EU Voice
social.network.europa.eu
social.network.europa.eu
<jack jack>: “I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn’t own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can’t have an advertising model.”
0.https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/now-twitter-belongs-elon-h...
https://www.osnews.com/story/133275/signal-embeds-shady-cryp...
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
Sorry for pointing out, but such absolutists statements are easily debunked with a single 'black swan'.
The parent commenter was making a generalization, like "all birds have wings". The discoverability problem is a legitimate point. If we allow the colloquial English for a moment, it'd be interesting to hear informed opinions on how that can be solved.
like everything: marketing campaigns.
Right now media are reporting (embedding) statements from EU from private social networks, in the future PR are going to include links to the new platforms and journalists will start to track them instead.
Exactly how it happened with Twitter, nobody knew about it months after its launch.
Nobody mentioned it as a source for important stuff, especially not established media outlets/newspapers.
A little reminder: Twitter is 16 years old, was never profitable, and, despite the billions poured into the platform and into "buying" attention, it "only" has 200 million active users/day globally, compared to the 2 billions of WhatsApp user active daily or the 1.7 billion active Facebook users.
The vast majority of social network users around the World don't even know what Twitter is and why it should matter.
when I was born nobody knew what star wars was.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19218
"This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322."
I think it is a much better investment in the future of federated social networking, than trying to get control of it by setting up a centralized instance for EU-citizens, as someone else suggests in the comments.
NLnet might have its roots in the EU, but you shouldn't conflate the two.
The European Commission is kinda a part of the EU government.
NGI0 Discovery Fund is a 5.6 million euro fund - coordinated by STICHTING NLNET using 7 million euros of EU commission money.
I am starting to appreciate Mastodon. It's clearly more difficult than Twitter but I believe that the young generations will learn it quite quickly.
They also have a peertube instance https://tube.network.europa.eu/
I know that hn is 100% for mastodon. I like it too. I just don't think that what EU is doing is unrelated with Musk and I don't like how EU stands behind this narrative that "before Twitter was good, now its evil".
References: https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/140088/eu-joins-mastodon-s...
I admire your faith in it but there's no way in hell two different branches of the Commission were able to coordinate a deployment, ask for the budget, make all the preparations on anything in two weeks
I would be shocked if it took them less than 6-8 months to organize it all
https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/elon-must-twitter...
The disguting EU are attacking Musk by deciding to implement this; funding, coordinating, building and launching this in 11 days. Oh and a personal f'you to google as they launched a youtube clone too...
I admire people who can hold opposing opinions at the same time, but lets face it these both cant be true.
I propse a more likely explanation, which is actually supportive of the Musk agenda (oh how inconvenient). Seeing Trump banned from Twitter made politicians realise they shouldnt be all in on the whims of "content moderators" at a corporation in another country.
Or you could just read about the programme that produced it ... https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/informatics/open-sourc...
Interesting point. Which I would agree with you, but I tend to see the EU parliament pretty well aligned with democrats in EU and per consequence with Twitter moderation practices. I agree however with others here that probably in mastodon the radicalization should actually increase. I'm curious (not cheerleading) to see how Musk will tackle the moderation issue.
What if they make it illegal to mention homosexuality or abortion on Twitter?
> Twitter has potential to become the most important communication channel in the World
Isn't it already?
No one uses these platforms.
Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches.
https://tube.network.europa.eu URL looks like a scam website.
There is no way tech illiterate people can use these websites.
Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views.
Because they don't cost much? If at all?
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches.
Because if they did, the US is going to freak out about foreign influence.
just look at how the media is reporting on Saudi Arabia investing in Twitter.
Saudi Arabia is one of biggest users for Twitter in the World(1), its where everything official gets announced, almost everyone has a Twitter account.
> https://tube.network.europa.eu URL looks like a scam website.
I agree, the URL is very weird, maybe mastodon/puretube.official.eu would've been better
> There is no way tech illiterate people can use these websites.
> Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views.
They can use this as a backup, or as a source of truth for any official content from the EU.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...
You need to take into account the percentage of users to the population, in SA its close to 50%.
