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.
That might be true for social media, but there are 100s of American brands that make a large point of being thought of as an "American company" or "American made" goods.
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.
You can be suite in some European countries if you have a web page without an impressum and latest your domain registration will have your credit card to track you. Obviously, not all cases can be traced back.
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...
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.
Depending on how hardcore enforcement of the upcoming Cybersecurity Resilience Act is, that might(?) push EU products very slightly towards this luxury pricing power on the margin.
But on the whole I think you're dreaming, Ray. I can't imagine a single case of a successful luxury software product. (Apple is premium mediocre at best, doesn't count.)
You’re probably right i’m just thinking out loud. It is interesting that software has resisted quality-based segmentation, something that exists in almost every other type of product.
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.
Having spent years working for a VC and having raised rounds from VC's in Europe multiple times over the last 26 years, that it doesn't exist is news to me.
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.
Yes, but us universities aren’t financially accessible to most people and access depends more on connections and families than merit.
But your link also is only relevant to the university system.
It doesn’t change the fact that the non university part of education is severely financially crippled in major areas of the country in order to hinder black people from getting proper education.
Combined with a burnout introducing system of standardized tests the us educational system is truly world leading. At demonstrating how NOT to do education.
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?
Like all good regulation, it would only kick in after a company has a large reach. So as to not snuff out startups and cause regulatory capture problems that are already so common.
Telling big companies to be transparent about their suggestion algorithms would not be hard. I think governments already do this? wasn't that a tiktok thing in the US? Anyway, it's well within government's reach.
Telling companies to only use signals that people consciously give seems like a no-brainer.
Well, I mean, if you believe that a goal of civilization is to respect the free will of individuals up until the point that that free will becomes a problem for other people.
The alternative is something less than respectful of human dignity.
I'm only partially convinced. I just can't see how you could really know if a company is using a hidden metric (or some sort of proxy for that metric so that they are not technically in violation) for figuring out what to promote. Short of having constants audits, how would you ever really know?
But my skepticism may be unfounded. Do you have examples of companies that are currently working with regulators to allow full auditing of their content promotion policies? Are they actually auditing these partnerships or are they simply accepting promises from the companies?
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.
I'm pretty sure Pandora's box has already been opened. The youth spending hours on TikTok every day is not going to go back to early days of Facebook on their own.
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.
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.
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
Why do you think a government should compete on a market segment? I find it slightly irritating.
Let me get a cup of the good EU coffee! I like the "privacy" blend the most!
Now let me turn on my EU computer and log-in with my EU id
Check my messages on EU social media and then I have to leave for work
Oh that's a cute girl that messaged me on EU dating
I hope she also likes privacy and democracy
Now into my EU car, let me quickly stop at my EU charging station
Power is cheap, no middleman, all EU for our democracy
And then I'm on my way to my EU employer!
Meh. Best thing for dating apps is probably for them to cease to exist. Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created, even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.
Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine. Even lonely hearts columns in newspapers probably still work, as physical newspapers still get sold here in Europe.
>Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created
Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.
>even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.
Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
>Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine.
Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age. Some cities are better than others and the older you get the worse it is. While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date. Meanwhile you can waste time and money in pubs and clubs for years and never meet a partner.
It's similar to job searching, if you're unemployed and need a job, you go straight to linkedin and apply, you don't go to clubs and pubs hoping you meet a founder who has a job for you. The latter might work every now and then if you're sociable and lucky and live in the right place, but it's not a sure thing for everyone all the time. That's why dating apps will never go away just like linkedin will never go away.
Social media and dating apps together have created this isolation. People can demand a completely comfortable illusion of life and enforce this sterility.
> Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.
And in cities, more pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share.
Most of us didn't go from Renaissance village churches to dating apps in one lifetime, let alone one day.
> Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
Most surveys only started about 10 years ago, i.e. after social media and dating apps were already around, and the few longer surveys disagree with each other, but even they only go back to the 80s AFAICT; we've been living in big dense isolating cities for a lot longer than that.
> Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age.
So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app.
> While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date.
Everyone I've heard talking about dating apps since Match Group cornered the market, says the only "sure thing" about them is how mediocre they are, at least for straight couples. Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.
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.
I think they focus mainly on the fact that these are federated and mature solutions. I don't know anything about Matrix but as far as XMPP/Jabber and "push notifications" go, you don't need to reveal the sender, nor the message, in the alert. Right, it's not perfect, but in my book that goes a long way for privacy.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That might be true for social media, but there are 100s of American brands that make a large point of being thought of as an "American company" or "American made" goods.
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.
Same problem with the Play Store/Console if you're registering as an individual instead of a company to publish an app.
No it’s not.
You’re generalizing, DACH != the entire EU.
You can register domain names anonymously. Sure, you will be asked for contact details (WHOIS), but no one verifies them.
You can be suite in some European countries if you have a web page without an impressum and latest your domain registration will have your credit card to track you. Obviously, not all cases can be traced back.
