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 !
They also have a peertube instance https://tube.network.europa.eu/