So what now?

Yeah the biggest threat are the same corrupt right wing forces in Europe (which are often funded by the US or other adversaries). They will try to chip away Europe's unity and divide, which leaves everyone weaker in terms of bargaining power or otherwise. Britain already fell into this and they are almost certainly not going to be better off by themselves.

Europe should be concentrating on unity, but also economic and military strength.

home grown right-wing populists

corrupted traitors, which are mostly foreign subsidised and supported. Let's not forget that important bit. If they weren't, they probably wouldn't never gotten that far, or so I think

Wealth disparity is the number one enemy of the modern world. Every millionaire with a net worth over X is a threat to democracy and actively reduces our chances of maintaining a democracy. I think I remembering hearing X being 10 million from a scientist researching this thing, but even if you bump it up to 20 or 50 million - still insane piles of wealth - removing the rest via taxation would change the world for the better overnight.

Break up monopolies and tax the rich out of existence, that should be the platform of every party, the single policy that we should strive to complete this year, before it's too late. The US is what too late looks like, this is all a consequence of allowing the Uber wealthy to continuously drain the network of the bottom 99% of people.

@poVoq @Elrecoal19_0 that problem of populists is sadly more up to the member states. Seems that while pro-European sentiment does exist across all member states, it is not consistent. Hence why the populists keep getting in power in the first place.

And while most of the Europe is paying closer attention to the likes of Fico and Orban, it seems like it is overlooking the corruption and the captivity of the system by political forces that are also populist, but like to call themselves pro-European. Case in point: my country, Romania.

Here the so-called pro-European government (it doesn't even contain all the pro-EU forces in the parliament, but I'll get to that in a moment) is failing to implement vital reforms that have been asked for so long and even in the last minute, it is playing business as usual, like nothing seems to be happening. Well, something is happening, assholes: you're burning down the very democratic system because of it. We literally got our elections canceled and while most of the people are basing this on Georgescu, not a single reason was officially provided for this.

Even the European Commission is canceling bilions upon bilions of Euros in post-covid resilience funds because they fail to address reforms of the public system, to make it less corrupt. And the said government is going like "well, yea, shit happens, we'll just handle it".

And from what I understood, the situation is somewhat similar in the neighboring Bulgaria: highly corrupt populist but pro-European political forces and politicians are holding power for a long time, hindering reforms, but the Brussels is not giving a damn because of their pro-European positions.

Do they not sense the danger in all of this? Do they not think that by not doing enough about these things, the EU will have a bad reputation among these countries citizens? I get that the membership question lies within the member states and it's good to be like that. But I think the high-ranking officials in Brussels should be aware of this situation and send a message about it, rather than be complacent.

Reasons for Volt being criticized are some of their decisions in the past and their base philosophy creating an EU leader similar to US Präsident or chancelors.

It seems that some are a bit starry-eyed about reasons and about what to do

one of the reasons why Volt is considered weak is because it's small and young,

Maybe because they want a sort of (Con) Federation for the EU. I was surprised to see that many citizens don't seem to want that .

You missed one other option that has also been gaining traction in Europe:

employee = employer

A co-op kinda gets the benefits of both, with the downside being growth can be a little slower due to how it's organized and bureaucracy, but this could be fixed too with legislation.

@Illecors @Elrecoal19_0 not sure how software would relate to employment and politics in this regard, but I fully agree with the hosting part. And if it's more of a hassle, try finding someone doing it for you. In Europe. My profile is on a server based in Finland and the server admin is kind enough to also offer me and whoever is here some small amount of Nextcloud space (can be increased if you have accounts at other providers too) along with some NC apps like, calendar, polls, tasks, passwords, bookmarks and talk. In addition to all of that, I also have an XMPP address with the same account.

Now, my Friendica node is currently closed for registration, but there are also some more popular providers like tchncs.de which offer more stuff (not yet having a friendica offering fwiw, but they do have a Mastodon instance, a Lemmy one and a Writefreely one, along with some other stuff like Matrix, XMPP or even a Minetest server). I think providers like these are the way to go for the regular folk moving forward. Or maybe something that doesn't require hosting on an external server at all, such as Secure Scuttlebutt. I mean, we already have the phone network which doesn't really depend on a central server (i.e. your number belongs to your SIM card) as much. It would imply less of a hassle for the regular user, since not everyone has all the time and/or knowledge to selfhost and deal with all the issues this implies.

yeah when it works it's cool, but it doesn't always work.

Plus the user experience for anyone who not only isn't tech literate but neither fairly tech savvy can be a pain. Navigating the way into joining rooms, DMing people, etc is pretty confusing (even for someone like me, who can manually install Arch for example^[obligatory I use arch btw]) and that's without mentioning all the E2EE problems with federated instances, etc, which not only can mean sometimes users can't see each others' messages but it can even break bridges.

Oh and the bridges may be cool but they're also kinda shit, I mean the TG one can't handle supergroups, WhatsApp often requires you to open the app anyway to view certain content, I don't use the signal bridge cause I don't mind using signal. Oh and tbh bridges only exist because we still need to talk to some folks in the other places, but they do not provide you any extra privacy, your message is still going in telegram/meta's servers and through their apps (which realistically you'll also still need to keep installed anyway) etc and on top of that it will also go through the servers of whoever is hosting your instance.

Yes self-hosting is an option, no your average joe will not do it and it is absurd to ask them to, and self-hosting for your whole community is nice but it gets hard if you're on your own and good luck if you have quite a few friends to actually talk to that have to be in your instance.

Unfortunately, messaging apps are meant to do one job: talk with people, and in order to do that privately and securely you need to get people on the chosen app^[refer to part about bridges] and therefore it needs to be easy enough to grasp that even people who don't know what an OS is can get them, hence why Signal beats out Matrix (and getting people to switch to Signal from WhatsApp or Telegram is still pretty challenging).

So this is why I believe it's less developed. Matrix is probably not the only made in Europe project tbf, and besides even US things can be used if they are open source.