> In the next 12 months we aim to set up and operate key components in the AT Protocol tech stack: PDS services, relays, and content moderation, in order to ensure that the ecosystem is robust, resilient and with a base in Europe. We also aim to kickstart the development of a suite of social applications that advance democratic and participatory civics, through technical support, access to resources, and collaboration with communities.
> To do that, we aim to raise €5-7 million over the next 12 months, and €15 million in funding by 2028.
€5-7m for operating a BlueSky instance. Great use of european funds right here!
All these "European social media" projects are, imo, cash grabs trying to capitalise on the populist "European digital sovereignty" sentiment.
If your goal was social media "built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws", you'd just host a Mastodon instance and donate those EU funds to Mastodon GmbH
There is an entire industry in europe built to take EU money and produce nothing but a stack of papers. This would just set up some OVH/Hetzner instances of open source software. It is all a very expensive joke.
This looks like it's just the open source BlueSky instance and AT protocol? That's an American project and company, right? Is it just that the instance itself is run in Europe? What is "built in Europe"?
Yes, that does seem a bit of an odd claim. Possibly they're talking about the hosting being built?
That said, I don't have an issue with using a US authored open source project for this. To use another example - PostgreSQL was originally US, but I don't have any problem with that being part of the deployment of Eurosky.
That said, I would prefer that the Open Source system we were using didn't have a profit making (US) company as principal maintainer. I think AT has some technical advantages over Mastodon, but I prefer the governance of ActivityPub/Mastodon.
I wasn't trying to be pedantic. I was just hoping to see if it was a new and novel European social site project or if it was just spinning up an instance of an existing project.
That's just throwing the baby out with the bath water. In my experience, the best kind of online interactions are those where people don't have to be limited by what their offline ID is.
Why would anyone want any kind of non-politician-approved interaction? Are you a traitor or a paedophile? In fact give me all your chat history and let's go through it, because I have no idea what we'd even approve.
Oh and all your private photos too. Think of the children! (and let's NOT discuss that when it comes to child abuse in Europe BY FAR the biggest culprits are European government employees. School teachers, and people in youth services. That's >90% of all child abusers in the EU. The youth services part of that would be the EXACT individuals screaming about thinking of the children. Don't worry. They've put rules in the Chat Control legislation protecting themselves from ... well the law)
I agree with what you are saying here, but social media is pretty sterile. It's heavily censored as it is. YouTube comments is awful for it, with hiding comments and all the rest.*
I find it next to useless. Faecebook has told me about birthdays and people's bereavements weeks after they've happened. It looks awful if I reply to those late.
_
* I'm often confused by why. YouTube hid a thread in which someone pointed out the A Team had reused a Blues Brother joke.
i fully expect most users of eurosky will not experience any censorship. this is just such a ridiculous over-dramatization, that is so preposterously lopsided.
please man. this sounds like the tin foil hat wearing nutcase shit that is ruining the US and the world right now. there's ways to debate & talk about these things, but this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug. you are 100% on one side, totally polarized into spot, and it's clear nothing is going to budge you: that's not a very hackerly spirit, and being so closed to possibility should be disqualifying.
> i fully expect most users of eurosky will not experience any censorship.
Ignorance of what's going on doesn't mean it's not there.
> this sounds like the tin foil hat wearing nutcase shit
yeah, like the CIA overthrowing governments or islands for cheese pizza eating billionaires.
The only reason, why things like these can even happen, is because of all the mindless people programmed to not think and ask questions, but to attack and attempt silencing.
It's clear nothing is going to budge you, because Ignorance is Strength.
> there's ways to debate & talk about these things, but this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug.
Also, the name is.... Could they really not come up with something apart from a bluesky rip off? I understand they integrate with them etc, but still if you want to create a new app that you want actual people to use, then you need to be a little more creative. Thats ignoring the web design choices that others have commented on.
Oh boy. Vaporware startup facing an unsolved cold-start problem calling itself the “next era” of something and announcing lofty funding goals. Exactly where I want to put my personal data.
As far as I can tell, it also doesn't have anything to do with the Linux Foundation, and the website also doesn't claims to be connected to either of them, but I guess worth saying for some reason?
Seems to be run by "The Modal Foundation", a public interest foundation based in the Netherlands, according to the FAQ: https://www.eurosky.tech/faq
Modal also seems like a recently started shell for this and the funding they got so far originates from US non-profits through Free Our Feeds which you might remember from trying and failing to raise 30 million USD for a similar purpose without the whole European thing. I don't think any of the key people involved is actually Dutch.
As a European, my impression is that things named something something ”Euro” tend to be cheap and low quality. I don’t think it’s possible to build a positive consumer brand around ”Eurosky”. I support the cause though - we probably need to find a catchy word like ”Brexit” or ”enshittification” to make it salient.
