8 ms·

I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives. No one uses these platforms. Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these Americ

I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives. No one uses these platforms. Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches. https://tube.network.europa.eu https://tube.network.europa.eu URL looks like a scam website. There is no way tech illiterate people can use these websites. Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views.

arlort 4y ago
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead I'll assume this is made in jest, as for this > I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives. I don't know, and I can't say I believe this should be a priority of any kind, but it probably costs them very little in both cash and man-hours, has the benefit of being self hosted rather than relying exclusively on third parties and I appreciate their endorsement of these federated platforms however small
berkes 4y ago
As far as can be counted, the user count of just mastodon users, has surpassed six million [1]. > No one uses these platforms. Six million is not no-one. It's relatively few, but absolutely a great number. I'm certain you'll have a hard time finding social networks with these amounts of users, that don't belong to one of the tech monopolies. Or with such numbers where the EU has no account or official presence. [¹] https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/109297455066070237 https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/10929745506607...
- scrollaway 4y ago
  It’s also not just users. Mastodon instances can have plenty of readers who never make an account. Websites like Twitter often push hard to create an account but the 1:10 rule apply… if there’s 6 million users, there’s probably around 60 million readers.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > the user count of just mastodon users, has surpassed six million That must make the users of Gab hate them even more...
- rsynnott 4y ago
  It's also notable how many journalists (and even news outlets; the Irish paper of record just created an account, say) are suddenly using Mastodon. Realistically, the target audience of EU twitter feeds is mostly journalists; very few normal people will follow any sort of government twitter feed, but journalists will. Government bodies tend to use Twitter as a sort of low latency press release mechanism, and Mastodon will do fine for that, should there be problems with Twitter.
jacooper 4y ago
> I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives Because they don't cost much? If at all? > Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches. Because if they did, the US is going to freak out about foreign influence. just look at how the media is reporting on Saudi Arabia investing in Twitter. Saudi Arabia is one of biggest users for Twitter in the World(1), its where everything official gets announced, almost everyone has a Twitter account. > https://tube.network.europa.eu https://tube.network.europa.eu URL looks like a scam website. I agree, the URL is very weird, maybe mastodon/puretube.official.eu would've been better > There is no way tech illiterate people can use these websites. > Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views. They can use this as a backup, or as a source of truth for any official content from the EU. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-twitter-users-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-... You need to take into account the percentage of users to the population, in SA its close to 50%.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  > Because they don't cost much? If at all? You are probably wrong here, but would be nice if EU was transparent enough to tell us how much it costs. It is a server management, patch management, content management, and etc.. i can imagine that isn't as cheap as you think, done by EU employees that are normally well paid.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Its an Instance only for EU officials, there aren't many users.
    - pelasaco 4y ago
      Their staff is around 32k. people. But still server maintenance, content management, etc.. I would love to know how much such services costs to us.
simion314 4y ago
>I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives. >Why don't they buy a considerable stake .... What? instead of investing in a server and some open source code we should bive Elon a few millions? Are you Elon or how does this logic work ? News websites can link to twitter or any other website as easily , is not like the average EU citizens is actually following any EU institutions (no idea about politicians, who is the regulat guy that wants political pam), I only see twitter embeded or screenshot in news webistes, the experience would not differ if the text is on a higher quality website but with less active users.
- Ecstatify 4y ago
  It's not about the cost of the service, it's that it's a pointless endeavour it's never going to succeed. Every social media company succeeds or fails based on the network effect. Where did I mention Elon?
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > It's not about the cost of the service, it's that it's a pointless endeavour it's never going to succeed. Every social media company succeeds or fails based on the network effect. I think that's a valid concern if your main goal is to create a social network, but less so if you're trying to create a reliable and trustworthy organ for government communication. > Where did I mention Elon? This: > > Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches. does not refer explicitly to Elon, but Twitter is a much more common organ of government communication than any other big American social-media company, so it seems disingenuous to pretend that this wasn't at least suggestive of buying a considerable stake in Twitter (and so giving money, indirectly, to Elon).
    - Ecstatify 4y ago
      Disingenuous, huh? previous poster interpreted "buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies" as give Elon Musk money.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
I am guessing that you missed that the legality of US companies in the EU is very much under question ? > the US takes the view that foreigners don't have privacy rights. I doubt that the US has a future as the cloud provider of the world, if non-US persons have no rights under their laws https://noyb.eu/en/new-us-executive-order-unlikely-satisfy-eu-law https://noyb.eu/en/new-us-executive-order-unlikely-satisfy-e... This has been a looong time in the coming, maybe since at least the Patriot Act (2001), and definitely since the Snowden scandal... It's indeed the US companies dominance in the EU which explains all the denial around this, and of course the still good relations between the countries : compare with the ban in the USA of the Chinese company Huawei... (which is an issue in EU too !)... or what the reaction would be if it was Russia instead of the USA !
riffic 4y ago
> No one uses these platforms. nO oNe UsEs MaDtOdOn I'm personally really tired of this trope, so instead of offering reasonable replies I'm just going to return the same spirit of ridicule back to you (despite HN guidelines, lol)
- Ecstatify 4y ago
  So you're arguing that lots of people use Mastodon? Even on Hacker News no one is talking about it Mastodon: 536 results Facebook: 276071 results Twitter: 371583 results
  - M2Ys4U 4y ago
    > So you're arguing that lots of people use Mastodon? It has 1 million active users so... yeah, lots of people use Mastodon.
viraptor 4y ago
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies One is cost - a peertube instance costs thousands of costs including employee costs, while a considerable stake in youtube would cost billions. Two Second is control - why pay lots to hopefully get some special rules that need to be maintained over time to (for example) prevent any ads affecting the content when you can host yourself and not have the issue in the first place.
hans_castorp 4y ago
> No one uses these platforms. Musk is certainly helping that platform. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109300967725833789 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109300967725833789 > Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool.
pelasaco 4y ago
people are going to down-vote you to death, since HN wants to see mastodon winning against Tweeter.

