This is great, it shows one of the strengths of the Fediverse. Official bodies can participate in social media without being dependent on a foreign, for-profit company. And you can read updates with a lot of different applications, be it Mastodon, Pleroma or the RSS reader of your choice.
This is what Dorsey and Musk discussed in private according to court documents[0].
<jack jack>: “I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn’t own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can’t have an advertising model.”
Though of course, Jack Dorsey doesn't want to build on an existing protocol (like activitypub) and instead is rolling out his own (https://atproto.com)
With Signal given as an example, I don't think your conclusion is right. Signal is famous for disallowing federation in the network they own. (I'm guessing that there's no provision for federation in the Signal protocol for that reason, either.)
I was able to read a feed by following https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission for example. So the @user is mandatory to reach a feed. You probably know this already, but for who doesn't and wants to follow updates by RSS.
> Sorry for pointing out, but such absolutists statements are easily debunked with a single 'black swan'.
The parent commenter was making a generalization, like "all birds have wings". The discoverability problem is a legitimate point. If we allow the colloquial English for a moment, it'd be interesting to hear informed opinions on how that can be solved.
Right now media are reporting (embedding) statements from EU from private social networks, in the future PR are going to include links to the new platforms and journalists will start to track them instead.
Exactly how it happened with Twitter, nobody knew about it months after its launch.
Nobody mentioned it as a source for important stuff, especially not established media outlets/newspapers.
A little reminder: Twitter is 16 years old, was never profitable, and, despite the billions poured into the platform and into "buying" attention, it "only" has 200 million active users/day globally, compared to the 2 billions of WhatsApp user active daily or the 1.7 billion active Facebook users.
The vast majority of social network users around the World don't even know what Twitter is and why it should matter.
I know Twitter yet still don't know why it should matter. Just another social media platform, they come and go since a while already. If it was useful, another one will jump in its place (see Vine -> TikTok)
"This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322."
I think it is a much better investment in the future of federated social networking, than trying to get control of it by setting up a centralized instance for EU-citizens, as someone else suggests in the comments.
it is related. It was created after Elon Musk bid[1] was accepted. Which is strange, suggesting that Musk would be bad, supporting the rhetoric that the millionaire owners of twitters would be more democratic than the billionaire Elon Musk.
I know that hn is 100% for mastodon. I like it too. I just don't think that what EU is doing is unrelated with Musk and I don't like how EU stands behind this narrative that "before Twitter was good, now its evil".
It was unfortunate timing, but Musk made his offer on the 14th of April, this instance was launched on the 25th
I admire your faith in it but there's no way in hell two different branches of the Commission were able to coordinate a deployment, ask for the budget, make all the preparations on anything in two weeks
I would be shocked if it took them less than 6-8 months to organize it all
The EU are useless bureaucrats that can never and will never organise anything without spending years debating it and billions implementing it.
The disguting EU are attacking Musk by deciding to implement this; funding, coordinating, building and launching this in 11 days. Oh and a personal f'you to google as they launched a youtube clone too...
I admire people who can hold opposing opinions at the same time, but lets face it these both cant be true.
I propse a more likely explanation, which is actually supportive of the Musk agenda (oh how inconvenient). Seeing Trump banned from Twitter made politicians realise they shouldnt be all in on the whims of "content moderators" at a corporation in another country.
So… aren’t the first two paragraphs of your comment mutually exclusive? As in, given the timeline, either the EU are attacking Musk but can move pretty fast, or this has nothing to do with Musk?
> Seeing Trump banned from Twitter made politicians realise they shouldnt be all in on the whims of "content moderators" at a corporation in another country.
Interesting point. Which I would agree with you, but I tend to see the EU parliament pretty well aligned with democrats in EU and per consequence with Twitter moderation practices. I agree however with others here that probably in mastodon the radicalization should actually increase. I'm curious (not cheerleading) to see how Musk will tackle the moderation issue.
why its not unfounded? Reading his comments, looks like he will focus on having plurality on the moderation team and he will fight the bots and anonymous accounts which are quite noisy and disturbance to the real discussion. Twitter has potential to become the most important communication channel in the World, and I'm sure Musk will be the person leading it to this direction.
Is it? It has few 100s of millions of users, most of them in US - it's insignificant anywhere else. Older people don't know what it is, and younger people don't care about it - there's not enough dancing videos on it I guess.
I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives.
No one uses these platforms.
Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches.
There is no way tech illiterate people can use these websites.
Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views.
> I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives
Because they don't cost much? If at all?
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches.
Because if they did, the US is going to freak out about foreign influence.
just look at how the media is reporting on Saudi Arabia investing in Twitter.
