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Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

31 points| ZacnyLos | 2 years ago |wikimedia.brussels

73 comments

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[+] seydor|2 years ago|reply
Yes it is weird that europe has public television, public education etc, but we don't have a public Mastodon. Even if it s not very popular, it is a necessity.

An additional benefit of publicly-ran communications is that they can't be censored unless it s something unlawful.

[+] f6v|2 years ago|reply
Yes, I’d very much like to pay a new tax in addition to the television tax (even though I never used it).

And yes, let some guys decide what’s “misinformation” and what isn’t. My guess is that anything that’s not aligned with a state’s foreign policy is “misinformation”.

[+] jackothy|2 years ago|reply
The part that people can't do themselves is the massive storage and indexing of posts/content/uploaded data (because expensive). I'm envisioning a more or less public (hosting is publically funded) API where anyone can build and host their own frontend, with each custom frontend having their own content discovery algorithm(s) and custom moderation options based on the underlying data and indexes provided by the API.

What I mean is that the publically hosted API itself will be minimally moderated, hosting anything except for illegal material. The rest will be solved by (highly granular and specific) indexing/tagging or similar such that each frontend can choose to leave out or otherwise moderate the presentation of certain material. That indexing will also be the basis of writing custom content discovery algorithms.

The API could even allow training of AI models on usage data (for recommendation or moderation) without leaking anything by declaring a set of available parameters and offering to train and deploy models proposed by the public.

This way we won't have to leave the innovation and the making-it-fun-and-usable parts fully up to the government, and we will hopefully avoid government-enforced censorship.

[+] endisneigh|2 years ago|reply
this already exists. problem is they're not popular
[+] catapart|2 years ago|reply
Right? Isn't this just... a forum? PHPBB is still kickin' baby; probably has a one-click deployment, somewhere out there, too. What's stopping y'all, Article OP?
[+] prirun|2 years ago|reply
IMO it's naive to think there is going to be some large public space where reasonable and thoughtful free speech occurs. In my experience running public forums on an e-commerce site, you can have this for small groups of people, but as it gets larger, there are inevitably a few troublemakers that will turn it into a cesspool. You can't moderate them without violating their "free speech" rights, and once they are there, the reasonable, thoughtful people will leave.

I think it's a much better idea for individuals to have their own blogs, with comments enabled if they choose, and let them moderate these as they see fit.

[+] fredgrott|2 years ago|reply
I have a question, in the USA we have some common law basis of some public spaces being public commons in terms of free assembly and speech. In Europe there are two common law systems, one is the USA one based on non-roman common law and of course the roman common law used in Italy.

With those two common law systems in Europe are there public free speech assembly spaces that might be then copied onto the electronic world?

[+] jruohonen|2 years ago|reply
A good initiative in my opinion. As for oifjsidjf's criticism below, neither are they suggesting that a government would be in charge nor are all government services bad.
[+] oifjsidjf|2 years ago|reply
If the gov't will be in charge of it then it will be shit as all government services are in general.

If there is no profit in it for someone the platform won't improve.

It's the classic "the capitalist owns a restaurant vs the people own a restaurant, but which has better food".

[+] brookst|2 years ago|reply
Spare me. Private medicine is a disaster, private utilities are disasters where they are tried, private roads are a disaster.

Governments screw a lot of things up. So do private companies. Arguing about which is better in the abstract is like arguing whether even or odd numbers are “better”: only possible for tribalists.

[+] FranzFerdiNaN|2 years ago|reply
Can’t be worse than privately owned Twitter or Facebook.
[+] kranke155|2 years ago|reply
I’ve been to restaurants owned by communists and the food was great.

You’re just repeating cliches IMO

[+] thrillgore|2 years ago|reply
I am seeing a lot of 0 karma and less than a day old accounts posting here. I think we may be getting botted.
[+] peoplefromibiza|2 years ago|reply
EU is heavily targeted every time is mentioned here.

Don't know why, but it's something that is happening and I also noticed that the same arguments are used Evey time

- EU is not free

- EU is descending into authoritarianism

- You can be jailed for saying things

- EU politicians are puppets working for some gray entities that want to cancel the right to privacy for (reason unknown)

and so on

[+] bwesz|2 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] kranke155|2 years ago|reply
Europe doesn’t have free speech because -