This is almost universally true for every national identity (or however we want to widen the term to include Euro).
If you have a good product, you usually lead with that. "Made in X" becomes one bullet point in the list of things that make you great. If you lead with "made in X" or even make that your entire brand, that's a sign that you probably don't have much else to bring to the table.
The only real exception are foods and beverages. And even there it's questionable
> Eurosky is a pan-European initiative spearheaded by a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists and civil society organizations
A brit, a belgian and a german by the looks of their profiles, which are just their linkedin pages.
Posting this to HN feels like some guys trying to do "growth hacking" with Brusselian characteristics.
Honestly I even propose this conjecture: If you are in Europe you will learn about any truly European social media from some other source long before it appears on HN.
Europe absolutely should build their own. Is this the one that will happen? Will they have a diverse selection of viewpoints?
>Today, social media is critical technology. It shapes information flows, social norms, and political discourse. Yet Europe runs on US-owned systems whose architectures remain outside European jurisdiction and democratic control.
Social media is a place for speech. There's nothing else there.
Democratic control over speech is their goal.
>This includes our modular moderation platform, CoCoMo.
CoCoMo is an interesting name, but also quite interesting how they never explain which speech they plan to "control"
When your stated goal is to control the speech of your political opponents, they wont join.
Which applies equally well to the US, US law, and US social media.
What you get to choose is not the mere existence of that control, but given that both the EU and the US are democratically governed*, what that control means.
* with differences: states are sovreign in EU, send representatives to Brussels; states are not sovreign in US, send representatives to Washington; differences of direct vs. indirect representation; US has a person who is president, EU has presidents plural of sub-institutions and in one case that's a country not a person; differences of who brings forward new laws to be debated (does anyone in US congress/senate even read laws before voting?); coallitions in EU, two party system in US; etc., but still both democratic
Sorry but NO, thanks. I'm and EU citizen, I do not want to switch from a spy service to another. I want decentralized/distributed platforms. The old Usenet is good, Nostr is usable, the Fediverse still works.
It's time to break cages IMPOSING FLOSS not trying to makes new GAFAM with pseudo-open services.
This actually manages to be worse than either of those two things. It isn't a separate service from Bluesky but it also doesn't really offer any meaningful decentralization.
Another contender to become the European 'Max' [1] for when the EU decides it can no longer tolerate communications applications where those who stray too far from the desired narrative are not reined in.
Nope, nein, nee, nej, non, нет, não, nie, nei, ei, nē, ne, όχ and whatever other word for 'no' you can think of.
Although I live in the EU, I have no trust in its ability to regulate my media usage or platform providers at all.
The EU just managed to postpone chat control for a bit, and my own country has found a renewed passion for punishing expression crimes (so-called "Äußerungsdelikte") through various legal and pre-legal means.
Social, legal or technical centralization is not a solution to any issue related to public discourse, and Euro-nationalism is not a wise concept. It will simply make us another economic bloc, just with an older population than the others.
Contrary to the current zeitgeist in the EU, power should be dispersed as much as possible. We should embrace global open-source initiatives and work towards a European Union that open-source projects (and tech companies!) want to organize under because of our superior regulatory frameworks, not subsidies, legal pressure, promised government service demand or political initiatives.
We already have a lot of failed political initiatives, so why not try the organic, good governance approach for once?
Instead, we just create more bureaucracy and red tape. This absurd CRA nugget is a good example for our european style tech regulation for open source: https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/
"the laws" being making everything you post on it publically available in bulk for research into social engineering so the brussels elite/monarchies can better manipulate the population.
Remind me again exactly why anyone should be excited about that?
Competition is good, but Europe has generally less good legal free speech protections than the United States does (because basically everywhere has less good legal free speech protections than the United States does, the first amendment is a powerful legal framework). Being governed by European law means that there's a whole host of things that the criminal justice system has an interest in preventing you from saying, and eurosky will presumably follow the law.
My experience is that on American platforms free speech means that these platforms are free to remove whatever content based on whatever heuristics, with little to no accountability. Right now I see examples of American social norms limiting expression worldwide (see people adopting bl**ping out words and using defused meta-expressions such as 'unalive' worldwide to escape any potential bans). Right now American free speech means that I'm subject to opaque, automated laws of a corporation which I cannot influence as a citizen.
Yes, exactly. Someone is going to moderate the platform, and in the US that is an entity which owns the space - an entity which at its core wants people on the platform. That dynamic is why we'd expect to see all the major social media platforms operated from the US, as opposed to most places where the moderation is ultimately driven by courts and governments.
