We have plenty of foss stuff ready to go and deployed. But we don’t want it. We want free ad supported American platforms. No one cares. It’s pretty annoying for the people that do, but alas.
I'm talking about the 90+% of people, not the people we all probably know. It's not about elitism either, it's just human nature. People care about the ends, not the means.
Even with all things being equal, if you offer X covered in shinies, you will win over someone just offering X. Companies like Meta are very good at covering their products with shinies, and governments are not.
You might think smart people will better well balance than not the poison in their drug to keep their junky customer base just afloat so business have a perennial flow of serfs. But even smart people are humans and make errors. And even if they plan with error rate in mind, they can be overthrown by one of their many far more stupid rivals. The number of mindless wannabe will always largely exceeds the anticipation power of the sharpest minds.
... but you're not wrong, I'm afraid.
Its not really about FOSS vs proprietary. FOSS is better because it can be verified, but, for example, Whatsapp is better than a FOSS platform that is not E2EE and not decentralised.
Ideally we would use decentralised, E2EE encrypted FOSS.
Governments also like centralised platforms because they enable surveillance.
Clearly most people just don't care about freedom at all in general. They claim they do, but then will argue against anything and everything that provides even the tiniest measure of it.
So a better platform is a must have if the EU wants the digital sovereign social media to have any traction. Most people just don't care enough about abstract concepts like digital sovereignty to move to a worse platform.
Companies care about it, which by extension should make some of their employees care as well.
(Saying this "out loud" made be realize one thing: maybe I should stop trying to make "get out of Twitter and come to Mastodon" happen, and get Communick to focus on companies and recruiters that want an alternative to LinkedIn?)
Every so often I get curious about something like Mastadon or Bluesky because it comes up here again. So I head over to see whatsup, and it's just post after post about how terrible Twitter is, and how badly it's doing now. Okay, I get it, you moved from Twitter because of blah, can you move on to all the things you _wanted_ to post on Twitter now?
If you only go check it after there is some major news that get people talking about it, then yes you'll probably end up seeing mostly this annoying meta-conversation around the Fediverse.
However, if you manage to stick around just a bit longer you will see that there is a tiny-but-growing number of people who are using Mastodon/Lemmy/Peertube "just" because they have found enough interesting people and conversation.
There is also nothing stopping you from taking initiative and starting the conversation around other, "better" topics. I made a habit of posting at least 3-5 links every day to Lemmy. You can always push out some introduction post on Mastodon with some relevant hashtags to see if you can help bootstrap a community, etc.
[0]: https://communick.news/u/rglullis?page=1&sort=New&view=Posts
[^1] "Most" may be an overstatement these days.
1. Racist meme - probably because I am visible ethnic minority so they hope it is rage bait. I continue to see a lot of wolf whistle racism on FB although I ignore it. A lot of it reads like it is written by someone who is not a native English speaker.
2. Sponsored post advertising a course for kids who want to be lawyers. Probably because I have a teenage daughter and I am an admin of two home education related groups. Not relevant to anything my kids wants to do though.
3. A post from a group I am in.
4. A stupid anti-home ed post - one of these ones where they take an image of a post somehwere else and mock it. More rage bait. It also talks about American stuff (you have school taxes, apparent?) and I am in the UK.
5. A map from a group I am not in that is copied from Our World in Data.
6. A sponsored post for a luxury bed.
7. A meme from a group I think is stupid, suggesting you encourage your daughters to dress modestly.
8. Pictures posted by a friend.
9. A post from a group I am in..
10. A post from someone I have never heard of.
That makes three determined by who I follow, to seven algorithmically chosen.
I'm sure you had nothing like this in mind, but I found this humorous:
"There's a lot of racism on Facebook" "But I'm sure it's written by those illiterate foreigners"
Again, i'n certain you don't actually think like that, just letting you know how it can be misinterpreted because I'm above average sensitive about that (being ESL myself).
Privacy isn't the vector that is able to disrupt this (although it is a nice feature). This will get disrupted when some combination of the following tips the scales on a new platform enough to make the gulf in discovery small: - google screws with the search enough to make it hard to discover content users want (they are already 20% of the way to unusable at this point and getting worse every year),
- Someone makes an even worse for addiction platform that siphons the younger generation off who doesn't want to be on uncoool old guy's platform (i.e. what tiktok did to facebook/insta but also to some extent to youtube).
- Someone spends a crazy amount of money to pull creators off youtube onto their platform (nobody has spent enough money as diversely yet. spotify tried this half heartedly with rogan and twitch has tried it half heartedly with a few streamers but hasn't fixed their rev sharing so they are basically poison to everyone not big enough to get a sweetheart deal contract)
The sad thing is, we had social networks in Europe, things like Nasza Klasa and Hyves. But Facebook is ate them all, I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure why VKontakte survived, possibly because they became a blatant copy of Facebook as fast as they could.
Meta's networks mostly inaccessible to the public. Only registered users - who IIANM are people who establish their identity vis-a-vis meta, with a phone number, or what-not - can access them.
All the link I receive hosted by them will only show door kind of NDA or whatever you call a "click here to mindlessly accept all our ridiculous terms".
It's really a shame, I think it could thrive regionally until today . Big tech doesn't always win - for example also in Poland AWS tried and failed to win the market several times, because there's an existing platform that everyone uses already.
What doesn’t work is trying to invent some open/stabdardized/distributed system. I’m happy to be proven wrong but we haven’t seen that work because they invariably have some drawback that the centralized systems don’t, while too few care about their benefits.
I don’t think anyone cares strongly about the origin if it’s American or European.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
It would take only one high-profile European institution to drop Twitter and set up their own server on the Fediverse - e.g, The Spanish "La Liga" running their own server for all the clubs and players eligible to play in UEFA - to get a good amount of people rushing to find out how to set up their own account.
Yeah our PR team would love this idea. What would actually happen is that nobody would read our updates, except that one or two journalists who repost it immediately on Twitter and X.
For them, I'd recommend to take a POSSE [0] approach: create their own instance and treat the other platforms as mere syndication channels. This would allow them to not lose any of their reach, but would also signal to everyone else that an exit path is available.
1) The EU would probably reject US-style moderation. They don't have the same level of tolerance for speech they disagree with. HN is up to what, its 3rd public moderator? The EU would probably have some sort of law that there must be some maximum number of mods per user if they had big social platforms. What if right-wingers say something without a mod looking over it? Europeans wouldn't stand for that sort of laxity or dang's obvious moderate bias.
2) The ad-supported aspect is likely to be problematic in the EU. The regulators seem pretty suspicious of that sort of thing.
3) A lot of the interesting people who were in Europe seem to get brain-drained to the US. Most of the interesting Europeans I know are US citizens because in the US they get paid well.
As for the "most interesting Europeans are Americans" thing, that's such a strange statement that I'm not sure how to respond, other than that has not been my experience.
You also hear a lot of Europeans cry out for censorship. They just think their kind of censorship will leave them alone. Until it doesn't. But they don't have to worry about it, since they're on American platforms anyway.
On the other hand, if doing this will let us avoid another genocide [1] maybe it's worth it.
2. We're concerned about privacy, but ad supported businesses are as popular as everywhere else (just regulated a bit more strictly). There's probably more fear of processing too much personal data and being sued, but it's good in my opinion as a customer.
3. Also true. But, assuming you're American, isn't the selection of Europeans your know biased? Anecdotally, most of the interesting Europeans I know are not American :).
[1] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup