If Mastodon is chronically underfunded, shouldn't we discuss serious public investment in its development, including its usability and design?

Twitter was purchased for $43 billion and is now widely used to amplify disinformation and polarization through hate speech and an extremist agenda.

How much are we willing to invest in a bold, interoperable, European alternative that strengthens democratic discourse?

If projects like “EuroSky” move forward, will public funding be diverted there, instead of supporting and scaling the Fediverse?

Mastodon already exists and has millions of users, official EU servers, and institutional accounts. Why start from scratch when what works can be strengthened?

Cc @EUCommission @HennaVirkkunen @mellifluousbox @alexandrageese @Gargron

@seboslaw If public funding is being considered for a for-profit model, a robust and transparent technical assessment should be conducted first, including an evaluation of whether the AT Protocol is truly more scalable than ActivityPub.

I disagree that the two are technically complementary. Currently, BlueSky operates as a largely centralized platform, allowing it to avoid many of the governance and moderation challenges inherent to decentralized networks.

Its growth, with ~40 million users, shows that strong product design, marketing, and familiar timelines attract nontechnical audiences. This is a lesson in usability and investment, not necessarily a protocol advantage.

If they complement each other, it is politically and socially, not architecturally. One has capital and media visibility. The other has a live, interoperable ecosystem in which public institutions are already participating.

Public funding decisions should be made accordingly.

@everton137 Eurosky (or rather the Modal Foundation) is a Non-Profit.
AT was engineered to scale. That's why the protocol facilitates a global timeline and a global search - something that is not possible with AP because it wasn't designed for that.

The 40 million users and the content they create will be ‚addressable' to developers and accessible to researchers through Eurosky under European legislation and DSA conform - something that is currently not available in Europe. (1/2)

@seboslaw taking your data is only one aspect. In practice current real-world AT is not decentralized at all.

I don't see Eurosky even begin to challenge the official BSky user numbers in any meaningful way anytime soon which also means Eurosky is going to not offer sovereignty from the US platform anytime soon.

It will simply be running subservient to a US company that drives the development of the US software it relies on.

About Eurosky: Eurosky doesn’t need to “beat” Bluesky’s user numbers. Sovereignty isn’t about majority market share. It’s about who runs the infrastructure: PDS, relays, AppViews, moderation, compliance tooling under EU law…users have the freedom to migrate.

Control of components > control of one app. (2/2)

@seboslaw Yeah I think that's just a cop out, the real situation on the network matters more than what could be possible on paper.

And I do think it very much matters for sovereignty what the user shares look like on that real network too. If 99% of the users are under the control of the US company they can completely destroy the visibility of your users on those Eurosky servers if the Trump administration were to one day force them to do so.