9 ms·

Europe needs its own social media platforms to safeguard sovereignty

108 points by robtherobber 2y ago

dankle 2y ago
Yes but how?
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  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...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fsflover 2y ago
There is Mastodon already, with the servers in the EU.
- bhouston 2y ago
  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.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    Mastodon is not hard to use. You register at any instance and use it as if instances don't exist. Bluesky will repeat the fate of Twitter. It's centralized and for-profit.
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
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.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  WhatsApp is social media. That’s one of my main channels of coordination.
- bondarchuk 2y ago
  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.
- bhouston 2y ago
  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.
  - moooo99 2y ago
    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
    - bhouston 2y ago
      > 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.
gizajob 2y ago
Would have been useful thinking if realised some 20 years ago
- kubb 2y ago
  The second best time to plant a tree is now. Running these platforms will be getting cheaper with time too.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    "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.
    - kubb 2y ago
      We don’t need Amazon. Hetzner, Nix, Elixir is enough to build a Social network.
- ginko 2y ago
  2005 is incidentally when StudiVZ was founded.
- bloqs 2y ago
  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.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  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.
varjag 2y ago
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.
- briandear 2y ago
  So that prevents censorship? Seems like anything critical of the government would not be allowed.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    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.
    - poincaredisk 2y ago
      ("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.
  - alkonaut 2y ago
    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.
- NotGMan 2y ago
  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.
teekert 2y ago
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.
- RadiozRadioz 2y ago
  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.
- bojan 2y ago
  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.
  - einpoklum 2y ago
    > 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.
  - psychoslave 2y ago
    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".
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    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.
marsven_422 2y ago
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seydor 2y ago
Social media is a misnomer. We should be calling them personal advertising services. The commercial part just makes the money.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  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.
haunter 2y ago
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.
briandear 2y ago
So if Romania launches a wildly popular social media site, that’s good for Spanish sovereignty?
- akmarinov 2y ago
  If EU member launches it, it’s good for the EU
- cbg0 2y ago
  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.
- alkonaut 2y ago
  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.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Be careful not to appear "far right" by putting your own country above the EU...
jart 2y ago
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.
bloqs 2y ago
Nerds mostly lack empathy so they cant understand why distributed tech/mastodon doesnt get adopted by non technical people
nottorp 2y ago
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.
- mhitza 2y ago
  > 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".
  - nottorp 2y ago
    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.
franczesko 2y ago
The World needs decentralized internet independent from big tech
kburman 2y ago
Same is true for every country.
skwee357 2y ago
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
- kubb 2y ago
  We need an alternative to the monstrosities that we have
  - skwee357 2y ago
    No. We need to let them die
    - kubb 2y ago
      The way to kill something is to take its nutrients (users).
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    It’s there. It’s called community, neighbors, friends. The outside.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    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.
qwertox 2y ago
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.
- diggan 2y ago
  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.
  - kubb 2y ago
    We need pseudonymity. Access only by court order like phone numbers.
    - qwertox 2y ago
      Why? There's nothing to gain from it. You'd have to stand by your word on that network.
      - anthk 2y ago
        Good luck with your Stasi/Gestapo wannabes there. We are fed up with neocons, fascists and stalinists.
        qwertox 2y ago
        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.
emigre 2y ago
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.
- diggan 2y ago
  > 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.
  - emigre 2y ago
    Compared with the United States, with Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.; and with China, with Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Ping An, etc.
  - dzhiurgis 2y ago
    Bigger companies have better economies and scale and can develop better tech…
  - emigre 2y ago
    > 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.
    - psychoslave 2y ago
      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?
ashvardanian 2y ago
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?
- alistairSH 2y ago
  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.
- amadeuspagel 2y ago
  The speed of light. Nothing truly dezentralized will ever be faster then the client-server model.
  - ashvardanian 2y ago
    I guess a 10 minute delay for content delivery is fine for most cases - shouldn't be the biggest issue, right?
banqjls 2y ago
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.
- dachworker 2y ago
  "Progressive" is not how I would describe it.
- diggan 2y ago
  > 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_Analytica_data_scandal 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.
  - jmull 2y ago
    Your own source contradicts that claim?
- i_love_retros 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - banqjls 2y ago
briandear 2y ago
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.
dylanmulvaney 2y ago
[flagged]
- anthk 2y ago
  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.
sureIy 2y ago
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.
- qwertox 2y ago
  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.
mediumsmart 2y ago
Europe needs sovereign, authentic and non selfcensoring citizens.
thinkingemote 2y ago
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!
- ndr42 2y ago
  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.
  - thinkingemote 2y ago
    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.
beloch 2y ago
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-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Helmut10001 2y ago
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.
- leonhard 2y ago
  Where you get the free VM from?
  - Helmut10001 2y ago
    A US company I don't want to name here.
pipes 2y ago
"counter disinformation, protect democratic integrity, preserve cultural diversity" So we need a way to censor things we disagree with.
- ta1243 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
no_throwaway 2y ago
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Zr01 2y ago
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.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  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?
john_texas 2y ago
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throwaway802 2y ago
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.
hyperman1 2y ago
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.
amadeuspagel 2y ago
> 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.
rdm_blackhole 2y ago
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.
EasyMark 2y ago
Just put up some lemmy servers and mastodon servers. Why make it hard? We all need to go out and touch grass more anyway.
jrepinc 2y ago
We have Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy... Let us just use what already exists and is decentralised/federated, is free as in freedom and opensource, has no rich oligarch behind it and controlling it and so on. We nned nothing new just more people using existing stuff that is already much better.
grimblee 2y ago
We need a EU-backed social media, paid with tax money and devoid of any predatory practices we commonly see on others.

