> most humans abhor sterile environments.

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.

I agree with what you are saying here, but social media is pretty sterile. It's heavily censored as it is. YouTube comments is awful for it, with hiding comments and all the rest.*

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.

If identity verification is what it takes to curb russian trolls, then be it.

Well current social media has been unusable for a couple of years surely?

Good point.

OTOH, in that sense, internet (or more specifically, WWW) is technically built in Europe, so can we say WWW is a European product? :D

Yes, that does seem a bit of an odd claim. Possibly they're talking about the hosting being built?

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.

Elevator pitch could be "Wirecard for Social Media".

When I read "Eurosky", Skyshield immediately came to mind. Sounds like a military project.

This is almost universally true for every national identity (or however we want to widen the term to include Euro).

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

> Eurosky is a pan-European initiative spearheaded by a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists and civil society organizations

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.

Try criticising ICE on the recently freed Tiktok

Which applies equally well to the US, US law, and US social media.

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

I think it's based on the bsky AT protocol, hence the name.

High End Reliability Messaging European Service

Europe is not a single country

Tell that to the people that didn't cry for Charlie Kirk and therefore lost their job.

Many europeans feel there are many things that free speech protections allow in the USA that should not be allowed. EU laws attempt at least to restrain some of the most egregious speech online.

It is commonplace in the US that the administration in the White House sues people for saying the wrong thing.

Selling point isn’t the free speech (free speech don’t apply to private companies in US).

More like my data is less likely to be ingested by US intel, and the data used against me.

My experience is that on American platforms free speech means that these platforms are free to remove whatever content based on whatever heuristics, with little to no accountability. Right now I see examples of American social norms limiting expression worldwide (see people adopting bl**ping out words and using defused meta-expressions such as 'unalive' worldwide to escape any potential bans). Right now American free speech means that I'm subject to opaque, automated laws of a corporation which I cannot influence as a citizen.

There is a reason why countries in Europe have such laws. US did not have a major war for quite a while on their own soil which affects your thinking. We do not want to reignite national socialism or communism, we do not like to see news channels lying to us. We do not like Russian bot armies spreading propaganda in chats.

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).

> less good legal free speech protections

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.

Mind that freedom of speech (US) and freedom of opinion (Europe) are different concepts. E.g., while you may harbour a certain opinion in the EU, expressing this in a way generally considered harmful (concept: speech may establish an act) may get you in trouble. On the other hand, crossing the US border may trigger an attempt to infer your opinion from extracted public or semi-public expressions, which may get you in even more serious trouble, you may be even considered a viable target based on such inferences (and there is no clear law for this, there isn't even due process.) Both concepts come with their own freedoms, implications and caveats.

As far as I can tell, it also doesn't have anything to do with the Linux Foundation, and the website also doesn't claims to be connected to either of them, but I guess worth saying for some reason?

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

I'm assuming you're saying this as someone who doesn't use social media at all ?

Not even enough money to vibe code a better landing page.

You did not provide evidence that UK are "arresting people based on social media posts criticizing goverment..."

Maybe review your media consumption for if they are reliable

There is an entire industry in europe built to take EU money and produce nothing but a stack of papers. This would just set up some OVH/Hetzner instances of open source software. It is all a very expensive joke.

Because you probably don't live in the EU. They've done a tremendous job regulating the mega corps and making tech better for consumers.