The European Social Stack
european.social
european.social
Your ethics can still be great, but don't make me feel like your product won't be. If you have to market "Europe" or privacy it probably won't be.
You’re generalizing, DACH != the entire EU.
Obviously nobody implied it literally doesn’t exist.
Every US region outside of the Bay Area is "mostly pennies" relative to the Bay Area too - the Bay Area accounts for 2/3s of the total venture capital in the US.
But that's still also somewhat misleading in that a lot of the bug US funds both have a lot of foreign LP's and invest a lot outside the US, and the same pattern holds within the US, so, sure it's pennies in terms of the location of the fund managers.
When you instead look at valuation or invested capital by recipients, it's still lopsided but much less so.
You find the same in Europe - London is far more dominant as a location of fund managers than it is as a location of LP's in the funds, as well as the location of companies invested in or valuation.
Yes being prudent and staying safe have costs. Acting stubbornly as base mindset all the time also have costs.
> suffer two world war consequences
I don’t particularly see how relates to general attitudes towards innovation.
There was a map some time ago about who had what connections on the regional, country, and EU level. Iirc EU was almost never number one, but got quite a few second places.
France pushes its SecNumCloud standard for critical infrastructure or handling of critical data (ex: health) through law. So, this may not be about pride, but the result is similar.
No one uses social media networks because they care about the quality of the platform. They use them to stay connected with friends and family, to meet new people, or to be entertained.
Very different use cases.
But also, don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better than this.
I’m thinking about Tik Tok. When it was Chinese, my feed was stuff I actually wanted to watch. A lot of it was Chinese propaganda, but it was stuff that was pleasant, like people cooking in Chinese villages. Now it’s just rage bait and engagement farming.
But on the whole I think you're dreaming, Ray. I can't imagine a single case of a successful luxury software product. (Apple is premium mediocre at best, doesn't count.)
Especially with 'Social' there are network externalizations like 'critical mass' - that actually compounds across a lot of things.
No European country given size and language is going to be able to create something that resonates as well as the American variation beyond the critical mass needed, at least naturally.
If 'French Facebook' started at one of the 'Grande Ecoles' it would have grown much more slowly, and maybe never moved out of being French centric and therefore not gone beyond borders.
Without the 'momentum' that doesn't attract investors, doesn't make employees want to work 'late nights for the big IPO payoff' etc..
And there are so many other related conventions, such as capitol markets, public markets, so many issues.
So - in order to overcome those limitations there may have to be a lot of strategic thinking and manoeuvring.
Given that Europe took 4 years to adjust to a nation literally invading it ... well ... I wouldn't hold my breath.
There are some winning opportunities: government procurement is powerful but Euros are afraid to negotiate hard with MS Goog etc..
There's a lot of money involved, forcing issues on privacy is entirely possible.
Same for local content, some degree of decentralization.
Requiring government actors to use 'Euro Mastadon' or whatever - it means school, students, parents come abard and then you have 'critical mass'.
Requiring 'open doc format' means you can break the MS Office monopoly.
Requiring 'Linux First' on every IT procurement decision - or even 'Open Soruce First' so local city council must give an excuse for why they are not using 'Approved Euro-Linux Variations' etc..
Lots of things.
Not really.
Reality is that people (eg: students) will have the "euro mastodon" (or whatever) AND the other social media accounts, and will drop the "euro mastodon" when not legally enforced anymore (eg: when finishing school).
> Requiring 'open doc format'
If you're talking about OpenDocument, it's not european really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument - It was originally built by Sun Microsystems, a very american company (RIP).
People wanted to move to BlueSky, but they couldn't move away from the others because the critical mass did not shift.
I governing bodies require certain use, then the critical mass for those platforms then exist.
People don't need to go to the other platforms.
There's zero reason for Europeans to use Facebook.
Now Twitter is another story - but as we see with Russia, where they have 'engineered' the critical mass on Telegram, and where Twitter is 'available' - it works. Telegram is #1, and Twitter is #2.
The same would happen in Europe.
There are standards for various things, it doesn't matter where they originate from that much, any number of them can be adopted, the key is there has to be hard requirements for parties to support them.
