The European Social Stack

by doener • 1 month ago

106 128 1 month ago

jruohonen• 1 month ago

Good luck, but I am not sure about the direction.

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.)

simianwords3• 1 month ago

Europe should make a dating app. Here’s why: monetising dating apps is really hard and companies don’t seem to be doing well with it.

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

ben_w2• 1 month ago

Meh. Best thing for dating apps is probably for them to cease to exist. Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created, even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.

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.

joe_mamba4• 1 month ago

Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created

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.

fp64• 1 month ago

Why do you think a government should compete on a market segment? I find it slightly irritating.

    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!

simianwords3• 1 month ago

What do you rather prefer, guy

baka367• 1 month ago

As long as E2E encryption is not guaranteed and we rely on id verification, the only thing this can do is to limit the 3rd parties that can easily access your data. Everything else is in the air

h05sz487b• 1 month ago

Perfect is the enemy of the good. Anything is better than the oligarchs systems.

9dev2• 1 month ago

I'm all in favour of the EU finally emancipating itself from American tech companies, but trying to recreate Social Media, just in a European way, is the worst possible way to go.

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.

embedding-shape• 1 month ago

Making people less addicted to social media, or creating other versions of social media that are less harmful, might be the "harm reduction" discussion/tradeoff of our modern times, but they're very different goals and ambitions. Sure, I agree, people shouldn't spend hours mindlessly scrolling through TikTok/Instagram/Whatever, but most likely they will, regardless of what we do. So, why not come up with some alternative that kind of gives them that experience, but not as addicting and with maybe more user choice, like Bluesky letting people chose their own recommendation algos they like?

TulliusCicero• 1 month ago

I think there's space for less crappy social media.

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.

9dev2• 1 month ago

I'm pretty sure Pandora's box has already been opened. The youth spending hours on TikTok every day is not going to go back to early days of Facebook on their own.

mawadev2• 1 month ago

Any software engineering done in germany is so bureaucratic. You cannot start small, you have to create the EierlegendeWollmilchSau that handles all edge cases, all security constraints and privacy concerns, use the latest architecture buzzwords and needs to be meticulously documented... Most projects turn into Stuttgart 21 within a year

throwaway133372• 1 month ago

Engagement metrics fed into recommendations algorithms are the paperclip maximizers that feed humanity's collective poison.

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.

stephen_cagle2• 1 month ago

Do you mean regulating "watch time and comment count" at the presentation (to the client) or the server (business/analytics) level? If the later, how would you even enforce that?

throwaway133372• 1 month ago

Like all good regulation, it would only kick in after a company has a large reach. So as to not snuff out startups and cause regulatory capture problems that are already so common.

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.

gf263• 1 month ago

I want to see the ability to opt out of algorithmic feeds regulated. Allow the people to poison themselves, but allow people to opt out

Radle3• 1 month ago

We europeans can do more than regulate, your statement is just plain offensive.

You would now that if you ever went to a proper school. Those unfortunately are not widely available on your side of the pond.

wilg3• 1 month ago

https://www.statista.com/chart/30934/world-best-universities...

heldergg• 1 month ago

And the regulation doesn't need to be overly complicated:

* 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.

dzink• 1 month ago

Keep the Social, ditch the media.

neilv• 1 month ago

Wouldn't hurt to also use European DNS TLDs.

glutamate2• 1 month ago

Europe is a union of 27 sovereign nations

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.

whiterock• 1 month ago

Europe != EU

glutamate2• 1 month ago

Correct

marginalia_nu• 1 month ago

Strengthening democracy
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.

maxdo• 1 month ago

Oh well for that you have to ban TikTok first , that directly affect your politics . But that will upset new owners of Europe .

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

jstummbillig3• 1 month ago

Here is an idea for a EU product: Build something that is great, and make it so good, that everyone, including US citizens, will want to use it.

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.

dgellow• 1 month ago

That's definitely the main issue. We will end up with a really neat technical stack, a few products built on it for their 100 users each, and it will be forgotten in a few years...

mawadev2• 1 month ago

The problem is impressumspflicht, you have to add your full contact address plus name to a website you host, inviting all sorts of trolls on the internet to ruin your life. No thanks.

aquariusDue• 1 month ago

Same problem with the Play Store/Console if you're registering as an individual instead of a company to publish an app.

drnick12• 1 month ago

You can register domain names anonymously. Sure, you will be asked for contact details (WHOIS), but no one verifies them.

redrove• 1 month ago

No it’s not.

You’re generalizing, DACH != the entire EU.

jstummbillig3• 1 month ago

The most European reason to not do something.

moffkalast• 1 month ago

Doesn't work. As soon as something great appears, US VCs immediately buy it and move it to the bay area. A fair few of the products you think are US grown probably aren't. If not, a competitor appears that is less constrained by regulations and can move faster, taking over most of the market instead.

wbl3• 1 month ago

US companies obey EU law when working in the EU. And there is a reason VC does not exist in Europe namely capital markets being divided.

wilg3• 1 month ago

They don't have to sell?

carlosjobim• 1 month ago

You're not forced to sell, nobody is.

keiferski2• 1 month ago

Yeah, basically no successful American social media company advertises itself as being American. And its users do not think of it as "an American company," they just think of it as its own thing.

benrutter• 1 month ago

That might be true for social media, but there are 100s of American brands that make a large point of being thought of as an "American company" or "American made" goods.

anotherevan• 1 month ago

Truth social is unsuccessful?

penguin_booze• 1 month ago

Calling it European signals that, for one, that it's not American. For some users, that in itself is an attraction.

ftmootnomoat• 1 month ago

[flagged]

kingofmen• 1 month ago

Indeed they do. And as a result they have rather more of it than European busybodies. :)

tomhow• 1 month ago

If you're going to use the word, just type the word. We don't need grawlix here.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rayiner2• 1 month ago

Is there room for European companies to be the “Hermes of the Internet?” The American web is ad-optimized slop for the masses. Can the europeans provide higher quality experiences for more discerning buyers?

