This is great, it shows one of the strengths of the Fediverse. Official bodies can participate in social media without being dependent on a foreign, for-profit company. And you can read updates with a lot of different applications, be it Mastodon, Pleroma or the RSS reader of your choice.
I was able to read a feed by following https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission for example. So the @user is mandatory to reach a feed. You probably know this already, but for who doesn't and wants to follow updates by RSS.
"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.
it is related. It was created after Elon Musk bid[1] was accepted. Which is strange, suggesting that Musk would be bad, supporting the rhetoric that the millionaire owners of twitters would be more democratic than the billionaire Elon Musk.
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".
It was unfortunate timing, but Musk made his offer on the 14th of April, this instance was launched on the 25th
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
I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives.
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.
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.
> I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives
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.
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.
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead
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
As far as can be counted, the user count of just mastodon users, has surpassed six million [1].
> 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.
>I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives.
>Why don't they buy a considerable stake ....
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.
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies
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.
> 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.
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)
I am guessing that you missed that the legality of US companies in the EU is very much under question ?
> 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
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 always baffled me that so many governments relied on a private solution that only has 5% of the world population as users (Twitter) as the preferred mode of communication with their citizens.
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.
Why replace press releases and web pages with a social microblog? "Official communication" sounds like something better handled in long-form reports than short notes jotted out into a social maelstrom of hot takes. Perhaps the next step might instead be to get government off social media altogether.
Governments, in practice, tend to use Twitter as a sort of low latency press release system; the target audience is really journalists, and the tweets tend to link to longer-form things. Mastodon will do fine for that.
One is a pull-based system (official press releases, web pages), the other is a push-based announcement system. They can communicate the same messages but delivery is quite different.
I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about government officials.
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.
Do they rely on twitter? They use it, but almost every public organization has a website (wordpress). Twitter is a megaphone that they should use (like any other mass medium) to reach citizens
> 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.
It's quite sensible really, why would you leave a method of disseminating official statements vulnerable to the whims of a private American corporation? Discussion still can and will be held on platforms not directly controlled by governments.
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)
>Each country should control official channels of communication.
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.
Readit News
Sorry for pointing out, but such absolutists statements are easily debunked with a single 'black swan'.
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.
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825322
https://nlnet.nl/discovery/background/
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
Dead Comment
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%.
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...
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
It's worse. Whims of one American individual.
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Dead Comment
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.