5 ms·

The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws

43 points by doener 8mo ago

b65e8bee43c2ed0 8mo ago
identity verified, approved opinions only, and dead on arrival. most humans abhor sterile environments.
- jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
  > most humans abhor sterile environments. i abhor short sterile attitudes like this! > approved opinions only i fully expect most users of eurosky will not experience any censorship. this is just such a ridiculous over-dramatization, that is so preposterously lopsided. please man. this sounds like the tin foil hat wearing nutcase shit that is ruining the US and the world right now. there's ways to debate & talk about these things, but this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug. you are 100% on one side, totally polarized into spot, and it's clear nothing is going to budge you: that's not a very hackerly spirit, and being so closed to possibility should be disqualifying.
  - 5o1ecist 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - lynx97 8mo ago
      Cypher begs to differ... Ignorance is BLISS.
  - philipallstar 8mo ago
    > this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug How you could imagine someone calmly setting out their stall of ideas isn't starting conversation, but you making up their emotions as a counter is?
- nephihaha 8mo ago
  I agree with what you are saying here, but social media is pretty sterile. It's heavily censored as it is. YouTube comments is awful for it, with hiding comments and all the rest.* I find it next to useless. Faecebook has told me about birthdays and people's bereavements weeks after they've happened. It looks awful if I reply to those late. _ * I'm often confused by why. YouTube hid a thread in which someone pointed out the A Team had reused a Blues Brother joke.
- lpcvoid 8mo ago
  If identity verification is what it takes to curb russian trolls, then be it.
  - dhdiodododnd 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - vaylian 8mo ago
    That's just throwing the baby out with the bath water. In my experience, the best kind of online interactions are those where people don't have to be limited by what their offline ID is.
    - spwa4 8mo ago
      Why would anyone want any kind of non-politician-approved interaction? Are you a traitor or a paedophile? In fact give me all your chat history and let's go through it, because I have no idea what we'd even approve. (dixit every European government) https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ Oh and all your private photos too. Think of the children! (and let's NOT discuss that when it comes to child abuse in Europe BY FAR the biggest culprits are European government employees. School teachers, and people in youth services. That's >90% of all child abusers in the EU. The youth services part of that would be the EXACT individuals screaming about thinking of the children. Don't worry. They've put rules in the Chat Control legislation protecting themselves from ... well the law)
  - Yizahi 8mo ago
    Reputation system and elected or at least transparent moderation is what's needed to curb any bad actors. In fact, identity verification would make it easier for spammers, just buy stolen identities in bulk in darknet for a few dollars and fire away. Facebook supposedly leans very hard into real identities and the end result is a dead wasteland of bots talking to bots. And on the other hand, there are plenty of regular forums with not a sign of bad actors, because they were collectively exterminated and the newcomers are vetted.
  - nephihaha 8mo ago
- johanneskanybal 8mo ago
  Well current social media has been unusable for a couple of years surely?
petcat 8mo ago
> built and run in Europe This looks like it's just the open source BlueSky instance and AT protocol? That's an American project and company, right? Is it just that the instance itself is run in Europe? What is "built in Europe"?
- workfromspace 8mo ago
  Good point. OTOH, in that sense, internet (or more specifically, WWW) is technically built in Europe, so can we say WWW is a European product? :D
  - VWWHFSfQ 8mo ago
    www was built in Europe but the Internet itself was built in USA! :D
  - petcat 8mo ago
    I wasn't trying to be pedantic. I was just hoping to see if it was a new and novel European social site project or if it was just spinning up an instance of an existing project.
    - workfromspace 8mo ago
      No worries, me too. And I agree with you as well.
- rkangel 8mo ago
  Yes, that does seem a bit of an odd claim. Possibly they're talking about the hosting being built? That said, I don't have an issue with using a US authored open source project for this. To use another example - PostgreSQL was originally US, but I don't have any problem with that being part of the deployment of Eurosky. That said, I would prefer that the Open Source system we were using didn't have a profit making (US) company as principal maintainer. I think AT has some technical advantages over Mastodon, but I prefer the governance of ActivityPub/Mastodon.
