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FediForum June 2025:

EU Fediverse: What Policies Do We Need to Establish Digital Public Infrastructure?

/2025-06/session/1-g/

Topics:

Convener: samvie (@samvie@chaos.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Contact details for an EU discussion round

Notes

Dutch Government Mastodon Instance: https://social.overheid.nl

Samvie (Sandra) - Berlin / Vienna - brought folks together to discuss European policy and situations around Fedi

Recent events

  • FOSDEM (Brussels)
  • re:publica (Berlin)

Upcoming summits / events -

Samvie: why it is important to talk more about Fediverse

  • Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Acts address “Big Tech” platforms
  • mention of the “EuroStack” - how to use more European products instead of US-based
  • Digital Public Infrastructure, we need to build and spend on a more particiatory, public owned infrastructure
  • Conversation finally evolving past commercial products/platforms; Fediverse and protocols starting to enter the convo slowly

Reference back to Ian Forrester keynote and public service notions

DMA - next year, EU to vote on interoperability needs for social (mid-2026 written note start of process)

Currently, it is mandatory for chat, next year they will vote on whether this is needed for social media –> how do we get them to choose the relevant standard? break the network effects of existing platforms

  • top-down
  • bottom-up

There is a 3-way (Germany/France/Poland) group that historically has some more opportunity to move policies along call for contacts to Fediverse people in these countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Triangle and also in other European Countries :) lets exchange contacts if we know people maybe under #FediForumEurope

Is there a way to have Fediverse access as some kind of human right

What do we have to offer here? Two angles:

  • how to organise a federated system so that it is approachable
  • invest in more reliable structures in the fediverse as alternatives to big tech i.e. make it all easier, more accessible, what is the offer to newcomers

If the EU can mandate something like this, there’s a huge opportunity for a new internet (centred in Europe)

Free Our Feeds / ATProto is also an option, there are opportunities here for a second relay

Reference to SaveSocial campaign as well

“race of the protocols” - interoperability is really important

The message of choosing what is best for our democracy is important

Open up the silos (Meta / Google etc) - the way to break the network effect. Does not break our economy but creates an on-ramp

Really hard to explain the difference between ATProto and ActivityPub to most EU legislators (just as hard as explaining the difference between messaging and social media)

For some forward-looking thoughts on custom feed functionality, consider My Decades of Blueskying, and Hopes for the Bluesky Project (6/25/23) https://ucm.teleshuttle.com/2023/06/my-decades-of-blueskying-and-hopes-for.html. -Richard Reisman

Mike M, would be very interested in your thoughts on this. Also, further thoughts on community-based feeds that are broadly accessible, see Making Social Media More Deeply Social with Branded Middleware https://ucm.teleshuttle.com/2024/10/making-social-media-more-deeply-social.html. And broader context on futures is in Three Pillars of Human Discourse (and How Social Media Middleware Can Support All Three) (Tech Policy Press, 10/24/24) https://www.techpolicy.press/three-pillars-of-human-discourse-and-how-social-media-middleware-can-support-all-three/