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.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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They all already do it for e-mail. Why not for social media?
Yes, open source and publicly funded. 20 years ago.
The hard part about social platforms is not the code, itโs getting people to use it. The inertia is vast for existing platforms where everyone already congregates.
thats why im here xD
Make it illegal to not use it
Youโd have to amend the European Constitution. I donโt think thereโs much appetite for that.
The entire world needs European services at this point.
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.
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 โ 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 โ 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 โ 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.
I also think that Mastodon is not ideal for many people due to some fundamental design decisions and the lack of monetization possibilities, which I believe are necessary to enable content creators to earn a living (many operate as small, indipendet businesses).
Nevertheless, Twitter continues to be used โ and this platform is no longer even fully publicly accessible since Musk's takeover (since July 2023, most content can only be viewed with a user profile). As a result, you can only reach Twitter users and no longer the general public. This seems to me to be a very significant design flaw if you actually want to reach the general public.
I don't know about monetization being the challenge. Most people creating Twitter content are not doing so to monetize it on Twitter.
It think the semi-deliberate inability to ride an alogrithm to any sort of sustained virality and the terrible moderation tools make Mastodon a very bad fit for anybody expecting a big following and to use it as an outreach or promotional tool. And yeah, those are fundamental design choices that make Masto a bad fit for public institutions, celebrities and brands.
Which, hey, that's fine if that's the thing you want to make. It's just weird to then spend so much effort in trying to grassroots promote a thing not made for the thing you're pushing.
I completely agree with you about Mastodon. I'm also not at all convinced that it's a suitable replacement for Twitter for the masses.
When it comes to monetization, I just meant that I think it's necessary for any Fediverse application if the Fediverse ever wants to have any chance of somewhat competing with mainstream platforms. After all, earning potential is, imo, the basis for professionally created content.
Not that the Fediverse necessarily needs all of that, but it does if you want to reach the masses, because they demand content in a quantity that simply cannot be provided free of charge (on mainstream social media it is paid for via ads).
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.
Preventing monopolies single-handedly is pretty hard. At least they are better than others at reclaiming some revenue and deploying some modicum of control.
But I think you may underestimate how much of a handicap there is in breaking out. If you go look at areas that need some degree of localization, like eBay, Uber or Amazon competitors what you end up seeing is that nation-specific startups tend to thrive and slowly spiral out to other countries. They often dominate indefinitely unless the US global leader decides it's time to sink billions in scorching the earth in that market.
When you don't need logistics, infrastructure and region-specific services it's almost impossible to compete with unlimited willingness to sink money in creating a monopoly. I don't know how you stop that, because particularly in social networks, but online in general people typically want to use THE thing. It's extremely rare that two competitors on the exact same service survive, grow and make money indefinitely, let alone a well populated market.
I don't know what the solution is to that. Nationalization? I mean, I can't believe there isn't a public EU payment provider, at least. That seems like key infrastructure that shouldn't be privatized, let alone existing almost entirely outside your country. Social networking and online comms are even harder because, frankly, you also don't want them to be controlled at the national government level, that's just as scary.
That's all absolutely right. The tech monopolies, which are mainly owned by US companies, are almost impossible to break up โ and it's certainly not something we can expect from users themselves. In my opinion, this can only be achieved through regulatory intervention, such as Switzerland has implemented for Amazon for example. Unfortunately, however, this is also highly unlikely within the EU.
Nevertheless, I think it is necessary. Essentially for two reasons:
- I believe that the manipulation of opinion by the current social media will sooner or later lead to the end of democracies, as I believe is already beginning in the US.
- The user data that makes social media platforms so valuable will continue to be controlled by US corporations, making it impossible for European companies to ever gain a foothold in the AI market (despite all the ethical problems and the inappropriate marketing hype surrounding it, I do not consider AI to be a trend, but rather a key technology).
In short, I think that if Europe does not do everything in its power to finally become more independent in terms of technology, we will very quickly fall even further behind than we already are. I also fear that we will no longer be able to save what is left of our social market economy or preserve our democracies.
Hah. If anything you're giving US democracy way too much credit there.
I think something's got to give, and European strategic independence will certainly be a requirement, both in this area and others.
I just don't know what that looks like or what the path to it looks like. And in the meantime the antidemocratic dynamics are already at play. We may be in a much worse position on all of this by the end of today.
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!
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.
As long as fascist germany doesnt control it sure