tobr 8mo ago
As a European, my impression is that things named something something ”Euro” tend to be cheap and low quality. I don’t think it’s possible to build a positive consumer brand around ”Eurosky”. I support the cause though - we probably need to find a catchy word like ”Brexit” or ”enshittification” to make it salient.
- philipallstar 8mo ago
  Elevator pitch could be "Wirecard for Social Media".
- lynx97 8mo ago
  When I read "Eurosky", Skyshield immediately came to mind. Sounds like a military project.
- wongarsu 8mo ago
  This is almost universally true for every national identity (or however we want to widen the term to include Euro). If you have a good product, you usually lead with that. "Made in X" becomes one bullet point in the list of things that make you great. If you lead with "made in X" or even make that your entire brand, that's a sign that you probably don't have much else to bring to the table. The only real exception are foods and beverages. And even there it's questionable
- SiempreViernes 8mo ago
  > Eurosky is a pan-European initiative spearheaded by a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists and civil society organizations A brit, a belgian and a german by the looks of their profiles, which are just their linkedin pages. Posting this to HN feels like some guys trying to do "growth hacking" with Brusselian characteristics. Honestly I even propose this conjecture: If you are in Europe you will learn about any truly European social media from some other source long before it appears on HN.
basemi 8mo ago
> [...] Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more [...]
lpcvoid 8mo ago
Great, registered. I hope it will take off.
gadders 8mo ago
"..ruled by our laws" = "Content under our political control"
- spiderfarmer 8mo ago
  Try criticising ICE on the recently freed Tiktok
- ben_w 8mo ago
  Which applies equally well to the US, US law, and US social media. What you get to choose is not the mere existence of that control, but given that both the EU and the US are democratically governed*, what that control means. * with differences: states are sovreign in EU, send representatives to Brussels; states are not sovreign in US, send representatives to Washington; differences of direct vs. indirect representation; US has a person who is president, EU has presidents plural of sub-institutions and in one case that's a country not a person; differences of who brings forward new laws to be debated (does anyone in US congress/senate even read laws before voting?); coallitions in EU, two party system in US; etc., but still both democratic
calgoo 8mo ago
Also, the name is.... Could they really not come up with something apart from a bluesky rip off? I understand they integrate with them etc, but still if you want to create a new app that you want actual people to use, then you need to be a little more creative. Thats ignoring the web design choices that others have commented on.
- INTPenis 8mo ago
  I think it's based on the bsky AT protocol, hence the name.
- croisillon 8mo ago
  High End Reliability Messaging European Service
  - petcat 8mo ago
    Highly European Relay Protocol Exchange Service
JuniperMesos 8mo ago
Competition is good, but Europe has generally less good legal free speech protections than the United States does (because basically everywhere has less good legal free speech protections than the United States does, the first amendment is a powerful legal framework). Being governed by European law means that there's a whole host of things that the criminal justice system has an interest in preventing you from saying, and eurosky will presumably follow the law.
- nixass 8mo ago
  Europe is not a single country
  - ahoef 8mo ago
    Nobody says it is. I think they mean the EU law frameworks that constituent countries need to implement.
- SiempreViernes 8mo ago
  Tell that to the people that didn't cry for Charlie Kirk and therefore lost their job.
  - ahoef 8mo ago
    Free speech means that the government doesn't go after you. It doesn't shield you from consequences (which you may or may not agree with) from private parties.
    - CorrectHorseBat 8mo ago
      In the USA
    - ben_w 8mo ago
      And what should we do when it's the un-elected corporations, rather than the democratically elected government, whose censorship of us and our views is a consequence we object to? e.g. how Paul Graham got his Twitter account suspended for posting "This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.": https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul-graham-232754736.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul... Musk was 100% allowed to do that. Should he have been allowed to do that? It was undone, but should it have been within the set of things he was allowed to do in the first place?
