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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.)
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.
But also, don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better than this.