How could the homepage europa.eu become our beloved daily "central square"?

Hi Kurt,

Thank you for sharing your idea!

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Initiative

Though I would support such an initiative, I don't think it should even be required in the first place. Something like this should be in our top 10 priorities right now.

Social Media

The portal could point citizens to decentralised services and to software alternatives. Social media plays the most important part in this.

Events in recent years have shown what happens when centralised echo chambers, a wide scale spread of misinformation by hostile forces, micro targeted advertising and unchecked data collection runs wild.

It is too much power and data in the hands of only a few big corporations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users)

What the EU can do

It's now more important than ever for the EU to set up a safe and user friendly onboarding portal into the fediverse ecosystem for its citizens (decentralised social media and other services, see https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/publications/techdispatch/2022-07-26-techdispatch-12022-federated-social-media-platforms_en).

Decentralised solutions exist (Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy and others) and it's a great opportunity to get a great many users to switch and give them the tools to take their social media into their own hands. A big hurdle seems to be the confusion regarding instances/servers and how to connect to others.

The EU could ease this hurdle, providing a one stop destination to get started, for instance with Mastodon. Either spreading the users to different existing instances based on their interests, or preferrably with their own official servers like https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/ but with an open registration for EU citizens. You might argue that this would be somewhat centralised, but a user that started on the onboarding server is not bound to it and could migrate their account to a different instance later, if they wished to do so.

A bigger influx of new users would make decentralised social media more mainstream, speed up development, increase usability and in turn pull in more users.

The potential amount of users in the EU is probably somewhere around 40-50 million Twitter users, and 10 million Reddit users if ALL of them switched (some overlap). Even getting a small part of those users would be enough to make it mainstream and they wouldn't even have to leave the big platforms if they don't want to. 

Same goes for the largest market share "Meta" (~300-400 million EU users) which could be partially absorbed by decentralised services and partially go to private companies within the EU or to end-to-end encrypted external services. For instance Signal took a lot of users away from WhatsApp (they are estimated to have around 70 million users, are donation funded and their yearly server cost is somewhere around 14-20 million $, which would be like 3 cent infrastructure cost per user per month).

Depending on how much the EU decides to be involved in this, it might not even be expensive or overly complicated. My dream would of course be full EU involvement, funding or providing alternatives for all the big social media platforms. The member states do have the money to run it without even having to make a profit.

Existing Projects?

Does anyone know if there is any official EU plan or project going on in that direction (decentralised social media, or offering privacy friendly centralised alternatives)?

I haven't done any extended searches for it yet though, so I have only seen some blockchain related whitepaper and a lot of fragmentation so far.

Conclusion

Having to point to the Facebook group for discussions regarding the EU?

Twitter being the default share option on an EU portal?

450 million citizens strong but depending on big corporations?

Enough. We can do better. Time for a change.

Thank you all for listening to my TED talk.