That's what europa.eu is, it's the official domain of the EU, every subdomain of europa.eu is an official website of the EU
> > Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views
I just thought to check but funnily enough the exact same video posted on youtube also has 27 view, the EU just has horrific public outreach
They should remove `.network` then
Given the number of communication agencies working with the EU and since the EU had its own communication branches, one has to wonder whether having such a low outreach is by design and why this is.
Not much to wonder about, public interest in the EU is abysmally low which is in good part because people don't know what the EU is or does.
You'd need a good PSA campaign plus to teach "EU civics" as much (or at least almost so) as national civics in school.
But both of those are never going to happen because for national governments it's much more convenient to keep the EU as something that can be blamed when things go wrong and pretend it doesn't exist when things go well
So politicians don't talk about the EU when they should, newspapers care much less than they should and it trickles down to horrible participation rates in EU elections and even that is more often than not seen as a way for government/opposition national dynamics
It's changing a bit but not enough
There's an additional problem which is that at the highest levels the EU doesn't genuinely want people to know what it's doing. Consider that the EU is notoriously overrun with secret law making:
https://euobserver.com/eu-political/136630
This isn't meant to happen but does, and that's fully intentional. Former EU Commission President Juncker often remarked on the intentionally obfuscated nature of the EU:
"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."
"Britain is different. Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?"
"Monetary policy is a serious issue. We should discuss this in secret, in the Eurogroup [...] I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious [...] I am for secret, dark debates."
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie."
You can't be civically engaged with a government that from the very top has attitudes and policies like that.
So they know what it is but nothing about how it works, should've specified I was talking about knowing how it works in my comments above
What's missing from your collection of quotes is that at the end of the day it all comes down to a public vote, whether in the EU parliament, national parliaments, referenda etc
The "secret lawmaking" still needs to be voted on in parliament, the Eurogroup is still made up of national ministers which answer to their parliaments
If people were the slightest interested that would change how those actors behave, as it is almost nothing MEPs do matters because their re-election or lack thereof will depend almost exclusively on national politics
> MEPs aren't allowed to change law or even start the process of changing the law
They are allowed to (and do) amend legislative proposals in almost all cases and can block a draft from becoming law in pretty much everything except foreign policy
What you're referring to is the lack of formal legislative initiative which does mean they can't amend an existing law on their own.
However amending laws requires anyway passing a new law which in turns requires the Council to be in favour as well. And if there's enough support that a majority of parliament and a QMV in the council wants something the commission will in practice make a proposal
But you know what else the parliament could do if they wanted? They could refuse to vote on anything or approve any budget unless the commission makes a proposal they want. The reason they can't do that politically however is that people don't know about how this stuff works and don't care about it. So if MEPs wanted to do that they'd end up being criticized by national leaders that people actually listen to and they'll bend or lose the nomination for the next elections or the election itself
Because it's not actually a Parliament, its members pretty much always supports the Commission in whatever it wants to do except for the protest parties like UKIP, Le Pen's party etc. Nobody with any political ambition or interest goes to the EP because they can't do anything there, so it's full of seat warmers whose primary interest is collecting a salary.
Here's another Juncker quote for you, to demonstrate the problem:
https://www.politico.eu/article/jean-claude-juncker-european...
Jean-Claude Juncker: ‘The Parliament is ridiculous’ After only about 30 MEPs show up for debate, Commission president says body ‘not serious.’
Can you imagine the British Prime Minister talking about the British Parliament in that way? Of course not, it's unthinkable. But Juncker is right. The EP is not even a Parliament because a Parliament is by definition the arm of government that creates law. The EP can't do that, therefore it isn't a Parliament, which leads to the question of what it really is. Unfortunately like in a single party state, the terminology of democracy is used but with procedural changes that render it an undemocratic system, thus we don't have a good word for this type of fake pseudo-Parliament.
You propose that the European "Parliament" could, in extremis, attempt to simply shut down the EU completely if the Commission didn't do as it was told. This is a theoretical possibility only, sort of like organizing a second party in a one party state. You could try, and anti-EU parties send people to the Parliament who think that institution shouldn't even exist at all, partly to try that (see UKIP). But the sort of people who want to spend years rotting uselessly in a powerless pseudo-Parliament are of course the sort of yes-men who went there specifically because they are EU mega fans. The sort of people who aren't obviously focus on national politics because that's where they think, correctly, power should actually reside.