Saudi Arabia is one of biggest users for Twitter in the World(1), its where everything official gets announced, almost everyone has a Twitter account.
I agree, the URL is very weird, maybe mastodon/puretube.official.eu would've been better
> There is no way tech illiterate people can use these websites.
> Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views.
They can use this as a backup, or as a source of truth for any official content from the EU.
> mastodon/puretube.official.eu would've been better
That's what europa.eu is, it's the official domain of the EU, every subdomain of europa.eu is an official website of the EU
> > Their first video that appears on the website "The future of data protection: Effective enforcement in the digital world - full video" is 1 week old and has 27 views
I just thought to check but funnily enough the exact same video posted on youtube also has 27 view, the EU just has horrific public outreach
Given the number of communication agencies working with the EU and since the EU had its own communication branches, one has to wonder whether having such a low outreach is by design and why this is.
> having such a low outreach is by design and why this is
Not much to wonder about, public interest in the EU is abysmally low which is in good part because people don't know what the EU is or does.
You'd need a good PSA campaign plus to teach "EU civics" as much (or at least almost so) as national civics in school.
But both of those are never going to happen because for national governments it's much more convenient to keep the EU as something that can be blamed when things go wrong and pretend it doesn't exist when things go well
So politicians don't talk about the EU when they should, newspapers care much less than they should and it trickles down to horrible participation rates in EU elections and even that is more often than not seen as a way for government/opposition national dynamics
Alternative take - people know what the EU is, but also know that they have no way to control or influence it. So they ignore it because it'll do whatever it's going to do anyway regardless of whether or not people think it's a good idea. For example participation in EU elections is low because they aren't elections to a real parliament. MEPs aren't allowed to change law or even start the process of changing the law, only the unelected Commission can do that, which in turn means they can't have policies beyond "support the Commission" or "try to slow things down", and thus there's little point in people paying attention to their campaigns.
There's an additional problem which is that at the highest levels the EU doesn't genuinely want people to know what it's doing. Consider that the EU is notoriously overrun with secret law making:
This isn't meant to happen but does, and that's fully intentional. Former EU Commission President Juncker often remarked on the intentionally obfuscated nature of the EU:
"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."
"Britain is different. Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?"
"Monetary policy is a serious issue. We should discuss this in secret, in the Eurogroup [...] I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious [...] I am for secret, dark debates."
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie."
You can't be civically engaged with a government that from the very top has attitudes and policies like that.
> also know that they have no way to control or influence it
So they know what it is but nothing about how it works, should've specified I was talking about knowing how it works in my comments above
What's missing from your collection of quotes is that at the end of the day it all comes down to a public vote, whether in the EU parliament, national parliaments, referenda etc
The "secret lawmaking" still needs to be voted on in parliament, the Eurogroup is still made up of national ministers which answer to their parliaments
If people were the slightest interested that would change how those actors behave, as it is almost nothing MEPs do matters because their re-election or lack thereof will depend almost exclusively on national politics
> MEPs aren't allowed to change law or even start the process of changing the law
They are allowed to (and do) amend legislative proposals in almost all cases and can block a draft from becoming law in pretty much everything except foreign policy
What you're referring to is the lack of formal legislative initiative which does mean they can't amend an existing law on their own.
However amending laws requires anyway passing a new law which in turns requires the Council to be in favour as well. And if there's enough support that a majority of parliament and a QMV in the council wants something the commission will in practice make a proposal
But you know what else the parliament could do if they wanted? They could refuse to vote on anything or approve any budget unless the commission makes a proposal they want. The reason they can't do that politically however is that people don't know about how this stuff works and don't care about it. So if MEPs wanted to do that they'd end up being criticized by national leaders that people actually listen to and they'll bend or lose the nomination for the next elections or the election itself
The "secret lawmaking" still needs to be voted on in parliament
Because it's not actually a Parliament, its members pretty much always supports the Commission in whatever it wants to do except for the protest parties like UKIP, Le Pen's party etc. Nobody with any political ambition or interest goes to the EP because they can't do anything there, so it's full of seat warmers whose primary interest is collecting a salary.
Here's another Juncker quote for you, to demonstrate the problem:
Jean-Claude Juncker: ‘The Parliament is ridiculous’ After only about 30 MEPs show up for debate, Commission president says body ‘not serious.’
Can you imagine the British Prime Minister talking about the British Parliament in that way? Of course not, it's unthinkable. But Juncker is right. The EP is not even a Parliament because a Parliament is by definition the arm of government that creates law. The EP can't do that, therefore it isn't a Parliament, which leads to the question of what it really is. Unfortunately like in a single party state, the terminology of democracy is used but with procedural changes that render it an undemocratic system, thus we don't have a good word for this type of fake pseudo-Parliament.
