Heh. No way. The EU has much more onerous IP laws than the US. That’s one reason why the EU can’t compete in tech.

EG search engines like Google process copyrighted content to make it searchable. When they started in the 1990s that would have been plain criminal in Germany. Once the internet turned out to be a big thing, this was legalized.

We can now see the same thing with AI. It’s just not possible to be competitive for European companies. Companies like Huggingface (originally French) or Elevenlabs (Polish) fucked off to the US. Mistral stayed in Europe and is being left behind. The early models with which they made a splash were almost certainly trained illegally, but the AI Act made it clear that Europe would double down on past mistakes.

Despite the fact that European IP laws hurt our economy and culture, they have only been expanded in the last decades. Despite the fact that the major content owners are American.

No offense. I just never know how widely understood such facts are. People do not seem to appreciate that open social media requires that the data be stored anywhere.

That’s something that may cause some grief in Europe. Moderation in ATproto is opt-in. You don’t have to subscribe to a US moderation service or any moderation service. One will probably want someone to filter spam, harassment, or content that one finds objectionable. But moderation according to EU regulations is about removing content that other people don’t want you to see. I’m not sure if that’s going to be super popular.

how the data is used and stored

That’s a tricky one and will potentially cause a lot of problems to open social media in Europe. Just know that there is no such thing as “looking” at a post, comment, or profile. It gets downloaded to your device and stored for as long as it’s needed, or maybe longer.

Let me save you a click:

“Decoupling is unrealistic and cooperation will remain significant across the technological value chain,” an EU digital strategy report draft reviewed by POLITICO in June 2025 said – which means the EU will, for now, continue to promote collaboration with the US and other tech players including China, Japan, India and South Korea.

The draft report’s admission that untangling from the dominance of US tech companies is “unrealistic” only fuels fears about the EU’s reliance on their unpredictable transatlantic ally.

Y’all will enjoy this: https://w-social.eu/

The company Bluesky Social PBC created the microblogging service Bluesky and the ATProtocol. It’s like the company Mastodon created the microblogging service Mastodon. There are other services built on ATproto that are EG like Reddit/Lemmy. But these have not taken off significantly.

The ecosystem is mature enough so that you can participate in Bluesky without using services offered by Bluesky Social PBC and without making sacrifices. For the most part, you can move without abandoning your account.

It is true that the servers are mostly run by the Bluesky company, but so what? Email is mostly run by Google and no one seems to think that’s a problem.

The option to self-host your identity piggybacks on the DNS-system. A certain domain name resolves to the server where you store your ATProto identity. As long as you control the domain name, you control your identity. The ATProto identity is simply a pointer to where you currently store your data that your followers/contacts can use to find your content (IIRC).

The non-selfhosted alternative is a central identity service run by Bluesky. Unfortunately, the identity cannot be moved for obvious reasons. It would be good if there were some more options there. In principle, if the ATProto identity was tied to the government identity, that would make it moveable and non-hijackable. For some people, celebrities and such, that would be a good option.

Regardless of whether you selfhost your identity, you can selfhost a Personal Data Server (PDS), which stores your data and makes it available to the network. The PDS can move, cause that’s what the identity is for.

Feeds and other stuff is again independent.

The basic building block of the Fediverse is the instance, right? Every instance is its own self-contained, centralized social media service that optionally interacts with other instances. EG Trump’s Truth Social is a Mastodon instance that does not federate.

ATProto takes a more radical approach. Everything is modular. There is no instance or anything that is complete in itself. It’s more like the WWW. You can make websites in different ways. These are made findable through search engines like Google or Bing, which are not affiliated with companies offering web hosting.

ATProto takes everything apart. It tries to avoid choke points or lock-in as far as possible to thwart monopolies. You have a server that stores your data (posts, etc …), called a PDS. You can move your data to a different server. An identity provider tells others where your account is at any moment. A relay collects all the posts that people make and makes them available for further processing. This can be used to create algorithmic feeds, or moderation (aka labelling). These things are independent of each other and can be independently offered by different parties. You can pick and chose which to use, though there isn’t a whole lot of choice yet.

ETA: No idea what W wants to offer in that regard.

Looks like W is being built on ATProto.

https://atprotocol.dev/w-for-atproto/

https://bsky.app/profile/ducky.ws/post/3md2b73w3g22j

I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.

How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?

To me, this feels like school politics.

OMG! Jaden invited ICE to his birthday party! I’m never talking to him again!

Oh No! ICE nabbed Julio! I’m telling the teacher and they will get suspended!

Probably a good number of these people are actual children. I know there are adults who have broadly similar ideas. For someone living a very sheltered and privileged life, being trolled on the internet is the absolute worst form of aggression they ever experience. Particularly in Europe, activists and politicians talk about “digital violence”, which tells you that they have no sense of proportion.

Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social

The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.

This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.

Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.

I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.

I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don’t think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.

The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he’s kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn’t seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.

Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?

So, trying to parse what’s going on here.

Bluesky has verified that an account claiming to belong to the US government agency ICE really is controlled by that agency. Somehow that shows that Mastodon is better. Because Trump has his own Mastodon instance and doesn’t need anyone to vouch for his goons?

Looking at the comments, maybe the issue is rather that the Bluesky company provides services to ICE. Tech companies should refuse service. Huh. I guess there is more diversity of opinion on Lemmy than I had thought, regarding the power of tech companies, democracy, and law.

It’s wurst case time!

Similar to copyright, enforcement requires surveillance and empowers censorship. But worse than copyright, it is directly aimed at information about people. So that is what gets surveilled and censored.

Of course, there are positive uses, such as disappearing revenge porn. But in practice, it will always favor the rich and powerful who have the resources to actively manage their image. I don’t believe it is worth the massive surveillance and censorship apparatus, even before one gets to the obvious potential for misuse.

Have you heard of the recent Russmedia case?

How did free speech help when the Nazis humiliated jews publicly in the 1930s?

How did it help taking “jew-baiters” like Julius Streicher to court during the Weimar Republic? Obviously it didn’t.

It seems obvious that I want the state to prevent hate speech, especially against minorities.

You want the state to act against hate speech coming from the elected head of state. What about that seems like a good plan?

You can’t convince people that Trump is a bad guy, and so you want the state to go after the bad guys. Maybe you can convince people that the state should smash bad guys. It’s not hard. But Trump is in charge of the state and not you. He’ll decide who’s a bad guy.

Really good. I wouldt have given full marks. Semi-precious gemstone isn’t good enough. Too much reliance on the pronunciation. Good pun, though, I feel. Very groan.

Nono, you’re thinking of circumference. This is about a semi-precious gemstone in the shape of a small, domesticated mustelid.

ETA: Maybe it’s too hard. I am thinking of a …

Nono, you’re thinking of circumlocution. This is about building a wall around a besieged city.