Can't speak for the EU, but in the English speaking world outside of the States it'd be quite risky to run large social media sites of the scale that the US ones operate at. The laws around what can and cannot be said in public are too limiting.
I remember when there was a suppression order out on talking about Cardinal Pell in Australia, it was eye opening to how limited political speech actually was. Good luck to anyone in Aus trying to compete with Facebook, let alone the UK.
Mind that freedom of speech (US) and freedom of opinion (Europe) are different concepts. E.g., while you may harbour a certain opinion in the EU, expressing this in a way generally considered harmful (concept: speech may establish an act) may get you in trouble. On the other hand, crossing the US border may trigger an attempt to infer your opinion from extracted public or semi-public expressions, which may get you in even more serious trouble, you may be even considered a viable target based on such inferences (and there is no clear law for this, there isn't even due process.) Both concepts come with their own freedoms, implications and caveats.
Many europeans feel there are many things that free speech protections allow in the USA that should not be allowed. EU laws attempt at least to restrain some of the most egregious speech online.
> EU laws attempt at least to restrain some of the most egregious speech online.
Isn't the difficulty that rules designed to suppress the most harmful speech often create a wide blast radius, affecting legitimate expression in ways that are hard to predict and/or contain?
Free speech means that the government doesn't go after you. It doesn't shield you from consequences (which you may or may not agree with) from private parties.
And what should we do when it's the un-elected corporations, rather than the democratically elected government, whose censorship of us and our views is a consequence we object to?
Musk was 100% allowed to do that. Should he have been allowed to do that? It was undone, but should it have been within the set of things he was allowed to do in the first place?
>And what should we do when it's the un-elected corporations, rather than the democratically elected government, whose censorship of us and our views is a consequence we object to?
Find another service. Find another platform. Or make one.
You say "un-elected corporations" as if to imply something sinister about the fact that businesses can have terms of service, but every business in existence is un-elected and has terms of service. What is the alternative, to have a grand jury decide everything?
>Musk was 100% allowed to do that. Should he have been allowed to do that?
Yes, it's obvious Musk should have been allowed to do that. Just as the mods on Hacker News are allowed to do that. It's their shop, they can refuse service to anyone.
Should Musk have done it? No. He's an asshole, and that kind of behavior ruins the value of his platform. Should it be legal for Musk to be an asshole and ruin the value of this platform? Yes, because Twitter isn't a monopoly and people can (and have) gone elsewhere.
The alternative is direct government control of all online platforms and all means of communication and replacing private censorship with government censorship, which is worse than letting Musk be an asshole, because Musk can't put people in jail or shoot them dead in the street for their speech. I can far more easily leave Twitter than I can my government's sphere of influence.
> Find another service. Find another platform. Or make one.
1. Which is the topic of the post, and where the solution is being objected to.
2. Network effects are a thing
3. Efforts to deeply integrate these networks into societies, make them seem irreplaceable, are a thing; in the case of Twitter in particular, it appears to have full-throated support of the US government, despite how this kind of thing is what DOGE itself was objecting to when it was in the form of fairly cheap radio stations in random 3rd world nations.
> You say "un-elected corporations" as if to imply something sinister about the fact that businesses can have terms of service, but every business in existence is un-elected and has terms of service. What is the alternative, to have a grand jury decide everything?
First: When it's a matter of freedom of speech, that can be encoded into the law, then it is just like the various bans on discrimination against protected groups. Are those done with grand juries?
Second, consider the opposite: given Musk's censorship preferences, is it OK for the US government to make heavy use of X.com for direct communication? Or is that use, as per judge ruling from first Trump term saying the POTUS account wasn't allowed to block people, now covered by 1st Amendment constraints despite being theoretically a private corporation?
Third, there are rules about what is and isn't allowed in terms of service. Is Apple now banned from banning app developers from linking to non-Apple storefronts? I've lost track of which jurisdiction has placed which restrictions on them and where they're at with appeals.
> The alternative is direct government control of all online platforms and all means of communication and replacing private censorship with government censorship
Not so. First: there are many laws governing corporations and online platforms and means of communication, none of which are "direct control". All corporate law, in fact. It is a setting of the rules of the game, and no more "direct control" than a referee in a ball game.
Second: The US government has the 1st Amendment, the EU has the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (amongst other things), these are meta-rules, rules about which rules may exist, restrictions against other restrictions.
> because Musk can't put people in jail or shoot them dead in the street for their speech.
There are plenty of people arguing the case that Musk's purchase of Twitter bought him the US government. Were they right? I am uncertain.
> I can far more easily leave Twitter than I can my government's sphere of influence.
Can you leave Twitter's sphere of influence, just by leaving the site? If you're an advertiser, will they let you leave or sue you for it?
