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Here is an idea for a EU product: Build something that is great, and make it so good, that everyone, including US citizens, will want to use it.

Your ethics can still be great, but don't make me feel like your product won't be. If you have to market "Europe" or privacy it probably won't be.

Totally valid point - but there are a lot of other strategic consideration.

Especially with 'Social' there are network externalizations like 'critical mass' - that actually compounds across a lot of things.

No European country given size and language is going to be able to create something that resonates as well as the American variation beyond the critical mass needed, at least naturally.

If 'French Facebook' started at one of the 'Grande Ecoles' it would have grown much more slowly, and maybe never moved out of being French centric and therefore not gone beyond borders.

Without the 'momentum' that doesn't attract investors, doesn't make employees want to work 'late nights for the big IPO payoff' etc..

And there are so many other related conventions, such as capitol markets, public markets, so many issues.

So - in order to overcome those limitations there may have to be a lot of strategic thinking and manoeuvring.

Given that Europe took 4 years to adjust to a nation literally invading it ... well ... I wouldn't hold my breath.

There are some winning opportunities: government procurement is powerful but Euros are afraid to negotiate hard with MS Goog etc..

There's a lot of money involved, forcing issues on privacy is entirely possible.

Same for local content, some degree of decentralization.

Requiring government actors to use 'Euro Mastadon' or whatever - it means school, students, parents come abard and then you have 'critical mass'.

Requiring 'open doc format' means you can break the MS Office monopoly.

Requiring 'Linux First' on every IT procurement decision - or even 'Open Soruce First' so local city council must give an excuse for why they are not using 'Approved Euro-Linux Variations' etc..

Lots of things.

Yeah, basically no successful American social media company advertises itself as being American. And its users do not think of it as "an American company," they just think of it as its own thing.
The problem is impressumspflicht, you have to add your full contact address plus name to a website you host, inviting all sorts of trolls on the internet to ruin your life. No thanks.
Doesn't work. As soon as something great appears, US VCs immediately buy it and move it to the bay area. A fair few of the products you think are US grown probably aren't. If not, a competitor appears that is less constrained by regulations and can move faster, taking over most of the market instead.
That's definitely the main issue. We will end up with a really neat technical stack, a few products built on it for their 100 users each, and it will be forgotten in a few years...
I don't think making a good product is enough. X is still prevalent despite Musk's actions both as a public person and as X's owner. The alternatives, be it Bluesky or Threads, are fine to use, yet people aren't moving.

There's no way we'll be able to compete against Google or Meta in any meaningful way if we can't even get people out of X. Even more so because I'd argue that a good product is a little more boring than the ones that are currently at the top.

Is there room for European companies to be the “Hermes of the Internet?” The American web is ad-optimized slop for the masses. Can the europeans provide higher quality experiences for more discerning buyers?

I’m thinking about Tik Tok. When it was Chinese, my feed was stuff I actually wanted to watch. A lot of it was Chinese propaganda, but it was stuff that was pleasant, like people cooking in Chinese villages. Now it’s just rage bait and engagement farming.

Ah but for some reason that was missing from the principles. It is the ONLY thing that matters.

Being European is a nice boost on the feelgood factor, if people even know. Anyone who ranks that above product quality is a minority - that’s why this has ~400 signatures not 4 million.

The key part of European projects is not their quality or greatness. They do not think big.
That doesn’t work when the incumbents are so entrenched.

You’d need to go the Chinese route and just ban everything to give the full market to domestic alternatives.

Have you tried wire card? Its really good! Best payment system i ever used! Bought my villa in moscow with it...
I would have subscribed to that before Trump‘s second term. Nowadays for many Europeans great product is not a necessary feature to choose European over American.
How about wines, cheeses, olive oils
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Engagement metrics fed into recommendations algorithms are the paperclip maximizers that feed humanity's collective poison.

Europe should do the one thing it knows how to do: regulate. For once, it is the answer. Do it only there. The rest of the dominos will fall.

Making a european branded humanity poisoner is not the answer.

Specifically, regulating against silent signals like watch time and comment count. Upvotes/likes can serve a purpose and would not cause the situation we're in now.

We need to get specific about the real issue.

I want to see the ability to opt out of algorithmic feeds regulated. Allow the people to poison themselves, but allow people to opt out
Do you mean regulating "watch time and comment count" at the presentation (to the client) or the server (business/analytics) level? If the later, how would you even enforce that?
We europeans can do more than regulate, your statement is just plain offensive.

You would now that if you ever went to a proper school. Those unfortunately are not widely available on your side of the pond.

And the regulation doesn't need to be overly complicated:

* Ban targeted ads or make them opt in;

* Ban targeted content or make it opt in;

* Enforce the use of a do not track header - if the user does not want to be tracked a simple browser or OS setting should be enough.

I'm all in favour of the EU finally emancipating itself from American tech companies, but trying to recreate Social Media, just in a European way, is the worst possible way to go.

We need less Social Media, not an inferior clone of TikTok or Instagram. Gaia-X would have been a nifty project, if it weren't a committee designing a framework for designing committee design frameworks by committee. We seem to make this mistake way too often. Don't plan to build Neuschwanstein—start to build a humble wooden cabin, and expand from there.