The key part of European projects is not their quality or greatness. They do not think big.
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...
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.
Depending on how hardcore enforcement of the upcoming Cybersecurity Resilience Act is, that might(?) push EU products very slightly towards this luxury pricing power on the margin.
But on the whole I think you're dreaming, Ray. I can't imagine a single case of a successful luxury software product. (Apple is premium mediocre at best, doesn't count.)
You’re probably right i’m just thinking out loud. It is interesting that software has resisted quality-based segmentation, something that exists in almost every other type of product.
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.
US companies obey EU law when working in the EU. And there is a reason VC does not exist in Europe namely capital markets being divided.
Having spent years working for a VC and having raised rounds from VC's in Europe multiple times over the last 26 years, that it doesn't exist is news to me.
They don't have to sell?
Have you tried wire card? Its really good! Best payment system i ever used! Bought my villa in moscow with it...
How about wines, cheeses, olive oils
Or fast trains you can only dream of in the US, or Airbus that is kicking Boeing’s ass…
America has world-class wines, cheeses, and olive oils.
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.
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.
https://www.statista.com/chart/30934/world-best-universities...
Yes, but us universities aren’t financially accessible to most people and access depends more on connections and families than merit.
But your link also is only relevant to the university system.
It doesn’t change the fact that the non university part of education is severely financially crippled in major areas of the country in order to hinder black people from getting proper education.
Combined with a burnout introducing system of standardized tests the us educational system is truly world leading. At demonstrating how NOT to do education.
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?
Like all good regulation, it would only kick in after a company has a large reach. So as to not snuff out startups and cause regulatory capture problems that are already so common.
Telling big companies to be transparent about their suggestion algorithms would not be hard. I think governments already do this? wasn't that a tiktok thing in the US? Anyway, it's well within government's reach.
Telling companies to only use signals that people consciously give seems like a no-brainer.
Well, I mean, if you believe that a goal of civilization is to respect the free will of individuals up until the point that that free will becomes a problem for other people.
The alternative is something less than respectful of human dignity.
I'm only partially convinced. I just can't see how you could really know if a company is using a hidden metric (or some sort of proxy for that metric so that they are not technically in violation) for figuring out what to promote. Short of having constants audits, how would you ever really know?
But my skepticism may be unfounded. Do you have examples of companies that are currently working with regulators to allow full auditing of their content promotion policies? Are they actually auditing these partnerships or are they simply accepting promises from the companies?
Laws that don’t apply to all people equally are unjust laws.
Penalizing the successful is also inherently rewarding the unsuccessful. You can’t do one without the other.
They apply equally to all people who run a company of a particular size with a particular user count.
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
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.
I'm pretty sure Pandora's box has already been opened. The youth spending hours on TikTok every day is not going to go back to early days of Facebook on their own.
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.
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.
Keep the Social, ditch the media.
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
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Anything is better than the oligarchs systems.
Wouldn't hurt to also use European DNS TLDs.
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.
Why do you think a government should compete on a market segment? I find it slightly irritating.
What do you rather prefer, guy
Meh. Best thing for dating apps is probably for them to cease to exist. Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created, even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.
Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine. Even lonely hearts columns in newspapers probably still work, as physical newspapers still get sold here in Europe.
>Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created
Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.
>even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.
Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
>Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine.
Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age. Some cities are better than others and the older you get the worse it is. While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date. Meanwhile you can waste time and money in pubs and clubs for years and never meet a partner.
It's similar to job searching, if you're unemployed and need a job, you go straight to linkedin and apply, you don't go to clubs and pubs hoping you meet a founder who has a job for you. The latter might work every now and then if you're sociable and lucky and live in the right place, but it's not a sure thing for everyone all the time. That's why dating apps will never go away just like linkedin will never go away.
Social media and dating apps together have created this isolation. People can demand a completely comfortable illusion of life and enforce this sterility.
> Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.
And in cities, more pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share.
Most of us didn't go from Renaissance village churches to dating apps in one lifetime, let alone one day.
> Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
Most surveys only started about 10 years ago, i.e. after social media and dating apps were already around, and the few longer surveys disagree with each other, but even they only go back to the 80s AFAICT; we've been living in big dense isolating cities for a lot longer than that.
> Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age.
So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app.
> While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date.
Everyone I've heard talking about dating apps since Match Group cornered the market, says the only "sure thing" about them is how mediocre they are, at least for straight couples. Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.
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
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.
Nothing about matrix or xmpp is “ideal”. This person knows nothing about how notifications work on iOS.
I think they focus mainly on the fact that these are federated and mature solutions. I don't know anything about Matrix but as far as XMPP/Jabber and "push notifications" go, you don't need to reveal the sender, nor the message, in the alert. Right, it's not perfect, but in my book that goes a long way for privacy.
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.)
> be Europe
> want to host infra outside the US
> write a blog post
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.
Ju vill accept your EU Government ID tracking and ju vill like it! Or else!
> 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.
Europe != EU
Correct
> 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.