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 don't think people care AT ALL about FOSS, however, they do care somewhat about privacy and sovereignty.
But at the end of the day, they need to have the network of people they care about already on the platform and they need a smooth experience.
The moment the U.S. moved to ban TikTok, users immediately flocked to an even worse Chinese platform.
People don’t actually care about privacy or digital sovereignty — not when convenience and clout are on the line.
I try not to be cynical, but I honestly don't think they even care about that with all things being equal.
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.
Centralised platforms have strong economic incentives to invade privacy.
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.
No one cares as long as the end product is worse and doesn't satisfy the users' requirements. If we want people to use non-American alternatives we need to build alternatives that are straight up better, which is exactly what the Chinese managed to do with TikTok.
Other than the points already made in replies, there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.
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?
I don't know which circles you visit, but out of my discover feed only one was lamenting about the old internet. Nobody was talking about other social media, the topics that dominated was stock market, stock market, and more stock market.
> there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.
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.
It's just network effects. The real dirty secret of youtube is that it pays well relative to the other platforms, which ensures the vast majority of creators are on there, which in turn makes it the easiest platform to discover new content you like as a consumer and to be discovered as a new creator.
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)
What do you have in mind? I am not aware of any foss platform, European or not, that is as accessible as Meta'a networks are. If you get asked about a server choice during the registration process, it's game over.
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.
Nasza Klasa (literally "our class", as in school) was crazy incompetent though. They had all social groups there - young and older kids, young adults, adults, even some elderly people - and they somehow randomly decided to focus purely on school kids, alienating everyone else. And since they were so bad at it, it became a meme, was not cool anymore and everyone left to facebook.
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.
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".
This is a easy cynical view, except that we've already migrated en masse between platforms several times. The issue at hand is the network effect, and it also happens automatically with each new generation of "eww, my parents social network". What Europe would probably get if wanted, is a rolling creation of social networks that are active at the same time.
Free (as in beer) and centralized or giving the impression of working as a centralized system. That seems to mean it must be ad supported, or run on donations.
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.
Individual level action is insufficient to overpower network effects in the service of the public good of maintaining sovereignty. The desired outcome is just not connected to an individual's incentives to a strong enough degree. State action is needed.
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.
Can the EU promotw a biz model where the max charge is 0.99€ a month and the annual renewal defaults to negative, with limits on the number of reminder messages ? I'd sign up for those without too much worry about handing out my credit card info.
Free ad-supported European platforms would probably be acceptable. The issues are:
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.
That's a lot of assumptions about what the EU would do. It's also a bit rich to hold the US up as a model of free speech at a time when liberal views are being actively censured.
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.
Hacker News is available in Europe, it doesn't even have (or need) a cookie banner. There is nothing here that would raise any eyebrows. Americans seem to misunderstand how "non-free" speech is in Europe.
It is mostly calls for violence, libel, and some historical oddities (holocaust denial in Germany) that are not allowed in public.
1. As much as I dislike the thought of law mandated overzealous moderation, you're probably right.
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 :).
The world doesn't need any more social platforms that detach people from touching grass and making real human connection, and at the same time act as a means to spread the current flavor of propaganda
Agreed. The genie isn't going back into the bottle. While connecting with that world has lots of downsides, it is also incredible and fascinating. Humanity does some amazing things, has amazing people, and social media does give us lots of glimpses of others.
The anti-social networking anti-online people need to do a lot better than their useless squalid whining & saying we should turn it off & touch grass instead. Get a little more creative than that, find something less than the polemic version to advocate for.
I've been thinking about this some time now. But not from the aspect of sovereignty.
Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified, possibly via personal ID / passport maybe at the town hall, no alias allowed, but the legal name, people will know who you are. All publicly readable without account.
This would give politicians, companies, journalists and citizens a way to have public "conversations", near real-time news updates just like on Twitter, but without the huge amount of garbage that comes from bots and people eagerly destroying the public discourse. Illegal comments (my mistake, criminal content) lead to direct consequences, maybe also with the one of setting the account to read-only mode.
You've not made an honest negative Google Maps review in Europe yet. I've received a takedown notice with threat of Lawyers.
Also, the UK/French and possibly other governments want to be able to read private messages and have law-enforcement tools made for free for them.
Public Opinion is free to issue in the EU, but doesn't go unpunished. Here an example and long legal battle most of us can't afford this famous talk show moderator had to face due to "Insulting a Majesty", the turkish president.
Don't even think of encryption, governments will request you build in backdoors for them. Social Networking is strictly controlled and locked down in the EU, hard to develop and maintain a product that you as a founder can goto jail for, if your users insult a majesty in some country.
A law had to be "cancelled" to repeal the extradition of Jan Böhmermann into prison in Turkey.
No DM, no need for encryption of messages. All conversation is public. Takedown notices will be from a real company or a real person to another real entity: if they're right, it has to be taken down. If not, not. I mean, the law would be pretty clear on that and if not, that would be a good time to set a precedence.
If Böhmermann wants to publish attacking satire, I guess it would stay up until courts decide otherwise.
