Europe needs its own social media platforms to safeguard sovereignty
Europe needs its own social media platforms to safeguard sovereignty
The EU can support the development of homegrown social media platforms to ensure European Union's digital sovereignty and shield it from foreign interference
Yea. Funding fediverse apps and launching official national / continental instances would go a long way and perhaps get there the fastest.
Why do we need social media? Can’t we just not have social media?
I know a lot of people are dependant on them now, but substitutes for the really important bits already exists :)
Exactly, all social media managed by a central company turned out to be a cancer.
It works be best to not use any social media, but if Europe must, then embrace fediverse.
I love how media is always ‘Nooo we can’t ban facebook because it undermines democracy because this dog hairdresser club in the suburbs use it for member communication twice per year’
Or, we help the eu out by embracing Europe :)
Where elso do you se teenagers dance and what peaople eat fotlr dinner?
European companies and communities already host decentralized alternatives like Mastodon, a federated network powered by the homegrown Mastodon software. These GDPR-compliant tools allow users to control data and interconnect across servers—a model echoing the EU’s federalist values. However, fragmentation, lack of user-friendly UI and underfunding limit their reach. A unified EU initiative could fund these projects while the alliance of European companies and communities could merge these projects into a public-private platform. It is in the best interest of the European Union to provide funding for European-owned social media platforms to ensure their development and European digital sovereignty.
It would be awesome if the EU started funding the Fediverse.
They could at least stop using twitter (and meta). At least here in Finland a ton of public offices, news outlets, radio channels and so on use twitter as a platform to deliver their information and, while it was a decent plan back when twitter wasn't owned by that clown, that ship has sailed ages ago but their practises haven't changed a bit. Government ran mastodon instance would be pretty cheap solution to this and it would quarantee that everyone had access to their information without signing up to any service at all.
But they won't as they actually love their dependence.
Not long ago they terminated their years long test run of hosting their own fediverse instances with what condensed down to basically "it was very successful and really worked well; but we don't care, so we can't be bothered to operate them any longer".
One thing I am thinking is that things whith such streng network effects like telephone networks, railway networks, messenger applications or the basic protocols of social media should be required to use specified, open standards and protocols, just like IMAP, HTTP or the Matrix protocol. (Actually the Gemini protocol is a good example how it can be done for microblogs).
Something like the fediverSe?
The GDPR requires data portability. That you can export your data in a reasonable machine-readable format.
Expanding that to protocols is an interesting extension of that thought and policy.
Isn't there already a requirement of mobile messengers where Apple had to open their messaging to Google but do it in a lackluster way? I don't remember the specifics.
What we need is a strong net neutrality realm who not every word gets tagged as a potential threat to America. Europeans must show more human sense.