Private corporations have tried moving advertising away from Twitter only to be met with legal retaliation from Musk. Speech about Twitter showing what it gets wrong has met with retaliation from Musk that exceeds the budgets of those making that speech, silencing the critics. Nations demanding Twitter does not interfere with trials about domestic attempts at overthrowing elections have been met with Musk trying to circumvent those rules. Nations whose population and government both demand that Twitter does not spread CSAM are now facing threats from the US government itself.
Network effects aren't laws. It isn't illegal or impossible to leave Twitter - millions of people have already done it.
> in the case of Twitter in particular, it appears to have full-throated support of the US government, despite how this kind of thing is what DOGE itself was objecting to when it was in the form of fairly cheap radio stations in random 3rd world nations.
The problem in that case is government influence over the platform and the collaboration between government and the press (if Twitter counts as the press,) not the free speech rights of the platform itself. Wanting greater regulation of online platforms only exacerbates that problem and normalizes it. If you don't trust the American government's influence on Twitter - and you shouldn't - why would you trust your own?
Hate speech laws are well and good until opposing your government's involvement in genocide gets classified as hate speech.
>When it's a matter of freedom of speech, that can be encoded into the law, then it is just like the various bans on discrimination against protected groups. Are those done with grand juries?
Fair enough, but what is the "protected group" in this case? It can't be everyone.
>There are plenty of people arguing the case that Musk's purchase of Twitter bought him the US government. Were they right? I am uncertain.
I don't know, but if so the problem there again is the government's own corruption not the platform's right to free speech. Powerful influential people have used the media to influence elections and sway voters ever since mass media made it possible. That is arguably a fundamental and necessary part of the democratic process.
If a platform doesn't have the right to advocate for a political position or candidate then it also doesn't have the right to call out political corruption.
>Can you leave Twitter's sphere of influence, just by leaving the site?
For all intents and purposes, yes. What exactly can Twitter do to me on Hacker News? Or in my own home? Nothing, legally.
There is a reason why countries in Europe have such laws. US did not have a major war for quite a while on their own soil which affects your thinking. We do not want to reignite national socialism or communism, we do not like to see news channels lying to us. We do not like Russian bot armies spreading propaganda in chats.
What truth is it that you cannot say in Europe? You can say pretty much anything and be critical and nothing will happen to you. And if something happens there are instruments like European court system which you can use to fight your case (there is no need to be rich for that).
Well that depends on your point of view. America might consider that holocaust denial, nazi flags and westboro bapists are good speech, but having something to watch a legally owned DVD is bad, Europe might consider things the opposite way round
Given that some forms of speech can stop other forms of speech, it's not clear cut.
Considering the draconian policies in the UK, Germany etc where people are arrested based on their social media posts criticizing the government or its officials or anything the govt doesn't agree with, I am not sure what exactly is the selling point here of using a social media platform built/hosted in Europe.
German police raid home of social media user over civil servant 'parasite' post
Man's house searched at dawn after criticizing tax system and government workers on social media; lawyer calls actions 'absurd and illegal'
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-police-raid-home-of-s...
> What are Eurosky’s goals?
> In the next 12 months we aim to set up and operate key components in the AT Protocol tech stack: PDS services, relays, and content moderation, in order to ensure that the ecosystem is robust, resilient and with a base in Europe. We also aim to kickstart the development of a suite of social applications that advance democratic and participatory civics, through technical support, access to resources, and collaboration with communities.
> To do that, we aim to raise €5-7 million over the next 12 months, and €15 million in funding by 2028.
€5-7m for operating a BlueSky instance. Great use of european funds right here!
Not even enough money to vibe code a better landing page.
All these "European social media" projects are, imo, cash grabs trying to capitalise on the populist "European digital sovereignty" sentiment.
If your goal was social media "built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws", you'd just host a Mastodon instance and donate those EU funds to Mastodon GmbH
There is an entire industry in europe built to take EU money and produce nothing but a stack of papers. This would just set up some OVH/Hetzner instances of open source software. It is all a very expensive joke.
> built and run in Europe
This looks like it's just the open source BlueSky instance and AT protocol? That's an American project and company, right? Is it just that the instance itself is run in Europe? What is "built in Europe"?
Yes, that does seem a bit of an odd claim. Possibly they're talking about the hosting being built?
That said, I don't have an issue with using a US authored open source project for this. To use another example - PostgreSQL was originally US, but I don't have any problem with that being part of the deployment of Eurosky.
That said, I would prefer that the Open Source system we were using didn't have a profit making (US) company as principal maintainer. I think AT has some technical advantages over Mastodon, but I prefer the governance of ActivityPub/Mastodon.
Good point.
