The EU can support the development of homegrown social media platforms to ensure European Union's digital sovereignty and shield it from foreign interference
European companies and communities already host decentralized alternatives like Mastodon, a federated network powered by the homegrown Mastodon software. These GDPR-compliant tools allow users to control data and interconnect across servers—a model echoing the EU’s federalist values. However, fragmentation, lack of user-friendly UI and underfunding limit their reach. A unified EU initiative could fund these projects while the alliance of European companies and communities could merge these projects into a public-private platform.
It is in the best interest of the European Union to provide funding for European-owned social media platforms to ensure their development and European digital sovereignty.
It would be awesome if the EU started funding the Fediverse.
They could at least stop using twitter (and meta). At least here in Finland a ton of public offices, news outlets, radio channels and so on use twitter as a platform to deliver their information and, while it was a decent plan back when twitter wasn’t owned by that clown, that ship has sailed ages ago but their practises haven’t changed a bit. Government ran mastodon instance would be pretty cheap solution to this and it would quarantee that everyone had access to their information without signing up to any service at all.
But they won’t as they actually love their dependence.
Not long ago they terminated their years long test run of hosting their own fediverse instances with what condensed down to basically “it was very successful and really worked well; but we don’t care, so we can’t be bothered to operate them any longer”.
It would be awesome if the EU started funding the Fediverse.
They could at least stop using twitter (and meta). At least here in Finland a ton of public offices, news outlets, radio channels and so on use twitter as a platform to deliver their information and, while it was a decent plan back when twitter wasn’t owned by that clown, that ship has sailed ages ago but their practises haven’t changed a bit. Government ran mastodon instance would be pretty cheap solution to this and it would quarantee that everyone had access to their information without signing up to any service at all.
But they won’t as they actually love their dependence.
Not long ago they terminated their years long test run of hosting their own fediverse instances with what condensed down to basically “it was very successful and really worked well; but we don’t care, so we can’t be bothered to operate them any longer”.