A good example of the problems that typify the EP is that the EU likes prosecuting "crimes" like using funding you get via being elected to the EP to engage in anti-EU politics. One might think that people who work for a Parliament would be expected to engage in politics, but the EU considers campaigning against the EU to be a "conflict of interest" and national politics not European politics. Because the only possible positions you can have as a EU level party are pro/anti the EU as a whole due to that lack of power, classifying the anti position as "national politics" and thus a "conflict of interest" effectively encodes in EU procedure that the only allowable position in the Parliament is blindly applauding whatever is put in front of them. Do the opposite and you can be tried for fraud.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2022/04/18/marine...
Yeah and how many middle eastern activists and journalists are now shitting themselves because the Saudi’s just put a cowboy edge lord in charge of their DMs
also because there's this thing with physical location of the data: europeans' private data must never leave the EU
https://www.reuters.com/legal/former-twitter-employee-is-con...
If Twitter was penetrated by one spy then there are probably others who just haven't been caught yet.
You are probably wrong here, but would be nice if EU was transparent enough to tell us how much it costs. It is a server management, patch management, content management, and etc.. i can imagine that isn't as cheap as you think, done by EU employees that are normally well paid.
It’s public, as it should be. I haven’t search hard enough for this specific project, but if you email the right channel they should provide more details.
The work is almost certainly done under the broader umbrella of the Mixed Multiple Framework Contract for Digital Communication Services and Social Media (DCOMM1)
https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=...
The irony of posing this as hysterical considering 99% of this thread is people saying "Good! The EU shouldn't be dependent on foreign influences!!"
Meta Platforms Inc 1.01%
Twitter 0.89%
Alphabet Inc 0.85%
Apple Inc 0.84%
Amazon.com Inc 0.81%
reference: https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/investments/#/2021/investmen...
I'll assume this is made in jest, as for this
> I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives.
I don't know, and I can't say I believe this should be a priority of any kind, but it probably costs them very little in both cash and man-hours, has the benefit of being self hosted rather than relying exclusively on third parties and I appreciate their endorsement of these federated platforms however small
> No one uses these platforms.
Six million is not no-one. It's relatively few, but absolutely a great number. I'm certain you'll have a hard time finding social networks with these amounts of users, that don't belong to one of the tech monopolies. Or with such numbers where the EU has no account or official presence.
[¹] https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/10929745506607...
Websites like Twitter often push hard to create an account but the 1:10 rule apply… if there’s 6 million users, there’s probably around 60 million readers.
That must make the users of Gab hate them even more...
What? instead of investing in a server and some open source code we should bive Elon a few millions? Are you Elon or how does this logic work ?
News websites can link to twitter or any other website as easily , is not like the average EU citizens is actually following any EU institutions (no idea about politicians, who is the regulat guy that wants political pam), I only see twitter embeded or screenshot in news webistes, the experience would not differ if the text is on a higher quality website but with less active users.
Where did I mention Elon?
People are interested in what the government has to say and mostly multipliers (aka Journalists) are reading the actual news.
It's good to have a accessible publication Plattform that is not subject to US policies (private or public ones), just in case the environment in Twitter gets undesirable.
I assume running this servers costs roughly nothing and they can shut it down at any time.
If EU would buy a big share of Titter it gives money to Elon, if from FB you give the money to Mark etc.
You are implying that is pointless me to have a person website because I will not succeed to be more popular the FB or Twitter. The joke is on you I have a personal website and I run a blog and some static pages. EU is not attempting to defeat Twitter,
It makes sense (if your logic circuits work) that you should have a backup communication method because
1 Twitter or FB because they might block you and your then need to fight with AI bots to unblock your stuff
2 there might be users that do not use Twitter or FB
3 Twitter and FB might not respect user privacy so it is imporal to publish only on those
> You are implying that is pointless me to have a person website because I will not succeed to be more popular the FB or Twitter. The joke is on you I have a personal website and I run a blog and some static pages. EU is not attempting to defeat Twitter
Again never said that.
