> 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!
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
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"?
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.
OTOH, in that sense, internet (or more specifically, WWW) is technically built in Europe, so can we say WWW is a European product? :D
most humans abhor sterile environments.
(dixit every European government)
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 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 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.
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.
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?
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
People might think this is funded by the EU because of the way they've launched it, but it's not.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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
It's time to break cages IMPOSING FLOSS not trying to makes new GAFAM with pseudo-open services.
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...
I don't trust megacorps, but I trust governments even less than that.
EU did a few things right, but it's a mixed bag at best. And much worse than "mixed" in specific EU countries.
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...
Remind me again exactly why anyone should be excited about that?
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.
More like my data is less likely to be ingested by US intel, and the data used against me.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Irrelevant. They have the impact of making it difficult to leave. (Conversely, the more who do, the easier it gets for the rest to leave; if Musk cared about money from the platform, this would be an important concern, as the hysteresis slows initial departures, but when enough damage is done they can't mend their relationship with their customers by undoing just whatever happened to be the metaphorical last straw which broke the metaphorical camel's back).
> If you don't trust the American government's influence on Twitter - and you shouldn't - why would you trust your own?
The point is, that government influence is always present. Pretending they're actually independent is a fig-leaf to deflect blame while allowing censorship anyway. If you force the same laws that apply to the government to also apply to these organisations, if you let Twitter (and Facebook, and all the others) face the same consequences that the government would face, that means they are as limited in what they can censor as the government itself is.
> Hate speech laws are well and good until opposing your government's involvement in genocide gets classified as hate speech.
Is an additional problem, yes. And yet, in its absence, you can get banned without recourse, without trial even, from all the private sites for the same.
Consider: If you have a democratic right to talk to your representative, and that representative decides to only make themselves available over ${insert network here}, then ${that network} banning your account has the same effect as that representative banning you, only without any court able to order them to re-enable access for your democratic rights. Previous link to judgement regarding Trump and Twitter amounts to this, even though in that case it was Trump doing the blocking rather than Twitter.
The absence of government intervention does not help, it creates a power vacuum in which the same problem exists without democratic oversight.
> 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 corruption is a "fundamental and necessary part of the democratic process", that's not a democracy, it's somewhere in the space of oligarchy, nepotism, kleptocracy, and aristocracy. Of course, no system is pure anything, but the point is that this isn't putting the δημο into "democracy".
Many countries, amusingly including the USA, have rules on silence right before an election; some recent electoral weirdness has been attributed to social media violating this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence
> What exactly can Twitter do to me on Hacker News? Or in my own home? Nothing, legally.
Sue you personally for your free speech for saying Musk's (in your words) "an asshole", and that his was the "kind of behavior ruins the value of his platform". Which ought to be protected free speech, may be legally protected in theory, but can you afford even just enough lawyers to get an anti-SLAPP against him? Some organisations have closed down because they could not.
It can promote propaganda that fuels a mob hell-bent on overthrowing your government while censoring anyone trying to organise against it.
What's that saying, "your freedom to swing your stops at the end of my nose"? Same applies here. His freedom to decide who is and isn't allowed to say what on his platform ends the moment it becomes censorship itself.
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.
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...