INTPenis 8mo ago
As far as I can tell this has no connection to the European Union, it's just a private company that launched a bsky instance?
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  As far as I can tell, it also doesn't have anything to do with the Linux Foundation, and the website also doesn't claims to be connected to either of them, but I guess worth saying for some reason? Seems to be run by "The Modal Foundation", a public interest foundation based in the Netherlands, according to the FAQ: https://www.eurosky.tech/faq https://www.eurosky.tech/faq
  - ajsalminen 8mo ago
    Modal also seems like a recently started shell for this and the funding they got so far originates from US non-profits through Free Our Feeds which you might remember from trying and failing to raise 30 million USD for a similar purpose without the whole European thing. I don't think any of the key people involved is actually Dutch.
  - INTPenis 8mo ago
    It's worth noting when the foundation has registered itself an address in Haag for some reason. People might think this is funded by the EU because of the way they've launched it, but it's not.
bashwizard 8mo ago
Thanks but no thanks. I'm not going to give you any of personal information whatsoever.
- bamboozled 8mo ago
  I'm assuming you're saying this as someone who doesn't use social media at all ?
das_keyboard 8mo ago
> What are Eurosky’s goals? > In the next 12 months we aim to set up and operate key components in the AT Protocol tech stack: PDS services, relays, and content moderation, in order to ensure that the ecosystem is robust, resilient and with a base in Europe. We also aim to kickstart the development of a suite of social applications that advance democratic and participatory civics, through technical support, access to resources, and collaboration with communities. > To do that, we aim to raise €5-7 million over the next 12 months, and €15 million in funding by 2028. €5-7m for operating a BlueSky instance. Great use of european funds right here!
- spiderfarmer 8mo ago
  Not even enough money to vibe code a better landing page.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
pkphilip 8mo ago
Considering the draconian policies in the UK, Germany etc where people are arrested based on their social media posts criticizing the government or its officials or anything the govt doesn't agree with, I am not sure what exactly is the selling point here of using a social media platform built/hosted in Europe. Sources: German police arrest author over tweets criticising Netanyahu https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/german-police-arrest-author-over-144423914.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/german-police-arrest-aut... German police raid home of social media user over civil servant 'parasite' post Man's house searched at dawn after criticizing tax system and government workers on social media; lawyer calls actions 'absurd and illegal' https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-police-raid-home-of-social-media-user-over-civil-servant-parasite-post/3751949 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-police-raid-home-of-s...
- dontwannahearit 8mo ago
  You did not provide evidence that UK are "arresting people based on social media posts criticizing goverment..."
  - pkphilip 8mo ago
    You sound like you should do some reading first. https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/2025 https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...
- luke5441 8mo ago
  Maybe review your media consumption for if they are reliable
DarkmSparks 8mo ago
"the laws" being making everything you post on it publically available in bulk for research into social engineering so the brussels elite/monarchies can better manipulate the population. Remind me again exactly why anyone should be excited about that?
PowerElectronix 8mo ago
This is just sad
heikkilevanto 8mo ago
I like their privacy policy
budududuroiu 8mo ago
All these "European social media" projects are, imo, cash grabs trying to capitalise on the populist "European digital sovereignty" sentiment. If your goal was social media "built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws", you'd just host a Mastodon instance and donate those EU funds to Mastodon GmbH
- rapsey 8mo ago
  There is an entire industry in europe built to take EU money and produce nothing but a stack of papers. This would just set up some OVH/Hetzner instances of open source software. It is all a very expensive joke.
fennecfoxy 8mo ago
Human social culture is not ready for this sort of thing. We love to pretend that we're all for free speech; but our species are too tribal and we'll never escape it. We are not a socially mature species in the slightest.
- blazarquasar 8mo ago