If 'all government procurement' required participants t adhere to those standards, it'd open up for others to participate.
I was on online social networks before Facebook, one of them (kly.it) was very local (national) and very similar to facebook.
And yet, facebook was better, it took off and other european platforms like kly.it or netlog died miserably.
English wins because many people speak it and most people with influence do as well.
All of that will probably evolve a bit by 2050 but probably not enough to move the needle.
India and Philippines with huge numbers of English speakers will probably bulwark 'English as the Commons'.
There's no way we'll be able to compete against Google or Meta in any meaningful way if we can't even get people out of X. Even more so because I'd argue that a good product is a little more boring than the ones that are currently at the top.
Being European is a nice boost on the feelgood factor, if people even know. Anyone who ranks that above product quality is a minority - that’s why this has ~400 signatures not 4 million.
With a product that’s good enough or maybe better, at least the chances aren’t a guaranteed zero :)
You’d need to go the Chinese route and just ban everything to give the full market to domestic alternatives.
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.
Telling big companies to be transparent about their suggestion algorithms would not be hard. I think governments already do this? wasn't that a tiktok thing in the US? Anyway, it's well within government's reach.
Telling companies to only use signals that people consciously give seems like a no-brainer.
Well, I mean, if you believe that a goal of civilization is to respect the free will of individuals up until the point that that free will becomes a problem for other people.
The alternative is something less than respectful of human dignity.
Penalizing the successful is also inherently rewarding the unsuccessful. You can’t do one without the other.
But my skepticism may be unfounded. Do you have examples of companies that are currently working with regulators to allow full auditing of their content promotion policies? Are they actually auditing these partnerships or are they simply accepting promises from the companies?
You would now that if you ever went to a proper school. Those unfortunately are not widely available on your side of the pond.
But your link also is only relevant to the university system.
It doesn’t change the fact that the non university part of education is severely financially crippled in major areas of the country in order to hinder black people from getting proper education.
Combined with a burnout introducing system of standardized tests the us educational system is truly world leading. At demonstrating how NOT to do education.
On the contrary, they are too accessible due to enormous tuition bills and federally guaranteed student loans (which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy). This toxic combination saddles many graduates with debt they will struggle to pay off for decades. Almost as if it was intended to create a modern form of debt slave.
> access depends more on connections and families than merit.
Only true for small elite private colleges these days. Even most of the big top schools have tried to move away from legacy admissions.
State schools also have problems with excessive tuition expenses, but the value is still there for high-demand undergraduate degrees (mostly just for connections and job access afterwards) and definitely for a Master’s. They also accept almost anyone regardless of educational background.
US trade schools are a fantastic value, and more people should take advantage of them. They are a great option, but too many people don’t realize that for many careers a trade school or community college is perfectly adequate and won’t hold you back or saddle you with a mountain of debt.
> Combined with a burnout introducing system of standardized tests
Our standardized testing has problems, but it’s really not that stressful or difficult compared to, say, much of SE Asia.
How about making universities accessible without federally guaranteed studen loans? Debt slaving doesn't mean accessibility.
I'm pretty sure most of these are just politics being played.
* Ban targeted ads or make them opt in;
* Ban targeted content or make it opt in;
* Enforce the use of a do not track header - if the user does not want to be tracked a simple browser or OS setting should be enough.
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.
The early days of Facebook, where I actually saw friends and family posting their thoughts, that was great! It wasn't dominated by people resharing political screeds or random videos from groups I've never even heard of.
Having a competitor here to bumble or hinge that is free and doesn’t care about short term monetisation would be a good thing.
Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine. Even lonely hearts columns in newspapers probably still work, as physical newspapers still get sold here in Europe.
Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.
>even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.
Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
>Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine.
Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age. Some cities are better than others and the older you get the worse it is. While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date. Meanwhile you can waste time and money in pubs and clubs for years and never meet a partner.
It's similar to job searching, if you're unemployed and need a job, you go straight to linkedin and apply, you don't go to clubs and pubs hoping you meet a founder who has a job for you. The latter might work every now and then if you're sociable and lucky and live in the right place, but it's not a sure thing for everyone all the time. That's why dating apps will never go away just like linkedin will never go away.
And in cities, more pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share.