Making people less addicted to social media, or creating other versions of social media that are less harmful, might be the "harm reduction" discussion/tradeoff of our modern times, but they're very different goals and ambitions. Sure, I agree, people shouldn't spend hours mindlessly scrolling through TikTok/Instagram/Whatever, but most likely they will, regardless of what we do. So, why not come up with some alternative that kind of gives them that experience, but not as addicting and with maybe more user choice, like Bluesky letting people chose their own recommendation algos they like?
I think there's space for less crappy social media.

The early days of Facebook, where I actually saw friends and family posting their thoughts, that was great! It wasn't dominated by people resharing political screeds or random videos from groups I've never even heard of.

Europe should make a dating app. Here’s why: monetising dating apps is really hard and companies don’t seem to be doing well with it.

Having a competitor here to bumble or hinge that is free and doesn’t care about short term monetisation would be a good thing.

"Europe has a strong ecosystem of social companies and a deep well of expertise in designing and operating social protocols." LOL

When you start writing something, pick something more believable. It just invalidates anything you write thereafter.

Keep the Social, ditch the media.
This thesis is undermined by the reality of operational an implementation concerns.

A 'wish list' is not hugely important to the operational capability of 'doing the thing'.

It's definitely a 'nice to have' and a 'starting point' from a certain angle, but it's a nominal thing really.

Thinking about critical masses, requiring established social networks to have open APIs and local content etc., definitely some regulations around local hosting and even use aka 'gov entities must use European based entities' for certain things, which helps build critical mass.

Etc.

Also - as someone commented 'doing the things' is often 75% of the reality of this, strategic considerations make up the smaller part even if they are critical.

I've grown to dislike mastodon and similar platforms.

They are a great place to harbor extremists and to let narcisistic instance admins play god.

I'll take Twitter/X any day, where everybody (from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other) can have pretty much the same chance at free speech.

Until Europe can't birth one such platform, I'll stay on old ones.

Perhaps relevant context: The EU commission just ignored the "Tech Sovereignty Package" it launched ~3 weeks ago, and explicitly referred open-source as a core element of their strategy, and endorsed W, another ATproto-based social that recently a) closed their code and b) ...had its CEO attend Davos. Make of that what you will.
> be Europe

> want to host infra outside the US

> write a blog post

Is it that easy to create a multi billion dollar tech company. The competition is fierce and many have tried.

Huge companies with billions of dollars have tried to compete with Google for years. Google has spent billions to compete with Facebook.

It seems very unlikely that you can just come up with this and win.

Time to coin a new term, I think: "openwashing".

Europe is adopting open source and open protocols, not to promote individual sovereignty, but explicitly to protect European sovereignty from foreign influence. This is not what these technologies were built for; "promoting democracy" does not protect the rights of individuals.

The technology listed is mostly federated, not radically open (like, for example, nostr). In particular, ATProto has provided the EU with the perfect opportunity to signal openness while simultaneously standing up a new walled garden in which dystopian "moderation policies" will be the norm.

> Strengthening democracy

> Europe is in a hybrid conflict on two fronts; our elections and political life are under direct attack from foreign agents who use social media to manipulate public opinion and centre the political agenda to undermine us. We are deploying systems that have editorial pluralism and FIMI monitoring built in to shield our polity from influence and make our democracy resilient under attack.

I just wish there'd be more of a acknowledgement about the very real democratic deficit in the EU, where multiple elections are overloaded and affect different widely disparate affairs, leading to much of the EU largely able to operate completely without fear of repercussions from its citizenship. Strengthening democracy must start at an institutional level.

As of right now, there is just no real way for a European citizen to hold anyone accountable for something like Chat Control. Parliament, where you get a say, is mostly already opposed to it. The council and comission are de facto untouchable.

> Europe is a union of 27 sovereign nations

I guess the Swiss, British, Norwegians, Albanians etc etc are not welcome to participate in this project.

EDIT: In any case this whole thing is stupid. Open source and privacy matters, not country of origin.

As long as E2E encryption is not guaranteed and we rely on id verification, the only thing this can do is to limit the 3rd parties that can easily access your data. Everything else is in the air
Wouldn't hurt to also use European DNS TLDs.
This looks so complicated. There needs to be like 2 obvious buttons to press to get anyone to do any of this.
Nothing about matrix or xmpp is “ideal”. This person knows nothing about how notifications work on iOS.
I suppose social.eu was taken, because it would make more sense.
Oh well for that you have to ban TikTok first , that directly affect your politics . But that will upset new owners of Europe .

All these companies are just a new way of money laundering with a proud word sovereignty

Good luck, but I am not sure about the direction.

I mean, for a while, I thought something like Substack (and not Fediverse) could disturb things a little, but I suppose it and many others have already been killed by slop. So, if you do verified identity management, which is good for certain purposes but perhaps not for others, I suppose you should also do decentralized trust management, and with an ability to delete nodes from a personal but federated trust chain. (And feel free to adopt the idea also for science; it would be very much needed.)

Attention trap platform feel nothing like social to be frank. Now that we have LLMs to prove that it doesn't take any human direct involvement to generate epic useless conversations, that should make it all the more obvious.
> Strengthening democracy

Ah yes, there it is. We‘ve learned how to translate this in our heads.