OTOH, in that sense, internet (or more specifically, WWW) is technically built in Europe, so can we say WWW is a European product? :D
I wasn't trying to be pedantic. I was just hoping to see if it was a new and novel European social site project or if it was just spinning up an instance of an existing project.
No worries, me too. And I agree with you as well.
www was built in Europe but the Internet itself was built in USA! :D
identity verified, approved opinions only, and dead on arrival.
most humans abhor sterile environments.
If identity verification is what it takes to curb russian trolls, then be it.
That's just throwing the baby out with the bath water. In my experience, the best kind of online interactions are those where people don't have to be limited by what their offline ID is.
Why would anyone want any kind of non-politician-approved interaction? Are you a traitor or a paedophile? In fact give me all your chat history and let's go through it, because I have no idea what we'd even approve.
(dixit every European government)
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Oh and all your private photos too. Think of the children! (and let's NOT discuss that when it comes to child abuse in Europe BY FAR the biggest culprits are European government employees. School teachers, and people in youth services. That's >90% of all child abusers in the EU. The youth services part of that would be the EXACT individuals screaming about thinking of the children. Don't worry. They've put rules in the Chat Control legislation protecting themselves from ... well the law)
[flagged]
Well current social media has been unusable for a couple of years surely?
I agree with what you are saying here, but social media is pretty sterile. It's heavily censored as it is. YouTube comments is awful for it, with hiding comments and all the rest.*
I find it next to useless. Faecebook has told me about birthdays and people's bereavements weeks after they've happened. It looks awful if I reply to those late.
_
* I'm often confused by why. YouTube hid a thread in which someone pointed out the A Team had reused a Blues Brother joke.
> most humans abhor sterile environments.
i abhor short sterile attitudes like this!
> approved opinions only
i fully expect most users of eurosky will not experience any censorship. this is just such a ridiculous over-dramatization, that is so preposterously lopsided.
please man. this sounds like the tin foil hat wearing nutcase shit that is ruining the US and the world right now. there's ways to debate & talk about these things, but this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug. you are 100% on one side, totally polarized into spot, and it's clear nothing is going to budge you: that's not a very hackerly spirit, and being so closed to possibility should be disqualifying.
> i fully expect most users of eurosky will not experience any censorship.
Ignorance of what's going on doesn't mean it's not there.
> this sounds like the tin foil hat wearing nutcase shit
yeah, like the CIA overthrowing governments or islands for cheese pizza eating billionaires.
The only reason, why things like these can even happen, is because of all the mindless people programmed to not think and ask questions, but to attack and attempt silencing.
It's clear nothing is going to budge you, because Ignorance is Strength.
> there's ways to debate & talk about these things, but this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug.
Look into a mirror.
Cypher begs to differ... Ignorance is BLISS.
> this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug
How you could imagine someone calmly setting out their stall of ideas isn't starting conversation, but you making up their emotions as a counter is?
Also, the name is.... Could they really not come up with something apart from a bluesky rip off? I understand they integrate with them etc, but still if you want to create a new app that you want actual people to use, then you need to be a little more creative. Thats ignoring the web design choices that others have commented on.
I think it's based on the bsky AT protocol, hence the name.
High End Reliability Messaging European Service
Highly European Relay Protocol Exchange Service
Oh boy. Vaporware startup facing an unsolved cold-start problem calling itself the “next era” of something and announcing lofty funding goals. Exactly where I want to put my personal data.
As far as I can tell this has no connection to the European Union, it's just a private company that launched a bsky instance?
As far as I can tell, it also doesn't have anything to do with the Linux Foundation, and the website also doesn't claims to be connected to either of them, but I guess worth saying for some reason?
Seems to be run by "The Modal Foundation", a public interest foundation based in the Netherlands, according to the FAQ: https://www.eurosky.tech/faq
It's worth noting when the foundation has registered itself an address in Haag for some reason.
People might think this is funded by the EU because of the way they've launched it, but it's not.
Modal also seems like a recently started shell for this and the funding they got so far originates from US non-profits through Free Our Feeds which you might remember from trying and failing to raise 30 million USD for a similar purpose without the whole European thing. I don't think any of the key people involved is actually Dutch.
Thanks but no thanks. I'm not going to give you any of personal information whatsoever.
I'm assuming you're saying this as someone who doesn't use social media at all ?
Human social culture is not ready for this sort of thing.
We love to pretend that we're all for free speech; but our species are too tribal and we'll never escape it.
We are not a socially mature species in the slightest.
> [...] Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more [...]
| COMING EARLY FEBRUARY 2026
Oops
As a European, my impression is that things named something something ”Euro” tend to be cheap and low quality. I don’t think it’s possible to build a positive consumer brand around ”Eurosky”. I support the cause though - we probably need to find a catchy word like ”Brexit” or ”enshittification” to make it salient.
