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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Having a competitor here to bumble or hinge that is free and doesn’t care about short term monetisation would be a good thing.

All these companies are just a new way of money laundering with a proud word sovereignty

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.

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.)

> want to host infra outside the US

> write a blog post

Ah yes, there it is. We‘ve learned how to translate this in our heads.

> 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.