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.

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

Keep the Social, ditch the media.

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

I suppose social.eu was taken, because it would make more sense.

Wouldn't hurt to also use European DNS TLDs.

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

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.)

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.

> 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.