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.

hiAndrewQuinn• 1 month ago

Depending on how hardcore enforcement of the upcoming Cybersecurity Resilience Act is, that might(?) push EU products very slightly towards this luxury pricing power on the margin.

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.)

warumdarum• 1 month ago

Have you tried wire card? Its really good! Best payment system i ever used! Bought my villa in moscow with it...

deadbabe• 1 month ago

How about wines, cheeses, olive oils

dotcoma• 1 month ago

Or fast trains you can only dream of in the US, or Airbus that is kicking Boeing’s ass…

wilg3• 1 month ago

America has world-class wines, cheeses, and olive oils.

oaiey2• 1 month ago

The key part of European projects is not their quality or greatness. They do not think big.

bluegatty4• 1 month ago

Totally valid point - but there are a lot of other strategic consideration.

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.

znpy4• 1 month ago

Requiring government actors to use 'Euro Mastadon' or whatever - it means school, students, parents come abard and then you have 'critical mass'.

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).

psychoslave5• 1 month ago

You are aware that most French locutors are living in Africa right now. And more in the realms of hazardous projections, it might become the first spoken language by 2050 IIRC, depending on actual demographic evolutions.

dutchCourage2• 1 month ago

I don't think making a good product is enough. X is still prevalent despite Musk's actions both as a public person and as X's owner. The alternatives, be it Bluesky or Threads, are fine to use, yet people aren't moving.

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.

jstummbillig3• 1 month ago

No, it's not enough. In your case it's not even anything: Being a second mover and copying the incumbent without the benefit of the existing user base does not make a good product to begin with.

cadamsdotcom2• 1 month ago

Ah but for some reason that was missing from the principles. It is the ONLY thing that matters.

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.

wqaatwt5• 1 month ago

The product “quality” seems hardly relevant for social network services? Only the user base matters, otherwise Google Plus would have won against FB..

wqaatwt5• 1 month ago

That doesn’t work when the incumbents are so entrenched.

You’d need to go the Chinese route and just ban everything to give the full market to domestic alternatives.

doener• 1 month ago

I would have subscribed to that before Trump‘s second term. Nowadays for many Europeans great product is not a necessary feature to choose European over American.

alentred• 1 month ago

I suppose social.eu was taken, because it would make more sense.

MrBuddyCasino• 1 month ago

Strengthening democracy

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

fschuett• 1 month ago

Ju vill accept your EU Government ID tracking and ju vill like it! Or else!

sneak5• 1 month ago

Nothing about matrix or xmpp is “ideal”. This person knows nothing about how notifications work on iOS.

daneel_w2• 1 month ago

I think they focus mainly on the fact that these are federated and mature solutions. I don't know anything about Matrix but as far as XMPP/Jabber and "push notifications" go, you don't need to reveal the message, nor the sender, in the alert. Right, it's not perfect, but in my book that goes a long way for privacy.

sneak5• 1 month ago

You can’t send the notification to an iOS app from a federated server. All notifications to apps on iOS must come via APNS and be delivered to APNS via mTLS with a client cert issued only to the developer/publisher of that one app. Each federated instance would need its own app.

tonymet• 1 month ago

be Europe
want to host infra outside the US
write a blog post

lou1306• 1 month ago

Perhaps relevant context: The EU commission just ignored the "Tech Sovereignty Package" it launched ~3 weeks ago, and explicitly referred open-source as a core element of their strategy, and endorsed W, another ATproto-based social that recently a) closed their code and b) ...had its CEO attend Davos. Make of that what you will.

gls2ro• 1 month ago

About open source I think you missed reading the EU Open Source strategy _part_ of Tech Sovereignty Package.

psychoslave5• 1 month ago

Attention trap platform feel nothing like social to be frank. Now that we have LLMs to prove that it doesn't take any human direct involvement to generate epic useless conversations, that should make it all the more obvious.

jonstaab• 1 month ago

Time to coin a new term, I think: "openwashing".

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.

Barrin92• 1 month ago

not to promote individual sovereignty, but explicitly to protect European sovereignty from foreign influence

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.

bluegatty4• 1 month ago

This thesis is undermined by the reality of operational an implementation concerns.

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.

clickety_clack• 1 month ago

This looks so complicated. There needs to be like 2 obvious buttons to press to get anyone to do any of this.

dutchCourage2• 1 month ago

A lot of these principles are totally transparent for the user. For example, emails are a complex system but users can sign up to any email service and send emails regardless of which service their recipient uses. This could totally be possible for any social network, and many apps, would they be willing to implement it. The end user experience wouldn't be any more complex.

storus• 1 month ago

"Europe has a strong ecosystem of social companies and a deep well of expertise in designing and operating social protocols." LOL

When you start writing something, pick something more believable. It just invalidates anything you write thereafter.

daft_pink• 1 month ago

Is it that easy to create a multi billion dollar tech company. The competition is fierce and many have tried.

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.

znpy4• 1 month ago

I've grown to dislike mastodon and similar platforms.

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.

The European Social Stack

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