You propose that the European "Parliament" could, in extremis, attempt to simply shut down the EU completely if the Commission didn't do as it was told. This is a theoretical possibility only, sort of like organizing a second party in a one party state. You could try, and anti-EU parties send people to the Parliament who think that institution shouldn't even exist at all, partly to try that (see UKIP). But the sort of people who want to spend years rotting uselessly in a powerless pseudo-Parliament are of course the sort of yes-men who went there specifically because they are EU mega fans. The sort of people who aren't obviously focus on national politics because that's where they think, correctly, power should actually reside.
A good example of the problems that typify the EP is that the EU likes prosecuting "crimes" like using funding you get via being elected to the EP to engage in anti-EU politics. One might think that people who work for a Parliament would be expected to engage in politics, but the EU considers campaigning against the EU to be a "conflict of interest" and national politics not European politics. Because the only possible positions you can have as a EU level party are pro/anti the EU as a whole due to that lack of power, classifying the anti position as "national politics" and thus a "conflict of interest" effectively encodes in EU procedure that the only allowable position in the Parliament is blindly applauding whatever is put in front of them. Do the opposite and you can be tried for fraud.
“ Saudi Arabia is one of biggest users for Twitter in the World(1), its where everything official gets announced, almost everyone has a Twitter account.”
Yeah and how many middle eastern activists and journalists are now shitting themselves because the Saudi’s just put a cowboy edge lord in charge of their DMs
A Twitter employee was literally working as a spy for Saudi Arabia. He passed private account information on Saudi dissidents to their intelligence service, which probably got some people tortured or killed.
You are probably wrong here, but would be nice if EU was transparent enough to tell us how much it costs. It is a server management, patch management, content management, and etc.. i can imagine that isn't as cheap as you think, done by EU employees that are normally well paid.
I live in Brussels and have many friends in the EU bubble. EU employees are not as well paid as you think. The main perk has to do with how they’re taxed which is greatly advantageous and makes their salary look higher than most peers.
It’s public, as it should be. I haven’t search hard enough for this specific project, but if you email the right channel they should provide more details.
Probably you pasted the link without inspect it. I,however, read it and the information of how much such service costs isn't anywhere to find..or could point us out where did you find this information?
The work is almost certainly done under the broader umbrella of the Mixed Multiple Framework Contract for Digital Communication Services and Social Media (DCOMM1)
EU is always very transparent in general. How many time did you spend to search the answer to this question before saying "would be nice if EU was transparent enough to tell us how much it costs" ?
Yup, as i stated, the answer are not there in the documents. For sure the maintenance of that service comes from the 850k/year, which is a lot of money for the amount of stuff that they do. thank you!
The Norwegian pension fund already owns roughly 1% of many of the large tech giants, not sure what percentage would cause the US to start freaking out, especially as the EU is a close ally.
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead
I'll assume this is made in jest, as for this
> I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives.
I don't know, and I can't say I believe this should be a priority of any kind, but it probably costs them very little in both cash and man-hours, has the benefit of being self hosted rather than relying exclusively on third parties and I appreciate their endorsement of these federated platforms however small
As far as can be counted, the user count of just mastodon users, has surpassed six million [1].
> No one uses these platforms.
Six million is not no-one. It's relatively few, but absolutely a great number. I'm certain you'll have a hard time finding social networks with these amounts of users, that don't belong to one of the tech monopolies. Or with such numbers where the EU has no account or official presence.
It's also notable how many journalists (and even news outlets; the Irish paper of record just created an account, say) are suddenly using Mastodon. Realistically, the target audience of EU twitter feeds is mostly journalists; very few normal people will follow any sort of government twitter feed, but journalists will. Government bodies tend to use Twitter as a sort of low latency press release mechanism, and Mastodon will do fine for that, should there be problems with Twitter.
It’s also not just users. Mastodon instances can have plenty of readers who never make an account.
Websites like Twitter often push hard to create an account but the 1:10 rule apply… if there’s 6 million users, there’s probably around 60 million readers.
>I don't understand why the EU bothers wasting money on these initiatives.
>Why don't they buy a considerable stake ....
What? instead of investing in a server and some open source code we should bive Elon a few millions? Are you Elon or how does this logic work ?
News websites can link to twitter or any other website as easily , is not like the average EU citizens is actually following any EU institutions (no idea about politicians, who is the regulat guy that wants political pam), I only see twitter embeded or screenshot in news webistes, the experience would not differ if the text is on a higher quality website but with less active users.