This is almost universally true for every national identity (or however we want to widen the term to include Euro).
If you have a good product, you usually lead with that. "Made in X" becomes one bullet point in the list of things that make you great. If you lead with "made in X" or even make that your entire brand, that's a sign that you probably don't have much else to bring to the table.
The only real exception are foods and beverages. And even there it's questionable
> Eurosky is a pan-European initiative spearheaded by a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists and civil society organizations
A brit, a belgian and a german by the looks of their profiles, which are just their linkedin pages.
Posting this to HN feels like some guys trying to do "growth hacking" with Brusselian characteristics.
Honestly I even propose this conjecture: If you are in Europe you will learn about any truly European social media from some other source long before it appears on HN.
Elevator pitch could be "Wirecard for Social Media".
When I read "Eurosky", Skyshield immediately came to mind. Sounds like a military project.
Europe absolutely should build their own. Is this the one that will happen? Will they have a diverse selection of viewpoints?
>Today, social media is critical technology. It shapes information flows, social norms, and political discourse. Yet Europe runs on US-owned systems whose architectures remain outside European jurisdiction and democratic control.
Social media is a place for speech. There's nothing else there.
Democratic control over speech is their goal.
>This includes our modular moderation platform, CoCoMo.
CoCoMo is an interesting name, but also quite interesting how they never explain which speech they plan to "control"
When your stated goal is to control the speech of your political opponents, they wont join.
Great, registered. I hope it will take off.
I like their privacy policy
This is just sad
"..ruled by our laws" = "Content under our political control"
Which applies equally well to the US, US law, and US social media.
What you get to choose is not the mere existence of that control, but given that both the EU and the US are democratically governed*, what that control means.
* with differences: states are sovreign in EU, send representatives to Brussels; states are not sovreign in US, send representatives to Washington; differences of direct vs. indirect representation; US has a person who is president, EU has presidents plural of sub-institutions and in one case that's a country not a person; differences of who brings forward new laws to be debated (does anyone in US congress/senate even read laws before voting?); coallitions in EU, two party system in US; etc., but still both democratic
Try criticising ICE on the recently freed Tiktok
Sorry but NO, thanks. I'm and EU citizen, I do not want to switch from a spy service to another. I want decentralized/distributed platforms. The old Usenet is good, Nostr is usable, the Fediverse still works.
It's time to break cages IMPOSING FLOSS not trying to makes new GAFAM with pseudo-open services.
This actually manages to be worse than either of those two things. It isn't a separate service from Bluesky but it also doesn't really offer any meaningful decentralization.
Another contender to become the European 'Max' [1] for when the EU decides it can no longer tolerate communications applications where those who stray too far from the desired narrative are not reined in.
Nope, nein, nee, nej, non, нет, não, nie, nei, ei, nē, ne, όχ and whatever other word for 'no' you can think of.
[1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/08/28/everything-you-nee...
"Ruled by our laws" is the opposite of a selling point.
I don't trust megacorps, but I trust governments even less than that.
Because you probably don't live in the EU. They've done a tremendous job regulating the mega corps and making tech better for consumers.
Although I live in the EU, I have no trust in its ability to regulate my media usage or platform providers at all.
The EU just managed to postpone chat control for a bit, and my own country has found a renewed passion for punishing expression crimes (so-called "Äußerungsdelikte") through various legal and pre-legal means.
Social, legal or technical centralization is not a solution to any issue related to public discourse, and Euro-nationalism is not a wise concept. It will simply make us another economic bloc, just with an older population than the others.
Contrary to the current zeitgeist in the EU, power should be dispersed as much as possible. We should embrace global open-source initiatives and work towards a European Union that open-source projects (and tech companies!) want to organize under because of our superior regulatory frameworks, not subsidies, legal pressure, promised government service demand or political initiatives.
We already have a lot of failed political initiatives, so why not try the organic, good governance approach for once?
Instead, we just create more bureaucracy and red tape. This absurd CRA nugget is a good example for our european style tech regulation for open source: https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/
(rant over)
edit: A good - allthough unfortunately German - recent essay on the German speech issue might be: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/grundrechte-wie-polizei-und-jus...
"the laws" being making everything you post on it publically available in bulk for research into social engineering so the brussels elite/monarchies can better manipulate the population.
Remind me again exactly why anyone should be excited about that?
Competition is good, but Europe has generally less good legal free speech protections than the United States does (because basically everywhere has less good legal free speech protections than the United States does, the first amendment is a powerful legal framework). Being governed by European law means that there's a whole host of things that the criminal justice system has an interest in preventing you from saying, and eurosky will presumably follow the law.
