from thelucky8@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org on 21 Jan 13:00
https://beehaw.org/post/18111126
Even if the EU Commission holds the line, and laws like the DSA, DMA and GDPR start to push large online platforms into introducing tangible improvements, the core of the problem is hardly solved: Corporations like Meta, X and Tiktok have too much power. This power puts our entire public debate and even electoral campaigns at risk, as they depend on the goodwill of a small handful of Silicon Valley billionaires. This power also extends to our public infrastructure, access to essential services, and core functions of our States in ways that may soon become irreversible.
That’s why there has never been a more fitting moment for the EU and its member states to start seriously addressing our dependency on Big Tech and invest in real alternative models and services, including investing in Europe’s sovereign digital commons. The EU and member states should build up independent public funding mechanisms, like the EU’s Next Generation Internet programme but bigger, to support the development of sovereign free1 and open source software that can contribute to the resilience of our public digital infrastructure.
These public funds should be subject to conditionality, and not be spent on “AI hyperscalers” or “lighting-fast growing unicorns” that eventually reproduce exploitative business models and further consolidate the economic and political power of large tech corporations. Instead, they must be reserved for open digital infrastructure, software, hardware and standards, similar to what the NLnet Foundation and the Sovereign Tech Agency are already doing on a smaller scale.
This includes the core internet infrastructure that is mostly invisible to users, but could also be extended to projects like an open search index that can be used by innovative, more ethical search engines without having to rely on Google’s or Bing’s indexes, or an open browser engine that can be used by browser makers without being dependent on Google’s Blink engine. In order to address the threats outlined in this article, we also need substantial investment into non-commercial, decentralised public interest social media software like Mastodon, Peertube and other key pieces of the Fediverse.
With the US moving further away from its democratic path, Europe must show leadership to build a better digital future for people, democracy and the planet now.
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I was just thinking this was the logical step like months before trump got elected. Im glad at least now its getting some traction.
The US keeps moving to the right, soon the EU will be too far into the left for them, the alliance between the two likely won’t survive.
Large chunks of the EU are hurtling rightwards too, unfortunately.
The US leadership right now, maybe, but remember that Trump didn’t win so much as the incumbent lost. Most Americans didn’t vote for right-wing policies, they voted against inflation and housing costs. It’ll only take a year or two before people start realizing that Trump can’t fix the problems either (or won’t, because that would mean eating the rich).
So yeah, probably no alliance in the short term, but the US isn’t even its own ally right now, so we need to see how this all shakes out before we know how we’ll align with the EU in the long term (i.e. beyond this term).
Trump knows this, and he’s also been advised that the one thing that historically restores popularity for a leader is expanding a country’s territory. So my guess is that, the worse Trump’s approval rating is, the more likely it’ll be that he tries to take Greenland or Panama. Which I think is still a huge gamble for his approval rating.
Trump didn’t win because he literally bought Musk to crack the election computer systems. He even blatantly admitted to exactly that at his victory rally right before his inauguration. Then he was inaugurated. So he really is a CIA asset because there’s absolutely no difference between this crock of lies and every other CIA mission at every other targeted nation around the world.
Suppose the fediverse becomes widely used. At some point, people will figure out how to profit from it. Although it is a decentralized platform, I can see particular instances becoming dominant and walling off other instances.
How can we prevent users from being stuck behind walled gardens like this? Is it possible to make accounts portable, so if a particular instance becomes unusable one could easily move between them?
The other thing I can see happening is the EU investing in infrastructure, and then leaning more heavily into how things are conducted in the Fediverse. Right to be forgotten? Applies to all instances that want to federate with EU ones. Someone says something bad about the leader of Turkiye? Their instance is defederated if it doesn’t take it down.
Defederated from instances that federate with and support Turkish laws? I don’t like it, but it makes sense.
That makes me wonder if it is possible to federate with a and b, who are not federated, and not pass traffic between.
If it isn’t, it really should be, or things will become a mess as the fediverse becomes more political. It needs to be resistant to that sort of thing as well as corporate control.
The answer is obvious: we must forever be completely advertiser-unfriendly and absolutely unmarketable. With every piece of porn, every post on digital piracy, every swearword, we do our part to protect the fediverse’s independence.
Fuck shit dammit sex
Have you ever seen the advertisements on the pirate bay? There is a market for everything.
Accounts are already mostly portable (you can easily export all your settings and import into your new account), you just don’t retain posting history.
To retain that… I guess there could be a separate fediverse service that does nothing but allow registering accounts that let you prove that other fediverse accounts all belong to the same person, and then a PR can be made to Lemmy and the other platforms to honor these links when showing posting history. It’d be quite a messy system.
There could be a user-centric back end that you could tie in to an account, if it matters. You would export your history to the backend and then log in to the data from the new frontend. That prevents a denial of service caused by numerous large data collections attempting to forward their data all at once.
That then causes me to wonder if data could be hosted separate from the services. That would mean that there would have to be individuals willing to provide that storage and bandwidth.
Activitypub accounts are portable actually. Lemmy is not as slick as Mastodon with this feature yet but will likely get there.