Most of us didn't go from Renaissance village churches to dating apps in one lifetime, let alone one day.
> Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
Most surveys only started about 10 years ago, i.e. after social media and dating apps were already around, and the few longer surveys disagree with each other, but even they only go back to the 80s AFAICT; we've been living in big dense isolating cities for a lot longer than that.
> Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age.
So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app.
> While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date.
Everyone I've heard talking about dating apps since Match Group cornered the market, says the only "sure thing" about them is how mediocre they are, at least for straight couples. Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.
In theory yes, in practice, not so much. Just because you're surrounded by people doesn't mean people don't stay atomized. It doesn't mean everyone is open to you or likes the same things. If your interests are rather niche and don't live in a large metro area with million of people then you might be shit out of luck if you hope to meet your partner via your niche interests, so dating apps it is. For me, none of my partners shared the same interests, so if I relied on my hobbies for dating I would have stayed single forever.
>So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app.
Unfortunately, datings apps are the only easy way to meet someone is some cities at certain age groups. There's people who just don't like, or don't have the money or the patients, to go out to events, hoping to meet someone, as that's a waste of time and money if your goal is just romantic dating and not speeding two hours to listen to a band you don't like and paying 7 Euros for a mediocre beer. They just want a sure date in the near future to settle down and have a family in the near future.
If you're single in your thirties, and you move to a new city for work, you don't have the time to first build a social network from scratch before you can meet a partner as that takes years or even decades. If you're optimizing for starting a family ASAP due to your biological clock, then you need to optimize for dating people in your age group who also want a family ASAP, not waste your time going to art galleries, pubs and clubs hoping that maybe you'll meet your future partner there. For this demographic dating apps are the only way to optimize for dates, especially if you're a man working in male dominated fields with male dominated hobbies. Which is why the majority of dating apps users are Millennials. Students and people in their early twenties have a lot more options for IRL dating than apps.
>Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.
And you think the results of romantic interactions between opposite sexes in bars and pubs is THAT much different? If you as a man approach all the women in the club you find attractive, how do you think it's gonna work out for both of you? Unless you're Henry Cavill, it's gonna be similar to dating apps: women getting too much unwanted attention and men getting only rejections.
Work with me here. If you ban all social media and dating apps tomorrow, will you suddenly cured loneliness? I 100% doubt it. This reductionist logic is more like Stalin having all sparrows killed to save the crops.
This is not true, dating apps the result of our culture and not causing it.
Let me get a cup of the good EU coffee! I like the "privacy" blend the most!
Now let me turn on my EU computer and log-in with my EU id
Check my messages on EU social media and then I have to leave for work
Oh that's a cute girl that messaged me on EU dating
I hope she also likes privacy and democracy
Now into my EU car, let me quickly stop at my EU charging station
Power is cheap, no middleman, all EU for our democracy
And then I'm on my way to my EU employer!When you start writing something, pick something more believable. It just invalidates anything you write thereafter.
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.
They are a great place to harbor extremists and to let narcisistic instance admins play god.
I'll take Twitter/X any day, where everybody (from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other) can have pretty much the same chance at free speech.
Until Europe can't birth one such platform, I'll stay on old ones.
> want to host infra outside the US
> write a blog post
Huge companies with billions of dollars have tried to compete with Google for years. Google has spent billions to compete with Facebook.
It seems very unlikely that you can just come up with this and win.
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.
good, what's wrong with that? Europe isn't a continent for Ayn Rand reading crypto bros obsessed with their individual sovereignty, collective responsibility has always been the basis of our social contract.
We're not a continent for internet libertarians, if that's what you're going for you might want move to some Peter Thiel VC funded micro-nation somewhere, we don't want nostr or 'radically open' we want social technologies that facilitate democracy, human dignity and being able to defend ourselves from nations that don't care about any of it. In the German constitution we have a concept for this Wehrhafte Demokratie, 'militant democracy', building democratic tools that are able of defeating its enemies, not individual escapism.
> 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.
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.
any messaging app that doesn’t notify in realtime is DOA.
All these companies are just a new way of money laundering with a proud word sovereignty
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.)
Ah yes, there it is. We‘ve learned how to translate this in our heads.