Facebook and Google+ tried to do this with their realname policies. It doesn't work as well as one would expect:
• Toxic assholes are not deterred by their name being attached to what they're saying, because they think they're saying righteous things and/or fighting bad people who don't deserve any respect.
• People self-censor, because they don't want to risk upsetting some random violent stranger on the internet who can track them down.
• People who don't use their legal name publicly have trouble participating. This impacts transgender people, but also people using stage names/pen names, and stalking victims.
I think OP's point isn't to prevent toxic assholes from saying whatever righteous things and fighting whatever bad fight, but to limit bot/inorganic/foreign contributions from made up people - basically to make it "one person one voice".
I kind of like the idea of "one person one voice", but I have two problems with it, which I think will block me from accepting it.
One is that the cost of it seems much too high, even if you can change it to allow the use of chosen aliases (I don't think it matters what a "one person one voice" system calls an authenticated member). I don't really trust everyone who I have to give my ID details too, and this is just one more bit of stress for so little gain.
The second is that the benefits will never be realised. In an election, one person one vote doesn't work when half the population doesn't vote; you need almost everyone to come, otherwise it's the strongest opinions not the mainstream opinions that dominate. And I'm quite sure we'll see the exact same thing here, but in spades, and faster. If you don't like the opinion, you just don't show up. Once the centre of the social media is sufficiently different from the centre of the community, there will be the sort of bullying and self censorship you foresee and it will spiral out of control.
There's no need for real names, what is needed is that you can't create multiple accounts. This can be done without linking identities by using two unrelated parties. Party A is the platform and B is the authenticator, when creating an account on A you are sent to B to authenticate your identity and get a token to finish your account creation on A. As long as A and B are separate, A never knows the identity of the user and B doesn't know what the user represents himself on A.
People wouldn't use it, because Europe does censor speech. A German man was arrested for calling the vice chancellor an idiot, a British teen arrested for citing rap lyrics etc. The platform would be dead on arrival.
As a Spaniard, I will just wipe down my arse with your 1984-like comment. The least I want it's surveillance, neither from corporations nor from goverments.
> Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified
Facebook tried this and as far as I can remember it was found illegal in Europe for a social network to require people to upload their ID, or use their real names.
I am not saying upload something and have the social network verify the identity. Maybe something like VideoIdent/IDnow could work. Basically: Get a license to comment, the way you get a license to drive.
I mean, this should not replace Twitter, but offer a less harassing environment.
What about if we leverage existing systems, say DNS and domains? Kind of lets people verify things belong to some known entity, and legal system already handles conflicts in the domain world, in case someone tries to impersonate and so on.
You get a lot of hate for this, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't post there, but I am interested in reading discussions between politicians, journalists and scientists without all the fluff, ragebait, memes, spam and misinformation spread by bots and influencers collecting followers.
This kind of sounds like what you propose. Except maybe even more locked down
This should be the perfect time for decentralized social media platforms, and people might be increasingly open to trying them. What do you think is the biggest roadblock? Is it poor UI and app availability? Deficient UX and content discovery?
I gave up Meta and X. But didn’t replace them because there aren’t enough people on alternatives. I just surf less. Probably better for my mental health that way.
that doesn't work for me. I need reddit, hkrnews, lemmy, etc. I don't mind it when accounts get lost there. I don't have any ego or personal advertising in this, i just like the community. Most people don't care if you know who they are in real life, I find only tiktokers, instagrammers, twitchers want that stuff. Mostly ones build around video and photographs. There is a clear distinction in online "social media" groups.
"Running these platforms will be getting cheaper with time too."
Most cloud systems that make scaling of platforms easier are American too. We (Europeans) aren't behind just in social media, but in most of the IT industry, and way too many critical elements of the total stack don't have reliable European counterparts.
In my country 19 years ago we had a social media platform that for a long time was dominating and Facebook basically didn't exist internally. But that was long ago, now they are gone and everyone is on Facebook. On the other hand, if a change happened once it can happen twice.
This was realised and raised longer than 20 years ago, the primary problem being the decisionmakers who own the money have never cared beyond the 'Quarter'. The nerds are in pocket.
Taxpayer-funded public television that's already a thing in many European countries could be a decent model. No ads and much better incentive alignment. When you pay for it you are the customer not the goods.
In my country public TV is decent with good programming and neutral political tone.
When we speak of dominant social networks today however they are runaway adtech cesspools, outright owned by malicious actors, or a combination thereof. That recurring "good stuff becomes shit stuff when getting popular" effect that people lament so much is in no small part caused by adverse profit seeking incentives. There is no dopamine, addiction and hence money in keeping your timeline chill, unpolarized, attached to median human reality rather than freak circus and not riling you up with ragebait.
And naturally anything created by man can be undone and subverted and it can be done to public media as well. This risk however does not outweigh a demonstrably pathetic status quo of the fiery pits of existing social media platforms.