  Maybe a lot of us are ready for “free speech”. But people tend to define it in drastically different terms.
ACCount37 8mo ago
"Ruled by our laws" is the opposite of a selling point. I don't trust megacorps, but I trust governments even less than that.
- karmakurtisaani 8mo ago
  Because you probably don't live in the EU. They've done a tremendous job regulating the mega corps and making tech better for consumers.
  - fwn 8mo ago
    Although I live in the EU, I have no trust in its ability to regulate my media usage or platform providers at all. The EU just managed to postpone chat control for a bit, and my own country has found a renewed passion for punishing expression crimes (so-called "Äußerungsdelikte") through various legal and pre-legal means. Social, legal or technical centralization is not a solution to any issue related to public discourse, and Euro-nationalism is not a wise concept. It will simply make us another economic bloc, just with an older population than the others. Contrary to the current zeitgeist in the EU, power should be dispersed as much as possible. We should embrace global open-source initiatives and work towards a European Union that open-source projects (and tech companies!) want to organize under because of our superior regulatory frameworks, not subsidies, legal pressure, promised government service demand or political initiatives. We already have a lot of failed political initiatives, so why not try the organic, good governance approach for once? Instead, we just create more bureaucracy and red tape. This absurd CRA nugget is a good example for our european style tech regulation for open source: https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/ https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/ (rant over) edit: A good - allthough unfortunately German - recent essay on the German speech issue might be: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/grundrechte-wie-polizei-und-justiz-unsere-meinungsfreiheit-einschraenken/ https://netzpolitik.org/2026/grundrechte-wie-polizei-und-jus...
  - ACCount37 8mo ago
    With what? Cookie laws, Chat Control and mandatory age verification? EU did a few things right, but it's a mixed bag at best. And much worse than "mixed" in specific EU countries.
hagbard_c 8mo ago
Another contender to become the European 'Max' [1] for when the EU decides it can no longer tolerate communications applications where those who stray too far from the desired narrative are not reined in. Nope, nein, nee, nej, non, нет, não, nie, nei, ei, nē, ne, όχ and whatever other word for 'no' you can think of. [1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/08/28/everything-you-need-to-know-about-max-russias-state-backed-answer-to-whatsapp-a90356 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/08/28/everything-you-nee...
gyulai 8mo ago
Oh boy. Vaporware startup facing an unsolved cold-start problem calling itself the “next era” of something and announcing lofty funding goals. Exactly where I want to put my personal data.
sceptic123 8mo ago
| COMING EARLY FEBRUARY 2026 Oops
incomingpain 8mo ago
Europe absolutely should build their own. Is this the one that will happen? Will they have a diverse selection of viewpoints? >Today, social media is critical technology. It shapes information flows, social norms, and political discourse. Yet Europe runs on US-owned systems whose architectures remain outside European jurisdiction and democratic control. Social media is a place for speech. There's nothing else there. Democratic control over speech is their goal. >This includes our modular moderation platform, CoCoMo. CoCoMo is an interesting name, but also quite interesting how they never explain which speech they plan to "control" When your stated goal is to control the speech of your political opponents, they wont join.
kkfx 8mo ago
Sorry but NO, thanks. I'm and EU citizen, I do not want to switch from a spy service to another. I want decentralized/distributed platforms. The old Usenet is good, Nostr is usable, the Fediverse still works. It's time to break cages IMPOSING FLOSS not trying to makes new GAFAM with pseudo-open services.
- ajsalminen 8mo ago
  This actually manages to be worse than either of those two things. It isn't a separate service from Bluesky but it also doesn't really offer any meaningful decentralization.
Yizahi 8mo ago
Is anyone else bothered that "social media" for the last few years is equated only to the micro-post platforms like xitter, bluesky, mastodon etc.? Are there any "normal" new social networks with no arbitrary character limits, tree comment structure, usable categories or subforums and sane UI, not singularly focused on a tiny screens?
Henchman21 8mo ago
Why not just outlaw this clearly manipulative product that harms everyone that uses it? Ooooh right because the current people in power want to use it for their ends.