It's not about the cost of the service, it's that it's a pointless endeavour it's never going to succeed. Every social media company succeeds or fails based on the network effect.
A mastodon instance like this does not need to be "successful" in order stay online.
People are interested in what the government has to say and mostly multipliers (aka Journalists) are reading the actual news.
It's good to have a accessible publication Plattform that is not subject to US policies (private or public ones), just in case the environment in Twitter gets undesirable.
I assume running this servers costs roughly nothing and they can shut it down at any time.
If EU would buy a big share of Titter it gives money to Elon, if from FB you give the money to Mark etc.
You are implying that is pointless me to have a person website because I will not succeed to be more popular the FB or Twitter. The joke is on you I have a personal website and I run a blog and some static pages. EU is not attempting to defeat Twitter,
It makes sense (if your logic circuits work) that you should have a backup communication method because
1 Twitter or FB because they might block you and your then need to fight with AI bots to unblock your stuff
2 there might be users that do not use Twitter or FB
3 Twitter and FB might not respect user privacy so it is imporal to publish only on those
I never mentioned Elon or the implications of buying twitter, you went off on that tangent.
> You are implying that is pointless me to have a person website because I will not succeed to be more popular the FB or Twitter. The joke is on you I have a personal website and I run a blog and some static pages. EU is not attempting to defeat Twitter
Again never said that.
Backup communication methods don't work if no ones uses them do they?
> 1 Twitter or FB because they might block you and your then need to fight with AI bots to unblock your stuff
Normally when you have a controlling stake in a company you can have an input in how it operates.
> 2 there might be users that do not use Twitter or FB
There's also people who don't use the internet? what's your point?
>3 Twitter and FB might not respect user privacy so it is imporal to publish only on those
EU agencies already post on Facebook and Twitter, what's your point ?
My point is that it makes sense EU agencies post on many medias and it makes no sense to limit to only one and force the citizens to make accounts on Twitter, this days you are forced to login to read it. What if I have no account or maybe an AI blocked me, I can't read some useful information.
> It's not about the cost of the service, it's that it's a pointless endeavour it's never going to succeed. Every social media company succeeds or fails based on the network effect.
I think that's a valid concern if your main goal is to create a social network, but less so if you're trying to create a reliable and trustworthy organ for government communication.
> Where did I mention Elon?
This:
> > Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies instead of trying to reinvent the wheel that is deflating as soon as it launches.
does not refer explicitly to Elon, but Twitter is a much more common organ of government communication than any other big American social-media company, so it seems disingenuous to pretend that this wasn't at least suggestive of buying a considerable stake in Twitter (and so giving money, indirectly, to Elon).
> previous poster interpreted "buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies" as give Elon Musk money.
Which social-media companies did you mean? If Twitter is among them, then that is, at least indirectly, giving Musk money; and, if not, then it's hard to see how buying that stake would help to ensure communications reliability, since Twitter seems to be much more common than any other American social-media company as an organ of government communication.
I don't understand this link with Twitter, maybe because it's in the news now. I never mentioned any specific company. The previous poster wanted to go on some Elon rant/tangent. My point was to invest in a platform that people actually use.
If I'm the EU I want to have a platform where I can spread my message to as many people as possible. The EU is already spending huge amounts of money advertising on these platforms. Why not purchase a seat at the table.
> I don't understand this link with Twitter, maybe because it's in the news now. I never mentioned any specific company.
Exactly, which is why I'm asking: when you said "buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies", which social-media companies did you mean?
> Why don't they buy a considerable stake in these American social media companies
One is cost - a peertube instance costs thousands of costs including employee costs, while a considerable stake in youtube would cost billions. Two Second is control - why pay lots to hopefully get some special rules that need to be maintained over time to (for example) prevent any ads affecting the content when you can host yourself and not have the issue in the first place.
> Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool.
I'm personally really tired of this trope, so instead of offering reasonable replies I'm just going to return the same spirit of ridicule back to you (despite HN guidelines, lol)
I am guessing that you missed that the legality of US companies in the EU is very much under question ?
> the US takes the view that foreigners don't have privacy rights. I doubt that the US has a future as the cloud provider of the world, if non-US persons have no rights under their laws
This has been a looong time in the coming, maybe since at least the Patriot Act (2001), and definitely since the Snowden scandal...
It's indeed the US companies dominance in the EU which explains all the denial around this, and of course the still good relations between the countries : compare with the ban in the USA of the Chinese company Huawei... (which is an issue in EU too !)... or what the reaction would be if it was Russia instead of the USA !