Backup communication methods don't work if no ones uses them do they?
> 1 Twitter or FB because they might block you and your then need to fight with AI bots to unblock your stuff
Normally when you have a controlling stake in a company you can have an input in how it operates.
> 2 there might be users that do not use Twitter or FB
There's also people who don't use the internet? what's your point?
>3 Twitter and FB might not respect user privacy so it is imporal to publish only on those
EU agencies already post on Facebook and Twitter, what's your point ?
I think that's a valid concern if your main goal is to create a social network, but less so if you're trying to create a reliable and trustworthy organ for government communication.
> Where did I mention Elon?
This:
> > Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches.
does not refer explicitly to Elon, but Twitter is a much more common organ of government communication than any other big American social-media company, so it seems disingenuous to pretend that this wasn't at least suggestive of buying a considerable stake in Twitter (and so giving money, indirectly, to Elon).
Which social-media companies did you mean? If Twitter is among them, then that is, at least indirectly, giving Musk money; and, if not, then it's hard to see how buying that stake would help to ensure communications reliability, since Twitter seems to be much more common than any other American social-media company as an organ of government communication.
Exactly, which is why I'm asking: when you said "buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies", which social-media companies did you mean?
If I was talking about a specific company I would have said "Why don't they buy a considerable stake in {insert social media company}"
So you're saying it's not about the money, it's about sending a message?
One is cost - a peertube instance costs thousands of costs including employee costs, while a considerable stake in youtube would cost billions. Two Second is control - why pay lots to hopefully get some special rules that need to be maintained over time to (for example) prevent any ads affecting the content when you can host yourself and not have the issue in the first place.
Musk is certainly helping that platform.
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109300967725833789
> Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool.
nO oNe UsEs MaDtOdOn
I'm personally really tired of this trope, so instead of offering reasonable replies I'm just going to return the same spirit of ridicule back to you (despite HN guidelines, lol)
Even on Hacker News no one is talking about it
Mastodon: 536 results
Facebook: 276071 results
Twitter: 371583 results
It has 1 million active users so... yeah, lots of people use Mastodon.
> the US takes the view that foreigners don't have privacy rights. I doubt that the US has a future as the cloud provider of the world, if non-US persons have no rights under their laws
https://noyb.eu/en/new-us-executive-order-unlikely-satisfy-e...
This has been a looong time in the coming, maybe since at least the Patriot Act (2001), and definitely since the Snowden scandal...
It's indeed the US companies dominance in the EU which explains all the denial around this, and of course the still good relations between the countries : compare with the ban in the USA of the Chinese company Huawei... (which is an issue in EU too !)... or what the reaction would be if it was Russia instead of the USA !
It's good to see a solution made by the government instead.
The next step is to make it mandatory for officials to use this platform (and Twitter or Facebook in addition if they want to, I don't care) for all their official communication.
Twitter is sort of backbone, fairly useless on it's own, but important for what it enables in wider context.
It's not much weirder that people use private Twitter than that people use private google.
The fact that the British PM will post information, in his official capacity, on Twitter that will not be posted on gov.uk is ridiculous and should be illegal.
I agree it _should_ be posted on official websites.
Unfortunately we're racing to the bottom in how information is communicated and an app that delivers 10 second bits of nonsense is winning.
You are right, it should be illegal, at the extremes it totally breaks down - "I announced it publicly" could legitimately be "I stood at the back door of Downing street and whispered it out loud".
You can't exactly use tax payer money to develop an in-house solution
> The launch of the pilot phase of EU Voice and EU Video will help the EDPS to test the platforms in practice by collecting feedback from participating EUIs. The EDPS hopes that this first step will mark a continuity in the use of privacy-compliant social media platforms.
Exactly. Private corporations that adhere to US law and have demonstrated that they don't operate in good faith.
Each country should control official channels of communication.
P.S.: In a perhaps different sense, it has been decades since modernity ended.
Am I mistaken somehow ?