43 points by doener 8mo ago

b65e8bee43c2ed0 8mo ago

identity verified, approved opinions only, and dead on arrival. most humans abhor sterile environments.

jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
> most humans abhor sterile environments. i abhor short sterile attitudes like this! > approved opinions only i fully expect most users of eurosky will not experience any censorship. this is just such a ridiculous over-dramatization, that is so preposterously lopsided. please man. this sounds like the tin foil hat wearing nutcase shit that is ruining the US and the world right now. there's ways to debate & talk about these things, but this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug. you are 100% on one side, totally polarized into spot, and it's clear nothing is going to budge you: that's not a very hackerly spirit, and being so closed to possibility should be disqualifying.
- 5o1ecist 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lynx97 8mo ago
    Cypher begs to differ... Ignorance is BLISS.
- philipallstar 8mo ago
  > this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug How you could imagine someone calmly setting out their stall of ideas isn't starting conversation, but you making up their emotions as a counter is?
nephihaha 8mo ago
I agree with what you are saying here, but social media is pretty sterile. It's heavily censored as it is. YouTube comments is awful for it, with hiding comments and all the rest.* I find it next to useless. Faecebook has told me about birthdays and people's bereavements weeks after they've happened. It looks awful if I reply to those late. _ * I'm often confused by why. YouTube hid a thread in which someone pointed out the A Team had reused a Blues Brother joke.
lpcvoid 8mo ago
If identity verification is what it takes to curb russian trolls, then be it.
- dhdiodododnd 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- vaylian 8mo ago
  That's just throwing the baby out with the bath water. In my experience, the best kind of online interactions are those where people don't have to be limited by what their offline ID is.
  - spwa4 8mo ago
    Why would anyone want any kind of non-politician-approved interaction? Are you a traitor or a paedophile? In fact give me all your chat history and let's go through it, because I have no idea what we'd even approve. (dixit every European government) https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ Oh and all your private photos too. Think of the children! (and let's NOT discuss that when it comes to child abuse in Europe BY FAR the biggest culprits are European government employees. School teachers, and people in youth services. That's >90% of all child abusers in the EU. The youth services part of that would be the EXACT individuals screaming about thinking of the children. Don't worry. They've put rules in the Chat Control legislation protecting themselves from ... well the law)
- Yizahi 8mo ago
  Reputation system and elected or at least transparent moderation is what's needed to curb any bad actors. In fact, identity verification would make it easier for spammers, just buy stolen identities in bulk in darknet for a few dollars and fire away. Facebook supposedly leans very hard into real identities and the end result is a dead wasteland of bots talking to bots. And on the other hand, there are plenty of regular forums with not a sign of bad actors, because they were collectively exterminated and the newcomers are vetted.
- nephihaha 8mo ago
johanneskanybal 8mo ago
Well current social media has been unusable for a couple of years surely?

petcat 8mo ago

> built and run in Europe This looks like it's just the open source BlueSky instance and AT protocol? That's an American project and company, right? Is it just that the instance itself is run in Europe? What is "built in Europe"?

workfromspace 8mo ago
Good point. OTOH, in that sense, internet (or more specifically, WWW) is technically built in Europe, so can we say WWW is a European product? :D
- VWWHFSfQ 8mo ago
  www was built in Europe but the Internet itself was built in USA! :D
- petcat 8mo ago
  I wasn't trying to be pedantic. I was just hoping to see if it was a new and novel European social site project or if it was just spinning up an instance of an existing project.
  - workfromspace 8mo ago
    No worries, me too. And I agree with you as well.
rkangel 8mo ago
Yes, that does seem a bit of an odd claim. Possibly they're talking about the hosting being built? That said, I don't have an issue with using a US authored open source project for this. To use another example - PostgreSQL was originally US, but I don't have any problem with that being part of the deployment of Eurosky. That said, I would prefer that the Open Source system we were using didn't have a profit making (US) company as principal maintainer. I think AT has some technical advantages over Mastodon, but I prefer the governance of ActivityPub/Mastodon.