Depends on whether they are reasonably independent. This works pretty well for e.g NRK, YLE, DR etc. Government can’t have a say in short term (less than an election cycle) funding, or who’s leading the Public Service company or similar. There can be no possible leverage from politicians, that’s the key.
. The job of public service like any media is to be critical of power.
The first sign of a country sliding towards being a non-democracy is political tampering with public service.
Depends on the government. Poland for example was ok with criticising the government on the national tv for many years, until the last swing to "law and order".
So there are no guarantees even if it works without censorship currently.
It seems to me, this is less a technical challenge, but more of a cost challenge. Bandwidth and storage is not free. Freemium works for private business communities (Slack, Discord, Teams, etc.), yet public communication is monetized by attention (FB, IG, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit etc.).
Has someone done work on finding viable alternatives to the attention-based business models? As long as it's free, users will switch, but costs need to be managed somehow.
Readit News
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.
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.
... but you're not wrong, I'm afraid.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
Dead Comment
The anti-social networking anti-online people need to do a lot better than their useless squalid whining & saying we should turn it off & touch grass instead. Get a little more creative than that, find something less than the polemic version to advocate for.
Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified, possibly via personal ID / passport maybe at the town hall, no alias allowed, but the legal name, people will know who you are. All publicly readable without account.
This would give politicians, companies, journalists and citizens a way to have public "conversations", near real-time news updates just like on Twitter, but without the huge amount of garbage that comes from bots and people eagerly destroying the public discourse. Illegal comments (my mistake, criminal content) lead to direct consequences, maybe also with the one of setting the account to read-only mode.
Also, the UK/French and possibly other governments want to be able to read private messages and have law-enforcement tools made for free for them.
Public Opinion is free to issue in the EU, but doesn't go unpunished. Here an example and long legal battle most of us can't afford this famous talk show moderator had to face due to "Insulting a Majesty", the turkish president.
Don't even think of encryption, governments will request you build in backdoors for them. Social Networking is strictly controlled and locked down in the EU, hard to develop and maintain a product that you as a founder can goto jail for, if your users insult a majesty in some country.
A law had to be "cancelled" to repeal the extradition of Jan Böhmermann into prison in Turkey.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair
- https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2017/kw22-de-m...
If Böhmermann wants to publish attacking satire, I guess it would stay up until courts decide otherwise.
• Toxic assholes are not deterred by their name being attached to what they're saying, because they think they're saying righteous things and/or fighting bad people who don't deserve any respect.
• People self-censor, because they don't want to risk upsetting some random violent stranger on the internet who can track them down.
• People who don't use their legal name publicly have trouble participating. This impacts transgender people, but also people using stage names/pen names, and stalking victims.
I kind of like the idea of "one person one voice", but I have two problems with it, which I think will block me from accepting it.
One is that the cost of it seems much too high, even if you can change it to allow the use of chosen aliases (I don't think it matters what a "one person one voice" system calls an authenticated member). I don't really trust everyone who I have to give my ID details too, and this is just one more bit of stress for so little gain.
The second is that the benefits will never be realised. In an election, one person one vote doesn't work when half the population doesn't vote; you need almost everyone to come, otherwise it's the strongest opinions not the mainstream opinions that dominate. And I'm quite sure we'll see the exact same thing here, but in spades, and faster. If you don't like the opinion, you just don't show up. Once the centre of the social media is sufficiently different from the centre of the community, there will be the sort of bullying and self censorship you foresee and it will spiral out of control.
That's how you get mafias for free.
You're free to link to his posts (or copy them) from the new network on Twitter if that gives you the kind of discourse you prefer.
Facebook tried this and as far as I can remember it was found illegal in Europe for a social network to require people to upload their ID, or use their real names.
I mean, this should not replace Twitter, but offer a less harassing environment.
This kind of sounds like what you propose. Except maybe even more locked down
Dead Comment
I gave up Meta and X. But didn’t replace them because there aren’t enough people on alternatives. I just surf less. Probably better for my mental health that way.
Most cloud systems that make scaling of platforms easier are American too. We (Europeans) aren't behind just in social media, but in most of the IT industry, and way too many critical elements of the total stack don't have reliable European counterparts.
Tax founded/public != real/useful.
Also: I am NOT a "customer": since it's tax founded I am EXTORTED to pay for it.
A customer is someone who has the option to CEASE buying it. I do not have that option.
When we speak of dominant social networks today however they are runaway adtech cesspools, outright owned by malicious actors, or a combination thereof. That recurring "good stuff becomes shit stuff when getting popular" effect that people lament so much is in no small part caused by adverse profit seeking incentives. There is no dopamine, addiction and hence money in keeping your timeline chill, unpolarized, attached to median human reality rather than freak circus and not riling you up with ragebait.
And naturally anything created by man can be undone and subverted and it can be done to public media as well. This risk however does not outweigh a demonstrably pathetic status quo of the fiery pits of existing social media platforms.
So there are no guarantees even if it works without censorship currently.
Has someone done work on finding viable alternatives to the attention-based business models? As long as it's free, users will switch, but costs need to be managed somehow.