It always baffled me that so many governments relied on a private solution that only has 5% of the world population as users (Twitter) as the preferred mode of communication with their citizens.
It's good to see a solution made by the government instead.
The next step is to make it mandatory for officials to use this platform (and Twitter or Facebook in addition if they want to, I don't care) for all their official communication.
Why replace press releases and web pages with a social microblog? "Official communication" sounds like something better handled in long-form reports than short notes jotted out into a social maelstrom of hot takes. Perhaps the next step might instead be to get government off social media altogether.
Governments, in practice, tend to use Twitter as a sort of low latency press release system; the target audience is really journalists, and the tweets tend to link to longer-form things. Mastodon will do fine for that.
One is a pull-based system (official press releases, web pages), the other is a push-based announcement system. They can communicate the same messages but delivery is quite different.
I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about government officials.
The fact that the British PM will post information, in his official capacity, on Twitter that will not be posted on gov.uk is ridiculous and should be illegal.
tbh I assume, naively, that organisations that post official things would post them via wire service and twitter at the same time.
You are right, it should be illegal, at the extremes it totally breaks down - "I announced it publicly" could legitimately be "I stood at the back door of Downing street and whispered it out loud".
Do they rely on twitter? They use it, but almost every public organization has a website (wordpress). Twitter is a megaphone that they should use (like any other mass medium) to reach citizens
> The launch of the pilot phase of EU Voice and EU Video will help the EDPS to test the platforms in practice by collecting feedback from participating EUIs. The EDPS hopes that this first step will mark a continuity in the use of privacy-compliant social media platforms.
It's quite sensible really, why would you leave a method of disseminating official statements vulnerable to the whims of a private American corporation? Discussion still can and will be held on platforms not directly controlled by governments.
Or, instead of this kind of teleological framing, that they are entitled to their own values, but are not entitled to enforce them on the rest of the world.
P.S.: In a perhaps different sense, it has been decades since modernity ended.
"caught up to modernity" = history has some predetermined direction AND the writer knows what that direction is (AND because of this the writer is good, while people who hold opposite views and/or values are bad)
Am I mistaken somehow ?
And notably, this was a fairly common view during the height of the modern age (19th century), so much that its incompatibility with societal liberalism was widely ignored, probably because it allowed for paternalistic colonialism, which made the people practicing it very rich...
the sentiment methinks is misplaced. the US is a 23 trillion dollar GDP. sooner or later, all private corporations adhere to its law.
a better observation is that technocratic trappings of neoliberalism are more akin to neofeudalism than most western governments are willing to confess in 2022, lest they anger the spirit of Thatcher and Reagan or god forbid induce some sort of mass reform.
Vint Cerf said it best at the southern california linux expo when he explained how the digital frontier is really no different for sovreignity than air, land, sea, and space are. You either delineate the domain and maintain stewardship of it, or youre at the mercy of others with the digital equivalent of bluewater navy and satellites. the EU masto instance is a shot across the bow for major US corporations in that a contested battleground has been abruptly created in the absence of leadership and command at the largest fleet carrier (twitter)
> the US is a 23 trillion dollar GDP. sooner or later, all private corporations adhere to its law.
While the EU and China are not quite as large as the USA on their own, they are close enough that many multinational corporations already face the challenge of being the servants of three masters.
>Each country should control official channels of communication.
I don't want to create 100 accounts to access each countries totally unique and special websites. It's a bad system and ultimately will lead to less discourse and not more.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, I've never used mastodon, but I expect part of the "federated" bit means being able to "follow" users from other Mastodon instances, including EU Voice. So you'd need just one account on a Mastodon instances to follow every EU government/institution announcements on EU Voice.
If not on Mastodon, RSS feeds still exist.
> I don't want to create 100 accounts to access each countries totally unique and special websites. It's a bad system and ultimately will lead to less discourse and not more.
However, unless you are a resident of 100 countries, it's probably not particularly essential that you do so, is it? I mean, I can imagine my being interested in the official channels of communication for governments of countries in which I am not a resident, but I cannot imagine why they should care to make it particularly easy for me to access those communications. It seems that the most that I should be able to ask is easy read-only access without having to sign up for a special account.
Not too outrageous for the expected skills (min 3 languages fluently, bachelor of specific profiles, long admissions procedure, etc) and the responsibility. Would be horrible if the jobs for the people writing Europe's laws and managing millions in funding were not attractive.
EDPS , the organization that hosts (?) this mastodon is funded with $20M from the EU budget. It employs 96 people (last data i could find). ( Obviously not just for mastodon)
I d actually like to see something like a public funded mastodon, like we have public TV
I don't get it. Take the "Tagesschau" [0] for example. Now with all the ordeal around Twitter, they don't bother mentioning that this exists. They could even explain what Mastodon is and what makes it special.