And notably, this was a fairly common view during the height of the modern age (19th century), so much that its incompatibility with societal liberalism was widely ignored, probably because it allowed for paternalistic colonialism, which made the people practicing it very rich...
the sentiment methinks is misplaced. the US is a 23 trillion dollar GDP. sooner or later, all private corporations adhere to its law.
a better observation is that technocratic trappings of neoliberalism are more akin to neofeudalism than most western governments are willing to confess in 2022, lest they anger the spirit of Thatcher and Reagan or god forbid induce some sort of mass reform.
Vint Cerf said it best at the southern california linux expo when he explained how the digital frontier is really no different for sovreignity than air, land, sea, and space are. You either delineate the domain and maintain stewardship of it, or youre at the mercy of others with the digital equivalent of bluewater navy and satellites. the EU masto instance is a shot across the bow for major US corporations in that a contested battleground has been abruptly created in the absence of leadership and command at the largest fleet carrier (twitter)
> the US is a 23 trillion dollar GDP. sooner or later, all private corporations adhere to its law.
While the EU and China are not quite as large as the USA on their own, they are close enough that many multinational corporations already face the challenge of being the servants of three masters.
I don't want to create 100 accounts to access each countries totally unique and special websites. It's a bad system and ultimately will lead to less discourse and not more.
However, unless you are a resident of 100 countries, it's probably not particularly essential that you do so, is it? I mean, I can imagine my being interested in the official channels of communication for governments of countries in which I am not a resident, but I cannot imagine why they should care to make it particularly easy for me to access those communications. It seems that the most that I should be able to ask is easy read-only access without having to sign up for a special account.
Do, ĉiuj homoj devas paroli Esperanton.
;)
It's worse. Whims of one American individual.
hint hint, all media outlets.
you don't even need to use Mastodon. just put the underlying protocols (ActivityPub) in your CMS and assign internal users through your LDAP.
I d actually like to see something like a public funded mastodon, like we have public TV
The EDPS does a lot more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Data_Protection_Sup...
Mastodon at home: https://images.foxtv.com/static.fox5dc.com/www.fox5dc.com/co...
AFAIK thats the plan for Matrix too.
[0] Tagesschau (German for Review of the Day) is a German national and international television news service produced by the editorial staff of ARD-aktuell on behalf of the German public-service television network ARD. (Quoted form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagesschau_(German_TV_programm...)
What I meant was raising the discussion in one of the 20:00 live news, where the audience is significantly bigger.
He is already getting ready for that probably: https://edi.social/@janboehm
:)
[1] https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/11/01/mastodon-twitter/
[2] https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20221101_97987771
[3] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/10/31/vier-vragen-over-mastod...
Also found this in French-speaking Belgian media, but I'm not sure how much it's talked about there: https://www.rtbf.be/article/depuis-le-rachat-de-twitter-par-...
Think this and a few other people are helping me make the decision to set up on Mastodon.
The trend seems to be going that way.
This is the Mastodon instance of official EU accounts, not a website where you can sign up. You can follow any of these official EU accounts from other Mastodon instances since Mastodon is federated. Your gateway to Mastodon is the website of the instance where you sign up or one of the many Mastodon client apps.
What would likely happen is that you see something "retweeted" (boosted) on your timeline by some other account you're following and this perhaps makes you aware of one of these official EU accounts, the exact same way it works on Twitter. You don't need to care about the fact that it is posted on another instance, however in this particular case you can consider it a form of verification.
The usernames are more like emails then twitter usernames. They contain the server domain after the normal username like this `@user@example.org`.
Disappointing. Better then nothing, but why not provide a platform for everyone, or at least every EU citizen?
Having one big instance for every EU citizen is just political centralisation and is not a lot better than the economical one done by Twitter.
We have to unlearn that "everything centralized is good and the only way to go"
The EU could verify official accounts on their instance.
> Having one big instance for every EU citizen is just political centralisation and is not a lot better than the economical one done by Twitter.
It would be an alternative. People would of course remain free to choose other instances.
I don't think the Fediverse has any concept of "verification" as such. Hence "use your own domain to prove your identity".
It's the base url used by all EU institutions
European agencies use bunch of different domains, not all of them are a subdomain under europa.eu, although many of them are under that one.
You can see some examples of organizations/agencies that are not here: https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/ins...