My experience is that on American platforms free speech means that these platforms are free to remove whatever content based on whatever heuristics, with little to no accountability. Right now I see examples of American social norms limiting expression worldwide (see people adopting bl**ping out words and using defused meta-expressions such as 'unalive' worldwide to escape any potential bans). Right now American free speech means that I'm subject to opaque, automated laws of a corporation which I cannot influence as a citizen.
Yes, exactly. Someone is going to moderate the platform, and in the US that is an entity which owns the space - an entity which at its core wants people on the platform. That dynamic is why we'd expect to see all the major social media platforms operated from the US, as opposed to most places where the moderation is ultimately driven by courts and governments.
Can't speak for the EU, but in the English speaking world outside of the States it'd be quite risky to run large social media sites of the scale that the US ones operate at. The laws around what can and cannot be said in public are too limiting.
I remember when there was a suppression order out on talking about Cardinal Pell in Australia, it was eye opening to how limited political speech actually was. Good luck to anyone in Aus trying to compete with Facebook, let alone the UK.
Selling point isn’t the free speech (free speech don’t apply to private companies in US).
More like my data is less likely to be ingested by US intel, and the data used against me.
Mind that freedom of speech (US) and freedom of opinion (Europe) are different concepts. E.g., while you may harbour a certain opinion in the EU, expressing this in a way generally considered harmful (concept: speech may establish an act) may get you in trouble. On the other hand, crossing the US border may trigger an attempt to infer your opinion from extracted public or semi-public expressions, which may get you in even more serious trouble, you may be even considered a viable target based on such inferences (and there is no clear law for this, there isn't even due process.) Both concepts come with their own freedoms, implications and caveats.
Many europeans feel there are many things that free speech protections allow in the USA that should not be allowed. EU laws attempt at least to restrain some of the most egregious speech online.
> EU laws attempt at least to restrain some of the most egregious speech online.
Isn't the difficulty that rules designed to suppress the most harmful speech often create a wide blast radius, affecting legitimate expression in ways that are hard to predict and/or contain?
It is commonplace in the US that the administration in the White House sues people for saying the wrong thing.
Tell that to the people that didn't cry for Charlie Kirk and therefore lost their job.
Free speech means that the government doesn't go after you. It doesn't shield you from consequences (which you may or may not agree with) from private parties.
And what should we do when it's the un-elected corporations, rather than the democratically elected government, whose censorship of us and our views is a consequence we object to?
e.g. how Paul Graham got his Twitter account suspended for posting "This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.": https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul...
Musk was 100% allowed to do that. Should he have been allowed to do that? It was undone, but should it have been within the set of things he was allowed to do in the first place?
>And what should we do when it's the un-elected corporations, rather than the democratically elected government, whose censorship of us and our views is a consequence we object to?
Find another service. Find another platform. Or make one.
You say "un-elected corporations" as if to imply something sinister about the fact that businesses can have terms of service, but every business in existence is un-elected and has terms of service. What is the alternative, to have a grand jury decide everything?
>Musk was 100% allowed to do that. Should he have been allowed to do that?
Yes, it's obvious Musk should have been allowed to do that. Just as the mods on Hacker News are allowed to do that. It's their shop, they can refuse service to anyone.
Should Musk have done it? No. He's an asshole, and that kind of behavior ruins the value of his platform. Should it be legal for Musk to be an asshole and ruin the value of this platform? Yes, because Twitter isn't a monopoly and people can (and have) gone elsewhere.
The alternative is direct government control of all online platforms and all means of communication and replacing private censorship with government censorship, which is worse than letting Musk be an asshole, because Musk can't put people in jail or shoot them dead in the street for their speech. I can far more easily leave Twitter than I can my government's sphere of influence.
> Find another service. Find another platform. Or make one.
1. Which is the topic of the post, and where the solution is being objected to.
2. Network effects are a thing
3. Efforts to deeply integrate these networks into societies, make them seem irreplaceable, are a thing; in the case of Twitter in particular, it appears to have full-throated support of the US government, despite how this kind of thing is what DOGE itself was objecting to when it was in the form of fairly cheap radio stations in random 3rd world nations.
> You say "un-elected corporations" as if to imply something sinister about the fact that businesses can have terms of service, but every business in existence is un-elected and has terms of service. What is the alternative, to have a grand jury decide everything?
First: When it's a matter of freedom of speech, that can be encoded into the law, then it is just like the various bans on discrimination against protected groups. Are those done with grand juries?