[0] Tagesschau (German for Review of the Day) is a German national and international television news service produced by the editorial staff of ARD-aktuell on behalf of the German public-service television network ARD. (Quoted form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagesschau_(German_TV_programm...)
In both Flemish and Dutch media, I've seen Mastodon pop up several times in the last week. It seems to be this is because quite a number of Flemish and Dutch Twitter users (known journalists, tech commentators, etc.) have started using it.
You are not supposed to use this website so UX really doesn't apply.
This is the Mastodon instance of official EU accounts, not a website where you can sign up. You can follow any of these official EU accounts from other Mastodon instances since Mastodon is federated. Your gateway to Mastodon is the website of the instance where you sign up or one of the many Mastodon client apps.
What would likely happen is that you see something "retweeted" (boosted) on your timeline by some other account you're following and this perhaps makes you aware of one of these official EU accounts, the exact same way it works on Twitter. You don't need to care about the fact that it is posted on another instance, however in this particular case you can consider it a form of verification.
Yeah, I too wish that CSPAN were as popular and subscribed to as CNN, but for some reason, people don't find uncommented live streams of House committee and city council meetings interesting.
That's how everything starts. Same thing w/ Twitter and the migration to Instagram for photo-centric content. It takes time to move people over and the cost to cross-post is basically free.
It is better to have an official instance just like you have official websites. It means that accounts on this instance are official, that you can take their words as official statement.
Having one big instance for every EU citizen is just political centralisation and is not a lot better than the economical one done by Twitter.
We have to unlearn that "everything centralized is good and the only way to go"
> It is better to have an official instance just like you have official websites. It means that accounts on this instance are official, that you can take their words as official statement.
The EU could verify official accounts on their instance.
> Having one big instance for every EU citizen is just political centralisation and is not a lot better than the economical one done by Twitter.
It would be an alternative. People would of course remain free to choose other instances.
It's federation. You also wouldn't expect every citizen to get an @europarl.europa.eu e-mail-adress. The platform is decentralised by design, so just by joining, the EU is contributing to "providing a platform" imho.
I agree it would be neat to give emails to EU citizens and a "fediverse" account would be a cool addition to that, but that's a completely different situation to the launch discussed here. A government-only ActivityPub server is part of essential G2C communication, not just another nice-to-have service the EU provides.
Also it's a distinction without a difference in the context of the discussion, a tld is just another kind of domain. In the same way .gov subdomains are reserved for US government and signify to the users that the content of the page has official value subdomains of .europa.eu are reserved for EU institutions and agencies
The same way it'd not be smart for the US government to give out john.smith@gov email addresses it'd not be particularly clever for the EU to give out francois.martin@europa.eu
And no, all official agencies and institutions use .europa.eu subdomains, the only exception in that page seem to be other bodies such as research groups which are not official branches of the EU
Because that is an offical EU domain. Email coming from that domain is official EU correspondance. If the EU wanted to run a mail system available to all EU citizens, it would make more sense to register "civitas.eu" or some similar domain and provide it there.
I've often hoped the US would do this as well. Postal addresses are dependent on having a physical address—home, apartment, etc. Would love if people could habe a digital address that were not dependent on paying rent but citizenship.
How would you resolve the local name part? Do I get to claim xylakant@mail.europa.eu or is there a dispute process? hans.mueller@mail.europa.eu is going to be contentious.
I mean, I think there'd be considerable risk to that. You'd in effect be giving the government direct access to a terrifying amount of personal information.
Because there is no reason to do so? Providing e-mail address is service successfully provided by private sector, no need to use public money to destroy competition in private sector and centralise a service to one provider.
Most of EU engagement in digital services is to encourage market sector, not replace it with a public monopoly (see e.g. eIDAS).
I've been wondering about the handling of PR / legal / moderation issues on The Fediverse. Surely if it becomes popular, those burdens will fall on the shoulders of well-intentioned volunteers who just wanted to run a server, who will generally be ill-equipped to deal with them? I guess it could be OK if you're running a small invite-only server for people you know, but not sure how it's going to work for larger instances. Which, looking at the history of email, are probably where most people will want to be.
It's a matter of will of course. The EU talks a lot about digital sovereignty and right now, with a lot of people looking for alternatives to twitter, they have an incredible chance to advance that.
Every time these alternative/privacy focused/decentralised social media platforms appear they absolutely BUTCHER the UX. I thought "oh cool, let's sign up!"
