The European Social Stack

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. If you have to market "Europe" or privacy it probably won't.

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'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.

This looks so complicated. There needs to be like 2 obvious buttons to press to get anyone to do any of this.

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.

Keep the Social, ditch the media.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> be Europe

> want to host infra outside the US

> write a blog post

Nothing about matrix or xmpp is “ideal”. This person knows nothing about how notifications work on iOS.

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.

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> 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.

> 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.