Second, consider the opposite: given Musk's censorship preferences, is it OK for the US government to make heavy use of X.com for direct communication? Or is that use, as per judge ruling from first Trump term saying the POTUS account wasn't allowed to block people, now covered by 1st Amendment constraints despite being theoretically a private corporation?
https://web.archive.org/web/20180524014547/https://knightcol...
Third, there are rules about what is and isn't allowed in terms of service. Is Apple now banned from banning app developers from linking to non-Apple storefronts? I've lost track of which jurisdiction has placed which restrictions on them and where they're at with appeals.
> The alternative is direct government control of all online platforms and all means of communication and replacing private censorship with government censorship
Not so. First: there are many laws governing corporations and online platforms and means of communication, none of which are "direct control". All corporate law, in fact. It is a setting of the rules of the game, and no more "direct control" than a referee in a ball game.
Second: The US government has the 1st Amendment, the EU has the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (amongst other things), these are meta-rules, rules about which rules may exist, restrictions against other restrictions.
> because Musk can't put people in jail or shoot them dead in the street for their speech.
There are plenty of people arguing the case that Musk's purchase of Twitter bought him the US government. Were they right? I am uncertain.
> I can far more easily leave Twitter than I can my government's sphere of influence.
Can you leave Twitter's sphere of influence, just by leaving the site? If you're an advertiser, will they let you leave or sue you for it?
Private corporations have tried moving advertising away from Twitter only to be met with legal retaliation from Musk. Speech about Twitter showing what it gets wrong has met with retaliation from Musk that exceeds the budgets of those making that speech, silencing the critics. Nations demanding Twitter does not interfere with trials about domestic attempts at overthrowing elections have been met with Musk trying to circumvent those rules. Nations whose population and government both demand that Twitter does not spread CSAM are now facing threats from the US government itself.
> 2. Network effects are a thing
Network effects aren't laws. It isn't illegal or impossible to leave Twitter - millions of people have already done it.
> in the case of Twitter in particular, it appears to have full-throated support of the US government, despite how this kind of thing is what DOGE itself was objecting to when it was in the form of fairly cheap radio stations in random 3rd world nations.
The problem in that case is government influence over the platform and the collaboration between government and the press (if Twitter counts as the press,) not the free speech rights of the platform itself. Wanting greater regulation of online platforms only exacerbates that problem and normalizes it. If you don't trust the American government's influence on Twitter - and you shouldn't - why would you trust your own?
Hate speech laws are well and good until opposing your government's involvement in genocide gets classified as hate speech.
>When it's a matter of freedom of speech, that can be encoded into the law, then it is just like the various bans on discrimination against protected groups. Are those done with grand juries?
Fair enough, but what is the "protected group" in this case? It can't be everyone.
>There are plenty of people arguing the case that Musk's purchase of Twitter bought him the US government. Were they right? I am uncertain.
I don't know, but if so the problem there again is the government's own corruption not the platform's right to free speech. Powerful influential people have used the media to influence elections and sway voters ever since mass media made it possible. That is arguably a fundamental and necessary part of the democratic process.
If a platform doesn't have the right to advocate for a political position or candidate then it also doesn't have the right to call out political corruption.
>Can you leave Twitter's sphere of influence, just by leaving the site?
For all intents and purposes, yes. What exactly can Twitter do to me on Hacker News? Or in my own home? Nothing, legally.
In the USA
Europe is not a single country
Nobody says it is. I think they mean the EU law frameworks that constituent countries need to implement.
There is a reason why countries in Europe have such laws. US did not have a major war for quite a while on their own soil which affects your thinking. We do not want to reignite national socialism or communism, we do not like to see news channels lying to us. We do not like Russian bot armies spreading propaganda in chats.
What truth is it that you cannot say in Europe? You can say pretty much anything and be critical and nothing will happen to you. And if something happens there are instruments like European court system which you can use to fight your case (there is no need to be rich for that).
> less good legal free speech protections
Well that depends on your point of view. America might consider that holocaust denial, nazi flags and westboro bapists are good speech, but having something to watch a legally owned DVD is bad, Europe might consider things the opposite way round
Given that some forms of speech can stop other forms of speech, it's not clear cut.
Considering the draconian policies in the UK, Germany etc where people are arrested based on their social media posts criticizing the government or its officials or anything the govt doesn't agree with, I am not sure what exactly is the selling point here of using a social media platform built/hosted in Europe.
Sources: German police arrest author over tweets criticising Netanyahu https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/german-police-arrest-aut...
German police raid home of social media user over civil servant 'parasite' post Man's house searched at dawn after criticizing tax system and government workers on social media; lawyer calls actions 'absurd and illegal' https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-police-raid-home-of-s...
You did not provide evidence that UK are "arresting people based on social media posts criticizing goverment..."
Maybe review your media consumption for if they are reliable