oldest communication networks. It is here to stay, and it has been weaponized.
Isn’t it a democratisation of communication? I mean before social media the friction between you and your soapbox was much bigger.
Actually, no, not at all, and the creation of the phrase claiming social media to be a democratization of communication is wonderfully crafted manipulation. It is the opposite, it is gossip, as in the first false negative is free and any counter truth is expensive to the point of being impossible. It is the perfect communications medium for a powerful subculture to render the rest of culture babbling idiots. Which is what we have today. The "news" reports on emotional fronts, and the factual information of civilization's operations are opaque beyond a stock value. The "news" is truly talking heads, not actually giving actionable information, unless that action is a paralysis of fear. We have a plethora of tyrannical fiefdoms - the corporations the majority of humans are employed and maintained on stagnant wages rendering them 1-2 paychecks away from total loss of their accumulated wealth. The civilization is a farce, cruel, and immature to the point of insanity.
You could say one follows the other on a large enough scale.
As fads go it sure is long term and widely adopted. Thus I don’t think it is fad in the normal sense of the word.
I don’t think the widespread adoption - or lack thereof - is a good indicator for being a fad or not being one. That being said, I don’t think social media is one.
However, the original commenter is right by saying that social media is far from being a necessity.
Generally I also understand the increasingly negative sentiment towards social media and the assumption that it does far more harm than it does good doesn’t seem far fetched anymore
> However, the original commenter is right by saying that social media is far from being a necessity.
We need something to allow people to organize around friends/topics/places and discover ideas, share, make sense of the world, act, etc. Reddit, Facebook, and twitter served those needs. I prefer social media over traditional newspapers that are very top down.
Smaller forums and chat servers did that just fine prior to Google shoving them to page 500+ them in favor of the government created platforms and unified narratives. [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][documentary][44 mins]
In a sense, nothing beyond food, water and basic shelter is a necessity. Humans of the same species certainly lived somehow without whatever tech we can think of, including fire and clothing.
That said, I deleted my FB and TW/X account and while I don't miss their toxicity, I am more isolated than ever. I noticed that even for older people, their willingness to meet in person has gone down and their ability to reply to e-mails, including purely coordinational ones, is seriously shot.
You may be right, but in that case Europe sorely needs legislation to wind down the use of social media by governments for communicating towards citizens.
WhatsApp is social media. That’s one of my main channels of coordination.
Usenet and Dove/FidoNet still work and you can access them over NNTP.
Slow paced, much less drama, intelligent discussions. And you can get all your threaded chats offline.
> Usenet and Dove/FidoNet still work and you can access them over NNTP
Great for nerds but not going to solve society’s larger scale needs.
Put a simplified and unified UI in front of Usenet with RGB LED's and put it on everyone's refrigerator, car infotainment accident distraction panel, smart watch, smart toilet. Have Carls Jr. fund it. Implement text-to-speech and speech-to-text. Talk to all your family and friends over Usenet via the smart watch, toilet, etc... What devices did I miss?
They commented, on a social media platform...
I mean, honestly, if we're ever going to figure out what parts of these platforms are beneficial and which are harmful, we really need to start being more specific about what we're talking about.
And I hardly think you can call something as long-lived as social media of any form a 'fad'
Web forums are not social media, but I can see how they might be confused.
HN is more link aggregator / web forum than what the term social media has come to represent. I will grant you that the term 'social media' literally could cover any media that is social, but that's not historically how it has been applied.
Here there is no algorithmic bubble curated by engagement algorithm. Any attention is managed by the human brain, which is way healthier for the individual as they aren't being manuipulated into addictive engagement and groups as it tends less to form highly refined group think bubbles.
He's right, social media is the a big cause of the current unrest, not something that must be saved.
I would agree that communication platforms should probably not be open to spying or manipulation, but end-to-end encryption goes a long way there. The remaining problem is access being turned off, which can be solved by not relying on government controlled infrastructure (like electricity grid, networks, etc.).
So the person is right. The answer isn't a new site, it is more in person comms as redundancy.
How do you define social media? The use of algorithms to drive engagement? HN does use algorithms, though, such as upvotes/downvotes/flags influencing which stories/comments are seen more, and then there's the second chance pool. These algorithms may be more basic than those of, say, Facebook, but they are there. So what's the difference?
The ability to 'follow', having 'followers', thereby creating feeds and incentives.
Incentives for what, exactly? Have more followers, which by itself only makes one feel good through validation of others? Validation other platforms that don't have followers still manage to achieve?
I think the worst part about social media is the model for monetization and the incentives it creates
Certainly, but this can be said of quite literally any business endeavor - but I don't see people getting up in arms about other types of business in such an abstract sense - there aren't large groups of people calling for us to ban video games entirely [0], but we do advocate for, at the least, mitigating harmful practices such as loot boxes.
0 - Yes, some people do, but I think we can agree it's not nearly as popular a view as those pushing against 'social media'