1. I click "sign up." So far so good.
2. I am redirected to something called "Mastodon." No idea what this is. Nothing about it on the previous page. Is this a bug? Do I trust it? No options to sign up here. Only "get the app" and "find a server." I'm on my PC and don't need an app so I guess I find a server?
3. Now I'm presented with a list of servers. What on EARTH am I meant to do with this? Does each person get their own server? Do my friends all have to sign up on the same server? None of this makes any sense. I just want to post cute pictures of my cats! I'm now three layers deep into some kind of bizarre sign up process. I'm out. This is absurd.
For context, I run a team of developers building cloud services. There is almost ZERO chance that an ordinary person will follow these steps or use this service.
This needs one button to sign up, asking for exactly one piece of data: their email address. After that, they should be automatically redirected to the portal to begin using the service immediately. This clusterfuck was obviously designed by developers without a care in the world for regular users.
> EU Voice is open for registrations only to EU institutions, body and agencies. However, you can still interact with EU Voice from many other compatible platforms. The Mastodon developers maintain a list of Mastodon platforms open for registration.
Why would you expect to be able to sign up to "the official ActivityPub microblogging platform of the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (EUIs)"? The link could offer some explanation, but the idea is to redirect you to the main project's page where you can pick an open instance. This one obviously wouldn't be open.
Mastodon is a community effort, and as such members of the community will work on stuff like UX.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but rather contribute back instead of slamming a (very advanced and usable) project down just because your registration experience was bad.
This is open source, not a company with billions to spend on UX: they do what they can.
I think we need to better distinguish between comments about the current state of things (like GP) and comments about the future (like yours). GP is saying that currently the UX sucks, and this matters for people who want to use a social platform right now (think: non-programmers, technically challenged people, the mainstream, etc). Only enthusiasts are going to want to suffer through all the research and hurdles necessary to use to Mastodon because they think it'll be better in the future
> This is open source, not a company with billions to spend on UX: they do what they can.
This is not an excuse, all it takes to have a decent -or even a good UX- is one person asking the right questions and following up by interviewing a few folks during the sign up process.
It could be done in less than 2 hours or during a coffee break.
Getting the right experience and setting aside the time to do it is just business as usual for any product owner, even if they work during they free time.
Because the EU officials and subcontracted party do not have incentive make the product attractive.
- There is no monetary incentive for developers based on the success of the product. Close proximity with the EU is enough to win the likely overpriced government contract, which is either a fixed price or by-the-hour.
- The EU officials themselves rarely have ambitions or talent to make any good web services. Your success as a government officer does not depend on the success of a software product, but is based on political alignments and taking least risk of not screwing up.
It's thoroughly exhausting to read this kind of comment. It's pedantic and soapboxing at the same time, the two worst types of comments I come across in HN.
> I was under the impression that the above entities already have the largest megaphone of all through the uncritical mainstream press.
Where do you get this impression that the mainstream press/media is uncritical of the EU? The EU is a large body, obviously they would have a large megaphone, what's your actual issue with the EU governing bodies creating their federated platform to share their statements? And how exactly is that showing their want to control the Internet discourse? Just by participating in it are they trying to control it, in your worldview?
Again, abstain from this soapboxing (at least on HN), it's definitely low-quality comment.
It is easy to ask general, somewhat self-righteous questions here and elsewhere without providing any answers. That the comment you respond to has been censored does not make it any less difficult.
In general, opinions about the mainstream press come from reading it for decades. No one can provide a "proof" that can be captured in a comment box. It seems to me that the issue is calling the platform "EU Voice", which should probably be for all people.
> It is easy to ask general, somewhat self-righteous questions here and elsewhere without providing any answers. That the comment you respond to has been censored does not make it any less difficult.
It's also easy to escape through a throwaway account while using my history against me, instead of answering the aforementioned "self-righteous" questions :)
Please, don't come with the tiresome "CENSORED!" call out, if people flagged/downvoted it then you should look at that as a signal.
> It seems to me that the issue is calling the platform "EU Voice", which should probably be for all people.
This is exactly the pedantry I call out in my comment, if that wasn't absolutely clear...
You are interpreting the name "EU Voice" to have the meaning you want and then beating this strawman.
> In general, opinions about the mainstream press come from reading it for decades. No one can provide a "proof" that can be captured in a comment box.
Those are big and bold statements, I think you'd need to properly lay out these claims instead of writing hot takes. It'd do much more for a healthy and engaging conversation than empty platitudes based on your ideology :)
> Show me a mainstream media based in the EU actively supporting Russia in the Ukraine conflict then.
It's "Russian invasion of Ukraine", not "Ukraine conflict", first.
