Does Europe Need Its Own Social Media Platforms?
Does Europe Need Its Own Social Media Platforms?

Does Europe Need Its Own Social Media Platforms?

Does Europe Need Its Own Social Media Platforms?
Does Europe Need Its Own Social Media Platforms?
Yes, open source and publicly funded. 20 years ago.
Realistically though, proprietary tech services tend to be more successful. Whether it's Facebook, or Windows, or the most successful European tech service: Spotify.
I like open source, but realistically if we want a successful European social media platform, it would probably be largely proprietary.
Isn't it interesting that all the arguments against it boil down to two main things:
I think both are self-fulfilling prophecies:
I therefore believe that it all boils down to one central point: it is supposedly too late to change anything, so we should just accept the situation.
I find this unacceptable, as it is precisely the lack of will to change that has created this situation in the first place.
I mean, Bytedance was only founded in 2012 (TikTok in 2016) and faced exactly the same challenges. However, China still provided massive funding and support for the company, even though Meta, then still Facebook, was founded in 2004 and thus had a head start of almost 10 years. I simply don't believe that it was just the short video format that made TikTok so successful – it also received massive (state) funding to promote the platform. If China had not done that, they would not have one of the most successful social media platforms worldwide by now.
It is also assumed that social media can only function in the form of centralized platforms. I think this is also wrong, because the platform economy is not a law of nature on the internet. Rather, it is only since around 2000 that the internet has developed from a distributed information medium into a largely centralized medium through unregulated, neoliberal capitalism — with the consequences we are all now feeling.
I therefore believe that it would be entirely possible to establish EU platforms or at least to promote the ones already existing more effectively.
I think it would be worth a try, especially since established social media platforms clearly pose a significant threat to democracies, as demonstrated by the global rise of fascism (which, imo, is largely attributable to misinformation on social media).
However, this would require renouncing the principles of overarching capitalism to some extend – and I think that this is the real reason why such approaches are not being pursued: Many EU politicians if not most are convinced neoliberals, which is why they refuse to acknowledge the devastating consequences of this concept and instead prefer to maintain the status quo, thereby making the established, centralized players more and more powerful.
What is sad is that if every governmental administration was switching to fediverse and especially stopped to use x/twitter it would create a move to mastodon.
I think people would start to follow and it would make it more plausible that one day fediverse would be the main networks used. More so if governments were supporting development in any way.
It's not Mastodon, it's never going to be Mastodon.
Several key design issues prevent that from happening. It's just not built for that purpose. For one thing, a chrono-only firehose is a TERRIBLE fit for governmental notifications.
Also, nobody flocks to a social network for official admin accounts. That's just not a thing.
Bluesky maybe, but people around these parts absolutely refuse to acknowledge why that is or any differences between BS and other social media, so this conversation will likely remain inside the weird Fedi echo chamber that missed that this debate is now over for everybody else.
Noone needs any social media platform. Social media is the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.
ur on lemmy rn. a social media platform.
The way Mastodon and federated stuff works, it's a shame more organisations don't host their own Mastodon instances for their official announcements instead of Xitter and Facebook. They don't really take that much admin as only employees would need accounts to post. The BBC is trialling this I believe.