arlort 4y ago

> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead I'll assume this is made in jest, as for this > I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives. I don't know, and I can't say I believe this should be a priority of any kind, but it probably costs them very little in both cash and man-hours, has the benefit of being self hosted rather than relying exclusively on third parties and I appreciate their endorsement of these federated platforms however small

berkes 4y ago

As far as can be counted, the user count of just mastodon users, has surpassed six million [1]. > No one uses these platforms. Six million is not no-one. It's relatively few, but absolutely a great number. I'm certain you'll have a hard time finding social networks with these amounts of users, that don't belong to one of the tech monopolies. Or with such numbers where the EU has no account or official presence. [¹] https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/109297455066070237 https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/10929745506607...

scrollaway 4y ago
It’s also not just users. Mastodon instances can have plenty of readers who never make an account. Websites like Twitter often push hard to create an account but the 1:10 rule apply… if there’s 6 million users, there’s probably around 60 million readers.
dane-pgp 4y ago
> the user count of just mastodon users, has surpassed six million That must make the users of Gab hate them even more...
rsynnott 4y ago
It's also notable how many journalists (and even news outlets; the Irish paper of record just created an account, say) are suddenly using Mastodon. Realistically, the target audience of EU twitter feeds is mostly journalists; very few normal people will follow any sort of government twitter feed, but journalists will. Government bodies tend to use Twitter as a sort of low latency press release mechanism, and Mastodon will do fine for that, should there be problems with Twitter.

jacooper 4y ago

> I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives Because they don't cost much? If at all? > Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches. Because if they did, the US is going to freak out about foreign influence. just look at how the media is reporting on Saudi Arabia investing in Twitter. Saudi Arabia is one of biggest users for Twitter in the World(1), its where everything official gets announced, almost everyone has a Twitter account. > https://tube.network.europa.eu https://tube.network.europa.eu URL looks like a scam website. I agree, the URL is very weird, maybe mastodon/puretube.official.eu would've been better > There is no way tech illiterate people can use these websites. > Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views. They can use this as a backup, or as a source of truth for any official content from the EU. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-twitter-users-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-... You need to take into account the percentage of users to the population, in SA its close to 50%.