108 points by robtherobber 2y ago

dankle 2y ago

Yes but how?

mytailorisrich 2y ago
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...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

fsflover 2y ago

There is Mastodon already, with the servers in the EU.

bhouston 2y ago
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.
- fsflover 2y ago
  Mastodon is not hard to use. You register at any instance and use it as if instances don't exist. Bluesky will repeat the fate of Twitter. It's centralized and for-profit.

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago

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.

dr_dshiv 2y ago
WhatsApp is social media. That’s one of my main channels of coordination.
bondarchuk 2y ago
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.
bhouston 2y ago
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.
- moooo99 2y ago
  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
  - bhouston 2y ago
    > 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.

gizajob 2y ago

Would have been useful thinking if realised some 20 years ago

kubb 2y ago
The second best time to plant a tree is now. Running these platforms will be getting cheaper with time too.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  "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.
  - kubb 2y ago
    We don’t need Amazon. Hetzner, Nix, Elixir is enough to build a Social network.
ginko 2y ago
2005 is incidentally when StudiVZ was founded.
bloqs 2y ago
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.
poincaredisk 2y ago
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.

varjag 2y ago

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.

briandear 2y ago
So that prevents censorship? Seems like anything critical of the government would not be allowed.
- viraptor 2y ago
  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.
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    ("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.
- alkonaut 2y ago
  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.
NotGMan 2y ago
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.

teekert 2y ago

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.

RadiozRadioz 2y ago
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.
bojan 2y ago
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.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  > 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.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  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".
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  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.

marsven_422 2y ago

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seydor 2y ago

Social media is a misnomer. We should be calling them personal advertising services. The commercial part just makes the money.

EasyMark 2y ago
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.

haunter 2y ago

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.

briandear 2y ago

So if Romania launches a wildly popular social media site, that’s good for Spanish sovereignty?

akmarinov 2y ago
If EU member launches it, it’s good for the EU
cbg0 2y ago
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.
alkonaut 2y ago
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.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
Be careful not to appear "far right" by putting your own country above the EU...

jart 2y ago

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.

bloqs 2y ago

Nerds mostly lack empathy so they cant understand why distributed tech/mastodon doesnt get adopted by non technical people

nottorp 2y ago

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.

mhitza 2y ago
> 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".
- nottorp 2y ago
  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.

franczesko 2y ago

The World needs decentralized internet independent from big tech

kburman 2y ago

Same is true for every country.

skwee357 2y ago

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

kubb 2y ago
We need an alternative to the monstrosities that we have
- skwee357 2y ago
  No. We need to let them die
  - kubb 2y ago
    The way to kill something is to take its nutrients (users).
- barbazoo 2y ago
  It’s there. It’s called community, neighbors, friends. The outside.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  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.

qwertox 2y ago

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.

diggan 2y ago
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.
- kubb 2y ago
  We need pseudonymity. Access only by court order like phone numbers.
  - qwertox 2y ago
    Why? There's nothing to gain from it. You'd have to stand by your word on that network.
    - anthk 2y ago
      Good luck with your Stasi/Gestapo wannabes there. We are fed up with neocons, fascists and stalinists.
      - qwertox 2y ago
        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.

emigre 2y ago

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.

diggan 2y ago
> 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.
- emigre 2y ago
  Compared with the United States, with Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.; and with China, with Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Ping An, etc.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  Bigger companies have better economies and scale and can develop better tech…
- emigre 2y ago
  > 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.
  - psychoslave 2y ago
    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?

ashvardanian 2y ago

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?

alistairSH 2y ago
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.
amadeuspagel 2y ago
The speed of light. Nothing truly dezentralized will ever be faster then the client-server model.
- ashvardanian 2y ago
  I guess a 10 minute delay for content delivery is fine for most cases - shouldn't be the biggest issue, right?

banqjls 2y ago

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.

dachworker 2y ago
"Progressive" is not how I would describe it.
diggan 2y ago
> 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_Analytica_data_scandal 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.
- jmull 2y ago
  Your own source contradicts that claim?
i_love_retros 2y ago
[flagged]
- banqjls 2y ago

briandear 2y ago

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.

dylanmulvaney 2y ago

[flagged]

anthk 2y ago
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.

sureIy 2y ago

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.

qwertox 2y ago
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.

mediumsmart 2y ago

Europe needs sovereign, authentic and non selfcensoring citizens.

thinkingemote 2y ago

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!

ndr42 2y ago
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.
- thinkingemote 2y ago
  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.

beloch 2y ago

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-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Helmut10001 2y ago

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.

leonhard 2y ago
Where you get the free VM from?
- Helmut10001 2y ago
  A US company I don't want to name here.

pipes 2y ago

"counter disinformation, protect democratic integrity, preserve cultural diversity" So we need a way to censor things we disagree with.

ta1243 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

no_throwaway 2y ago

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Zr01 2y ago

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.

poincaredisk 2y ago
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?

john_texas 2y ago

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throwaway802 2y ago

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.

hyperman1 2y ago

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.

amadeuspagel 2y ago

> 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.

rdm_blackhole 2y ago

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.

EasyMark 2y ago

Just put up some lemmy servers and mastodon servers. Why make it hard? We all need to go out and touch grass more anyway.

jrepinc 2y ago

We have Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy... Let us just use what already exists and is decentralised/federated, is free as in freedom and opensource, has no rich oligarch behind it and controlling it and so on. We nned nothing new just more people using existing stuff that is already much better.

grimblee 2y ago

We need a EU-backed social media, paid with tax money and devoid of any predatory practices we commonly see on others.