tobr 8mo ago

As a European, my impression is that things named something something ”Euro” tend to be cheap and low quality. I don’t think it’s possible to build a positive consumer brand around ”Eurosky”. I support the cause though - we probably need to find a catchy word like ”Brexit” or ”enshittification” to make it salient.

philipallstar 8mo ago
Elevator pitch could be "Wirecard for Social Media".
lynx97 8mo ago
When I read "Eurosky", Skyshield immediately came to mind. Sounds like a military project.
wongarsu 8mo ago
This is almost universally true for every national identity (or however we want to widen the term to include Euro). If you have a good product, you usually lead with that. "Made in X" becomes one bullet point in the list of things that make you great. If you lead with "made in X" or even make that your entire brand, that's a sign that you probably don't have much else to bring to the table. The only real exception are foods and beverages. And even there it's questionable
SiempreViernes 8mo ago
> Eurosky is a pan-European initiative spearheaded by a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists and civil society organizations A brit, a belgian and a german by the looks of their profiles, which are just their linkedin pages. Posting this to HN feels like some guys trying to do "growth hacking" with Brusselian characteristics. Honestly I even propose this conjecture: If you are in Europe you will learn about any truly European social media from some other source long before it appears on HN.

basemi 8mo ago

> [...] Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more [...]

lpcvoid 8mo ago

Great, registered. I hope it will take off.

gadders 8mo ago

"..ruled by our laws" = "Content under our political control"

spiderfarmer 8mo ago
Try criticising ICE on the recently freed Tiktok
ben_w 8mo ago
Which applies equally well to the US, US law, and US social media. What you get to choose is not the mere existence of that control, but given that both the EU and the US are democratically governed*, what that control means. * with differences: states are sovreign in EU, send representatives to Brussels; states are not sovreign in US, send representatives to Washington; differences of direct vs. indirect representation; US has a person who is president, EU has presidents plural of sub-institutions and in one case that's a country not a person; differences of who brings forward new laws to be debated (does anyone in US congress/senate even read laws before voting?); coallitions in EU, two party system in US; etc., but still both democratic

calgoo 8mo ago

Also, the name is.... Could they really not come up with something apart from a bluesky rip off? I understand they integrate with them etc, but still if you want to create a new app that you want actual people to use, then you need to be a little more creative. Thats ignoring the web design choices that others have commented on.

INTPenis 8mo ago
I think it's based on the bsky AT protocol, hence the name.
croisillon 8mo ago
High End Reliability Messaging European Service
- petcat 8mo ago
  Highly European Relay Protocol Exchange Service

JuniperMesos 8mo ago

Competition is good, but Europe has generally less good legal free speech protections than the United States does (because basically everywhere has less good legal free speech protections than the United States does, the first amendment is a powerful legal framework). Being governed by European law means that there's a whole host of things that the criminal justice system has an interest in preventing you from saying, and eurosky will presumably follow the law.

nixass 8mo ago
Europe is not a single country
- ahoef 8mo ago
  Nobody says it is. I think they mean the EU law frameworks that constituent countries need to implement.
SiempreViernes 8mo ago
Tell that to the people that didn't cry for Charlie Kirk and therefore lost their job.
- ahoef 8mo ago
  Free speech means that the government doesn't go after you. It doesn't shield you from consequences (which you may or may not agree with) from private parties.
  - CorrectHorseBat 8mo ago
    In the USA
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    And what should we do when it's the un-elected corporations, rather than the democratically elected government, whose censorship of us and our views is a consequence we object to? e.g. how Paul Graham got his Twitter account suspended for posting "This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.": https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul-graham-232754736.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul... Musk was 100% allowed to do that. Should he have been allowed to do that? It was undone, but should it have been within the set of things he was allowed to do in the first place?