What point do you want to make with this though? I don't need to find a contrarian to every point to prove anything, that's also just being a contrarian and usually mainstream media avoids being a contrarian. If you live in Fox News-world that might seem alien but MSM is not in the job of being a contrarian.
Burdening me to prove my point by forcing me into an impossible situation won't change much, I could also tell you that support for Ukraine is so unanimous that no MSM in the EU holds the contrarian position you want them to. That's not wrong or the EU silencing it, it's simply a position that almost no business in the EU would dare to hold because they'd suffer a massive hit from public opinion, most EU citizens do not support Russia (as it should be), why should a MSM vehicle take the contrarian point of view?
Show me proof for your statements, please, I can't prove you a negative, I believe you should be quite well aware of that.
> Do you see any major mainstream media actively publishing things that go counter to key EU policy?
Yes, approximately all the time. For a time in England, you couldn’t open a newspaper without finding an article critical of - sometimes imaginary - EU policies.
You will be hard pressed to find an article supportive of Russia outside RT but you can find plenty questioning the timing and amount of weapons given, how we track where the money we give go and especially the idea of allowing Ukraine into the EU.
"not publishing anything that go counter to key EU policies" is now the same as "Mainstream media do not support russia"?
I think that media very often call out bullshit takes of the government, EU or national. But being against russia just isn't a bullshit take. That said, Media do cover also when Ukraine does things wrong, but those things are just not as common. You can't report 50/50% when the situation is 99/1%.
It's not a "Ukraine conflict", it is a Russian invasion on a neighbouring sovereign country called Ukraine. It's as much a "Ukraine" conflict as certain events of 1939 were "Poland conflict".
How do you even support the attacker in this war and remain true to the facts is beyond me. So it's really difficult to understand what do you even mean.
Additional to my other complaint: see here for a mainstream medium in germany (imho it should not be as popular as it is) reporting on "Ukraine reportedly attacking Kachovka dam": https://www.bild.de/news/2022/news/russland-krieg-gegen-ukra... . But since you did not define EU policy or "supporting Russia" I'm not sure if that covers your wants. Btw It took 2 minutes to find that article, there are surely more.
I'm surprised you are still posting, others hot takes of yours are:
> The Economist, FT and Bloomberg are obsessed with both race and class. Not content with the meager profits of economic reporting on a budget, they have become peddlers of social ressentment for a long while.
> Only media approved by the Democrat Party is free of hate speech and white nationalism
> They are not capitalist.
> They are sociologists / journalists / non-technical economists earning 50k (barely percentile 60), and telling us daily how action X is immoral (exactly what bishops and priests used to do).
It might be very exhausting to live in your head, hope you find some peace one day.
it s in the budget of some agency supervising the data protection supervisors.
This is not where a lot of money is wasted however. If you want to look for EU waste, look into the various agencies travel grants, endless committees and conferences, overhiring and bureaucratic reports that are many times longer than the actual output. I think in these times of fiscal tightening, people shopuld be more aware of the cost of EUrocracy
The EC employs about 32k people, EU institutions as a whole about 60k. That's actually... pretty modest, all things considered. The EU has a population of 450M. Ireland, a country with a population of 5 million, has about 40k civil servants (and 300k people in the wider public service).
If you imagine that the EU civil service was paid for on an equal basis per capita, that would imply that, say, Ireland was paying for about 600 EU public servants, or about 0.2% of its own public service. That seems like... probably good value for money? (In practice, not all EU members are net contributors, so it'd be somewhat more than that for rich countries, but still a drop in the bucket).
I think all politicians should be banned from Twitter and replacements. Ultimately, it is just self-promotion and lying.
For international relations, a counterargument might be made: Perhaps the preposterous "little rocket man" exchange between Trump and Kim Jong-un that resulted in a meeting actually brought the countries together.
But domestically I think the influence is harmful.
I wouldn't go that far, but I'd seriously punish any use of official "position" accounts for self-promotion or political fighting. Social media accounts like @POTUS or official government websites should never be used for the incumbent's own political agenda. Want to tweet to announce a new law you just passed? Cool. Want to respond to criticism, bark a journalists or fight with opponents? Fuck off to your own account!
This is nothing to do with politicians; it's for EU government bodies. There are only three accounts attributed to individual people, and they're civil servants, not politicians: https://social.network.europa.eu/explore
That's why they are introducing their own federated server to keep their communications under their own corner of the internet instead of your social network.
I already tried at least one mastodon server where the eu was present even if it shouldn't have been. It’s not their business to establish propaganda channels subsidised by tax payers. They should focus on solving democracy within its existing institutions first.