Which is why I said:
> is the closest equivalent
Also it's a distinction without a difference in the context of the discussion, a tld is just another kind of domain. In the same way .gov subdomains are reserved for US government and signify to the users that the content of the page has official value subdomains of .europa.eu are reserved for EU institutions and agencies
The same way it'd not be smart for the US government to give out john.smith@gov email addresses it'd not be particularly clever for the EU to give out francois.martin@europa.eu
And no, all official agencies and institutions use .europa.eu subdomains, the only exception in that page seem to be other bodies such as research groups which are not official branches of the EU
Most of EU engagement in digital services is to encourage market sector, not replace it with a public monopoly (see e.g. eIDAS).
After all git is a decentralized system as well and big silos like GitHub exist.
1. I click "sign up." So far so good.
2. I am redirected to something called "Mastodon." No idea what this is. Nothing about it on the previous page. Is this a bug? Do I trust it? No options to sign up here. Only "get the app" and "find a server." I'm on my PC and don't need an app so I guess I find a server?
3. Now I'm presented with a list of servers. What on EARTH am I meant to do with this? Does each person get their own server? Do my friends all have to sign up on the same server? None of this makes any sense. I just want to post cute pictures of my cats! I'm now three layers deep into some kind of bizarre sign up process. I'm out. This is absurd.
For context, I run a team of developers building cloud services. There is almost ZERO chance that an ordinary person will follow these steps or use this service.
This needs one button to sign up, asking for exactly one piece of data: their email address. After that, they should be automatically redirected to the portal to begin using the service immediately. This clusterfuck was obviously designed by developers without a care in the world for regular users.
> Where can I register?
> EU Voice is open for registrations only to EU institutions, body and agencies. However, you can still interact with EU Voice from many other compatible platforms. The Mastodon developers maintain a list of Mastodon platforms open for registration.
Maybe because of that CTA "register" button in the top right corner of the page (left to the "sign in" button) ?
This is open source, not a company with billions to spend on UX: they do what they can.
This is not an excuse, all it takes to have a decent -or even a good UX- is one person asking the right questions and following up by interviewing a few folks during the sign up process.
It could be done in less than 2 hours or during a coffee break.
Getting the right experience and setting aside the time to do it is just business as usual for any product owner, even if they work during they free time.
I’m sure this new influx of users will bring many UX designers into the space, and the improvements will be tangible.
Mastodon is supposed to be a kind of Twitter replacement... so why not using the "public timeline" (https://social.network.europa.eu/public) as the landing page??? It would allow everybody to see that mastodon is not more complicated than twitter and would be more interesting than https://social.network.europa.eu/about/more or even https://social.network.europa.eu !!!
I really don't get it. :-(
As long as Europa won't be able to make interesting things catchy for everybody, all these good ideas will just stay unused and lost
Sad to see this all messed up :-(
- There is no monetary incentive for developers based on the success of the product. Close proximity with the EU is enough to win the likely overpriced government contract, which is either a fixed price or by-the-hour.
- The EU officials themselves rarely have ambitions or talent to make any good web services. Your success as a government officer does not depend on the success of a software product, but is based on political alignments and taking least risk of not screwing up.
Do you have an example of such low quality webservice?
This is not where a lot of money is wasted however. If you want to look for EU waste, look into the various agencies travel grants, endless committees and conferences, overhiring and bureaucratic reports that are many times longer than the actual output. I think in these times of fiscal tightening, people shopuld be more aware of the cost of EUrocracy
If you imagine that the EU civil service was paid for on an equal basis per capita, that would imply that, say, Ireland was paying for about 600 EU public servants, or about 0.2% of its own public service. That seems like... probably good value for money? (In practice, not all EU members are net contributors, so it'd be somewhat more than that for rich countries, but still a drop in the bucket).
For international relations, a counterargument might be made: Perhaps the preposterous "little rocket man" exchange between Trump and Kim Jong-un that resulted in a meeting actually brought the countries together.
But domestically I think the influence is harmful.
That describes nearly entirety of what comes out of politicians mouth regardless of the medium.
You would have to ban debates in the chamber, press conferences, press releases, speeches etc.