pelasaco 4y ago
> Because they don't cost much? If at all? You are probably wrong here, but would be nice if EU was transparent enough to tell us how much it costs. It is a server management, patch management, content management, and etc.. i can imagine that isn't as cheap as you think, done by EU employees that are normally well paid.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Its an Instance only for EU officials, there aren't many users.
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    Their staff is around 32k. people. But still server maintenance, content management, etc.. I would love to know how much such services costs to us.

simion314 4y ago

>I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives. >Why don't they buy a considerable stake .... What? instead of investing in a server and some open source code we should bive Elon a few millions? Are you Elon or how does this logic work ? News websites can link to twitter or any other website as easily , is not like the average EU citizens is actually following any EU institutions (no idea about politicians, who is the regulat guy that wants political pam), I only see twitter embeded or screenshot in news webistes, the experience would not differ if the text is on a higher quality website but with less active users.

Ecstatify 4y ago
It's not about the cost of the service, it's that it's a pointless endeavour it's never going to succeed. Every social media company succeeds or fails based on the network effect. Where did I mention Elon?
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > It's not about the cost of the service, it's that it's a pointless endeavour it's never going to succeed. Every social media company succeeds or fails based on the network effect. I think that's a valid concern if your main goal is to create a social network, but less so if you're trying to create a reliable and trustworthy organ for government communication. > Where did I mention Elon? This: > > Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches. does not refer explicitly to Elon, but Twitter is a much more common organ of government communication than any other big American social-media company, so it seems disingenuous to pretend that this wasn't at least suggestive of buying a considerable stake in Twitter (and so giving money, indirectly, to Elon).
  - Ecstatify 4y ago
    Disingenuous, huh? previous poster interpreted "buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies" as give Elon Musk money.

BlueTemplar 4y ago

I am guessing that you missed that the legality of US companies in the EU is very much under question ? > the US takes the view that foreigners don't have privacy rights. I doubt that the US has a future as the cloud provider of the world, if non-US persons have no rights under their laws https://noyb.eu/en/new-us-executive-order-unlikely-satisfy-eu-law https://noyb.eu/en/new-us-executive-order-unlikely-satisfy-e... This has been a looong time in the coming, maybe since at least the Patriot Act (2001), and definitely since the Snowden scandal... It's indeed the US companies dominance in the EU which explains all the denial around this, and of course the still good relations between the countries : compare with the ban in the USA of the Chinese company Huawei... (which is an issue in EU too !)... or what the reaction would be if it was Russia instead of the USA !

riffic 4y ago

> No one uses these platforms. nO oNe UsEs MaDtOdOn I'm personally really tired of this trope, so instead of offering reasonable replies I'm just going to return the same spirit of ridicule back to you (despite HN guidelines, lol)

Ecstatify 4y ago
So you're arguing that lots of people use Mastodon? Even on Hacker News no one is talking about it Mastodon: 536 results Facebook: 276071 results Twitter: 371583 results
- M2Ys4U 4y ago
  > So you're arguing that lots of people use Mastodon? It has 1 million active users so... yeah, lots of people use Mastodon.

viraptor 4y ago

> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies One is cost - a peertube instance costs thousands of costs including employee costs, while a considerable stake in youtube would cost billions. Two Second is control - why pay lots to hopefully get some special rules that need to be maintained over time to (for example) prevent any ads affecting the content when you can host yourself and not have the issue in the first place.

hans_castorp 4y ago

> No one uses these platforms. Musk is certainly helping that platform. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109300967725833789 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109300967725833789 > Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool.

pelasaco 4y ago

people are going to down-vote you to death, since HN wants to see mastodon winning against Tweeter.