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  • The entire world needs European services at this point.

  • Isn't it interesting that all the arguments against it boil down to two main things:

    • Network effect: The established platforms already have so many users that alternative platforms don't stand a chance.
    • Lack of technical expertise: The established providers are more advanced technically, there is a lack of investment, no comparable start-up culture in the EU, etc.

    I think both are self-fulfilling prophecies:

    • The network effect is at least to a certain extend maintained, for example, by the fact that even government institutions do not leave the established platforms (even though Twitter, for example, is no longer an open platform, which makes it completely unsuitable for public announcements).
    • There is a lack of investment in technology because the EU does not invest in this sector on a proper scale, but instead makes itself dependent on established providers. In addition, due to the monopoly position of the established providers, which is imo made possible by inadmissible antitrust regulation, there simply can't be competition from small startups.

    I therefore believe that it all boils down to one central point: it is supposedly too late to change anything, so we should just accept the situation.

    I find this unacceptable, as it is precisely the lack of will to change that has created this situation in the first place.

    I mean, Bytedance was only founded in 2012 (TikTok in 2016) and faced exactly the same challenges. However, China still provided massive funding and support for the company, even though Meta, then still Facebook, was founded in 2004 and thus had a head start of almost 10 years. I simply don't believe that it was just the short video format that made TikTok so successful – it also received massive (state) funding to promote the platform. If China had not done that, they would not have one of the most successful social media platforms worldwide by now.

    It is also assumed that social media can only function in the form of centralized platforms. I think this is also wrong, because the platform economy is not a law of nature on the internet. Rather, it is only since around 2000 that the internet has developed from a distributed information medium into a largely centralized medium through unregulated, neoliberal capitalism — with the consequences we are all now feeling.

    I therefore believe that it would be entirely possible to establish EU platforms or at least to promote the ones already existing more effectively.

    I think it would be worth a try, especially since established social media platforms clearly pose a significant threat to democracies, as demonstrated by the global rise of fascism (which, imo, is largely attributable to misinformation on social media).

    However, this would require renouncing the principles of overarching capitalism to some extend – and I think that this is the real reason why such approaches are not being pursued: Many EU politicians if not most are convinced neoliberals, which is why they refuse to acknowledge the devastating consequences of this concept and instead prefer to maintain the status quo, thereby making the established, centralized players more and more powerful.

    • What is sad is that if every governmental administration was switching to fediverse and especially stopped to use x/twitter it would create a move to mastodon.
      I think people would start to follow and it would make it more plausible that one day fediverse would be the main networks used. More so if governments were supporting development in any way.

      • Yes, a self-fulfilling prophecy due to the short-sightedness of those responsible. They could at least take a multi-pronged approach, but most don't even do that.

        That leads me to believe that they actually have no interest in doing so whatsoever. I assume lobbying is the reason, perhaps also the entrenched approaches of the social media agencies and consultants who advise them.

      • It's not Mastodon, it's never going to be Mastodon.

        Several key design issues prevent that from happening. It's just not built for that purpose. For one thing, a chrono-only firehose is a TERRIBLE fit for governmental notifications.

        Also, nobody flocks to a social network for official admin accounts. That's just not a thing.

        Bluesky maybe, but people around these parts absolutely refuse to acknowledge why that is or any differences between BS and other social media, so this conversation will likely remain inside the weird Fedi echo chamber that missed that this debate is now over for everybody else.

    • For the record, there isn't a lack of investment in tech keeping European social media from happening. There were a bunch of early competitors in Europe that did quite well as Facebook/Reddit/Myspace alts at the national level.

      They were pretty uniformly either acquired and dismantled or pushed out of the global market by the increasingly monopolistic current leaders, and particularly Meta.

      It was venture capital and the insane advantage of launching in a consolidated, monocultural 350 million people market that drove that process. Alternatives in markets with less overlap or with more barriers to US competitors did not suffer the same fate.

      • Yes, the EU has been just as ineffective at preventing monopolies in this area as it has been in the tech sector as a whole.

        However, some platforms have also failed due to their national orientation: From Germany, I am familiar with StudiVZ, an early Facebook clone, and Xing, a LinkedIn (Microsoft since 2016) clone. Both failed due to their national focus, as they only served Germany.

        So this was probably largely a network effect, but for the rest it was exactly as you say: typical of unregulated capitalism, the big platforms, backed by venture capital, bought up more and more competitors from the same and related sectors (such as Meta's purchase of WhatsApp in 2014) until they achieved a monopoly position. This was not prevented and is now a massive problem.

    • The economist blogger "Noahpinion" had a few articles I agreed with along the lines of "the internet wants to be fractured" that are worth a read. Centralized town halls like Twitter are just exhausting and nobody can agree how to moderate them.

36 comments