INTPenis 8mo ago

As far as I can tell this has no connection to the European Union, it's just a private company that launched a bsky instance?

embedding-shape 8mo ago
As far as I can tell, it also doesn't have anything to do with the Linux Foundation, and the website also doesn't claims to be connected to either of them, but I guess worth saying for some reason? Seems to be run by "The Modal Foundation", a public interest foundation based in the Netherlands, according to the FAQ: https://www.eurosky.tech/faq https://www.eurosky.tech/faq
- ajsalminen 8mo ago
  Modal also seems like a recently started shell for this and the funding they got so far originates from US non-profits through Free Our Feeds which you might remember from trying and failing to raise 30 million USD for a similar purpose without the whole European thing. I don't think any of the key people involved is actually Dutch.
- INTPenis 8mo ago
  It's worth noting when the foundation has registered itself an address in Haag for some reason. People might think this is funded by the EU because of the way they've launched it, but it's not.

bashwizard 8mo ago

Thanks but no thanks. I'm not going to give you any of personal information whatsoever.

bamboozled 8mo ago
I'm assuming you're saying this as someone who doesn't use social media at all ?

das_keyboard 8mo ago

> What are Eurosky’s goals? > In the next 12 months we aim to set up and operate key components in the AT Protocol tech stack: PDS services, relays, and content moderation, in order to ensure that the ecosystem is robust, resilient and with a base in Europe. We also aim to kickstart the development of a suite of social applications that advance democratic and participatory civics, through technical support, access to resources, and collaboration with communities. > To do that, we aim to raise €5-7 million over the next 12 months, and €15 million in funding by 2028. €5-7m for operating a BlueSky instance. Great use of european funds right here!

spiderfarmer 8mo ago
Not even enough money to vibe code a better landing page.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

pkphilip 8mo ago

Considering the draconian policies in the UK, Germany etc where people are arrested based on their social media posts criticizing the government or its officials or anything the govt doesn't agree with, I am not sure what exactly is the selling point here of using a social media platform built/hosted in Europe. Sources: German police arrest author over tweets criticising Netanyahu https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/german-police-arrest-author-over-144423914.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/german-police-arrest-aut... German police raid home of social media user over civil servant 'parasite' post Man's house searched at dawn after criticizing tax system and government workers on social media; lawyer calls actions 'absurd and illegal' https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-police-raid-home-of-social-media-user-over-civil-servant-parasite-post/3751949 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-police-raid-home-of-s...

dontwannahearit 8mo ago
You did not provide evidence that UK are "arresting people based on social media posts criticizing goverment..."
- pkphilip 8mo ago
  You sound like you should do some reading first. https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/2025 https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...
luke5441 8mo ago
Maybe review your media consumption for if they are reliable

DarkmSparks 8mo ago

"the laws" being making everything you post on it publically available in bulk for research into social engineering so the brussels elite/monarchies can better manipulate the population. Remind me again exactly why anyone should be excited about that?

PowerElectronix 8mo ago

This is just sad

heikkilevanto 8mo ago

I like their privacy policy

budududuroiu 8mo ago

All these "European social media" projects are, imo, cash grabs trying to capitalise on the populist "European digital sovereignty" sentiment. If your goal was social media "built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws", you'd just host a Mastodon instance and donate those EU funds to Mastodon GmbH

rapsey 8mo ago
There is an entire industry in europe built to take EU money and produce nothing but a stack of papers. This would just set up some OVH/Hetzner instances of open source software. It is all a very expensive joke.

fennecfoxy 8mo ago

Human social culture is not ready for this sort of thing. We love to pretend that we're all for free speech; but our species are too tribal and we'll never escape it. We are not a socially mature species in the slightest.

blazarquasar 8mo ago
Maybe a lot of us are ready for “free speech”. But people tend to define it in drastically different terms.

