Yes, open source and publicly funded. 20 years ago.
Realistically though, proprietary tech services tend to be more successful. Whether it’s Facebook, or Windows, or the most successful European tech service: Spotify.
I like open source, but realistically if we want a successful European social media platform, it would probably be largely proprietary.
Your definition of successful is realistically very different than mine.
Most people want to use a service which is big and popular and just works, and I don’t think they care about code licensing…
It would be cool if Europe could make a really successful, open source social media platform which most Europeans want to use, but if it was open source then I expect some company (maybe a foreign one) would take the code, bolt on some proprietary features, and start stealing users.
linux is big, popular and just works just not yet on the desktop.
obs broadcaster is big, popular and everyone uses it. theres no good substitue for it.
both open source.
no company just stole the code and made an even popular version. there are dozen of examples.
or the dagor engine of war thunder. it was made open source yet no competitor cane and made a more popular game.
can you list some things when this thing of yours ever happened?
OBS has a techy following though, rather than an audience of mainstream people who aren’t especially tech-savvy.
I suppose perhaps the best example of a successful open source social media platform is Bluesky. Some people on Lemmy don’t like Bluesky (and I don’t use Bluesky myself) but it’s getting at least some mainstream traction.
If Bluesky continues to grow then maybe a European open source social media platform could work. In fact maybe some European government or company could set up a Bluesky server.
The fact you’re getting downvotes to fuck shows, I think, how unrealistic a lot of people here are. Proprietary or open, a service lives or dies based on it’s uptake. Uptake requires marketing, marketing requires money, money requires investors, investors who aren’t going to spend their money on something that isn’t profitable for them and it’s hard to see how giving users control of their data and giving them the tools to turn their backs on abusive monoliths leads to profit as compared to, say, the exact opposite.
No no. When you start seeing the Internet as an extension of the physical world you will understand. I’m not against private but the priority here is public and open source. You don’t need marketing to use the pavement outside to walk to the park and meet your friends do you? Or to drive to work per example: some countries have tolls but there’s always a public road to get you were you need to go. The right to free social media should be a fundamental right. Also the standardisation and opening of APIs to certified entities should be mandatory. Those are basic anti-monopolistic practices. Edit: typos/missing words
I definitely want people to have control over their data. And I like open source platforms, which is why I’m using Lemmy. But I just think if we want a European social media platform that sees widespread adoption among normal people, then such a platform would probably have proprietary elements. Surely if it was completely open source then some company could come along, take the open source stuff, bolt on some proprietary novelties, and start grabbing market share.
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:
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Network effect: The established platforms already have so many users that alternative platforms don’t stand a chance.
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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:
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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).
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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.
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.
Thank you very much! Sounds interesting!
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The way Mastodon and federated stuff works, it’s a shame more organisations don’t host their own Mastodon instances for their official announcements instead of Xitter and Facebook. They don’t really take that much admin as only employees would need accounts to post. The BBC is trialling this I believe.
They all already do it for e-mail. Why not for social media?
Noone needs any social media platform. Social media is the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.
ur on lemmy rn. a social media platform.
it’s not social because everything is bots and ai slop /s
It’s media, I’ll grant you that.
We need strong investments in everything software related and reduce barriers and bureaucracy for startups and scaleups I worked in a scale-up and we are simply not competitive, it was tough to find talent and they money we got as investment was pennies compared to US VC funding… Making way more difficult to scale.
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