The EU hasn't even got a home-built social network with significant market reach, let alone the wherewithal to pull off ditching Microsoft and Google. It'd be nice to see that change, but there's surely some sort of blocker after 25 years of the Web being a mainstream technology.
The used to exist (e.g. Hyves, StudiVZ), but they are murdered by FAANG. However, there are still locally successful companies that could expand to the rest of Europe if US companies were dropped. E.g. just speaking of The Netherlands, Bol.com is much more popular than Amazon, Marktplaats is more popular than eBay (which is pretty much non-existent here) and owned by a Nordic company, etc., iDEAL is much more popular for payments than PayPal, Stripe, etc. (and works far better). Such companies can fill the void.
Microsoft will be tough to replace. There are good alternatives, but retraining personnel, etc. will take years. Google, I am not sure. Their cloud services are replaceable. Search may be tougher, but the quality of Google Search has become so bad that it's often easier to ask an LLM.
With social networks or any EU startup problem is you have to deal with different languages right at the start.
Being US startup with English only you have access to 300m people right away.
There were country specific social networks but then all cool kids were on FB so everyone moved there.
The same with LinkedIn, our country specific business social network closed down finally last year. First 3-5 years it was growing then everyone moved to LinkedIn so that network was ghost town for 15 years someone kept it alive just in case but seems like they stopped wasting money.
I think the language problem will become less of a problem in the future due to (1) more (young) people living in citys and (2) all young people in cities speaking english. At least compared to previous generations imo. This could be my subjective view based on luxembourg, netherlands, and visiting other european cities.
Don't overestimate "young people speaking english" especially with current demography you still need to tap ones that are excluded from English as there will be much more of those.
I do see opportunities with LLMs as making all kind of platforms language agnostic - you should be able to write your own language and read your own language even if other person is from different country using different language.
Maybe so called social network is not something to reproduce. Who cares who runs them if they deteriorate sociality, generate addictive consumption of things detrimental to mental health and favor extremists point of view?
And that's why we need to stop being dependent on the US: everything in there is described in terms of « market share », and not in terms of usefulness, ethics, or independence.
There is an active effort currently to have the EU contribute towards funding https://freeourfeeds.com/ (to enable a distributed, global AT Proto network). Does the EU need the network to be home grown or have the valuation matter? I argue no, it is a utility, not a business to be captured and squeezed by investors or other potential controlling interests.
(as of this comment, Bluesky has ~32M users and counting)
Well, I'm all for the return of the classic forum experience!
The UK's largest "social" sites are pretty much forums (e.g. Mumsnet, The Student Room, DigitalSpy, MoneySavingExpert) and while they're good for their respective topics, they don't cover the Reddit/Facebook/Instagram use cases (they could be arguably considered on a par with individual sub-reddits).
Well, I'm all for the return of the classic forum experience!
If you make each individual bulletin board receive broadcasts from a central server, then you get the network effects of Facebook and Reddit. Individual boards can just sub to the central server keeping them connected to the hivemind or not. Your community can remain isolated or throttled (only 30% of global updates get through). We do this manually here, where not all global posts get through (you'd be hard pressed to push a Reddit post to the top here). It's the simplest way to federate using existing technology.
This model is already at play. X, Bluesky, Reddit, Truth Social, and Rumble are basically heavily funded private message boards with a large mindshare subscriber base.
Taking our message boards back is proving to be difficult, especially because trying to move the userbase off of it is the same as trying to move people off drugs.
> If you make each individual bulletin board receive broadcasts from a central server
Your're doing this with phpBB? Doesn't happen to be open-source somewhere?
Would be interesting to have a look, I think I a bit like this opt-in partial federation / hivemind. Would be even more interesting if it was possible to sync comments between such forums.
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Developing forum software myself, Talkyard. Based in Europe (Sweden).
Started thinking even more about using some European cloud, as an option. There's a Swedish hosting provider that looks interesting (I think)
I guess you could do syncing kind of like how CCing email is done. CC my home server and global server. This gives you agency to remain detached from the hivemind, and vice versa. This is not some idea out of left field, it's roughly my workflow between Reddit or HN or other sites. I manually do the filtering in my mind when I move through different channels.
Phpbb is open source, but I mostly brought it up to show that Facebook is just that, and nothing more. Forking Reddit will also give you a Facebook clone (and a Reddit clone).
I was wondering if you're using a phpBB extension you've built yourself, and if it's on GitHub or somewhere (the extension), or ... It's not a built-in feature?
Websearched for "phpBB federation" and "phpbb subscribe rss broadcasts", found this:
Too many trade barriers, stifling rules and general hostility to growing tech companies for the EU to compete with US companies, and only looks to get more restrictive. I’d bet against the EU pulling it off unless there’s a big coordinated realignment of priorities.