ACCount37 8mo ago

"Ruled by our laws" is the opposite of a selling point. I don't trust megacorps, but I trust governments even less than that.

karmakurtisaani 8mo ago
Because you probably don't live in the EU. They've done a tremendous job regulating the mega corps and making tech better for consumers.
- fwn 8mo ago
  Although I live in the EU, I have no trust in its ability to regulate my media usage or platform providers at all. The EU just managed to postpone chat control for a bit, and my own country has found a renewed passion for punishing expression crimes (so-called "Äußerungsdelikte") through various legal and pre-legal means. Social, legal or technical centralization is not a solution to any issue related to public discourse, and Euro-nationalism is not a wise concept. It will simply make us another economic bloc, just with an older population than the others. Contrary to the current zeitgeist in the EU, power should be dispersed as much as possible. We should embrace global open-source initiatives and work towards a European Union that open-source projects (and tech companies!) want to organize under because of our superior regulatory frameworks, not subsidies, legal pressure, promised government service demand or political initiatives. We already have a lot of failed political initiatives, so why not try the organic, good governance approach for once? Instead, we just create more bureaucracy and red tape. This absurd CRA nugget is a good example for our european style tech regulation for open source: https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/ https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/ (rant over) edit: A good - allthough unfortunately German - recent essay on the German speech issue might be: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/grundrechte-wie-polizei-und-justiz-unsere-meinungsfreiheit-einschraenken/ https://netzpolitik.org/2026/grundrechte-wie-polizei-und-jus...
- ACCount37 8mo ago
  With what? Cookie laws, Chat Control and mandatory age verification? EU did a few things right, but it's a mixed bag at best. And much worse than "mixed" in specific EU countries.

hagbard_c 8mo ago

Another contender to become the European 'Max' [1] for when the EU decides it can no longer tolerate communications applications where those who stray too far from the desired narrative are not reined in. Nope, nein, nee, nej, non, нет, não, nie, nei, ei, nē, ne, όχ and whatever other word for 'no' you can think of. [1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/08/28/everything-you-need-to-know-about-max-russias-state-backed-answer-to-whatsapp-a90356 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/08/28/everything-you-nee...

gyulai 8mo ago

Oh boy. Vaporware startup facing an unsolved cold-start problem calling itself the “next era” of something and announcing lofty funding goals. Exactly where I want to put my personal data.

sceptic123 8mo ago

| COMING EARLY FEBRUARY 2026 Oops

incomingpain 8mo ago

Europe absolutely should build their own. Is this the one that will happen? Will they have a diverse selection of viewpoints? >Today, social media is critical technology. It shapes information flows, social norms, and political discourse. Yet Europe runs on US-owned systems whose architectures remain outside European jurisdiction and democratic control. Social media is a place for speech. There's nothing else there. Democratic control over speech is their goal. >This includes our modular moderation platform, CoCoMo. CoCoMo is an interesting name, but also quite interesting how they never explain which speech they plan to "control" When your stated goal is to control the speech of your political opponents, they wont join.

kkfx 8mo ago

Sorry but NO, thanks. I'm and EU citizen, I do not want to switch from a spy service to another. I want decentralized/distributed platforms. The old Usenet is good, Nostr is usable, the Fediverse still works. It's time to break cages IMPOSING FLOSS not trying to makes new GAFAM with pseudo-open services.

ajsalminen 8mo ago
This actually manages to be worse than either of those two things. It isn't a separate service from Bluesky but it also doesn't really offer any meaningful decentralization.

Yizahi 8mo ago

Is anyone else bothered that "social media" for the last few years is equated only to the micro-post platforms like xitter, bluesky, mastodon etc.? Are there any "normal" new social networks with no arbitrary character limits, tree comment structure, usable categories or subforums and sane UI, not singularly focused on a tiny screens?

Henchman21 8mo ago

Why not just outlaw this clearly manipulative product that harms everyone that uses it? Ooooh right because the current people in power want to use it for their ends.