• laurens@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Germany (social.bund.de) and the EU (social.network.europa.eu) already have it. I think it’s very likely that other governments, especially european ones, will start to do this.

    With the internet being so dominated by american voices, I dont think a lot of people have fully appreciated the sentiment change in the higher levels of european governments. Sovereign control over their digital spaces is something that is actually mattering on the level of nation states. Its a way of thinking that is kind of new to most people, as we rarely think about the sovereign powers of nation states, and even less so in the context of the internet. But now were starting to do that again, and it actually matters.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      With the internet being so dominated by american voices, I dont think a lot of people have fully appreciated the sentiment change in the higher levels of european governments.

      Absolutely. I was on an instance, run by North Americans, that had blocked European Govt instances because they didn’t trust government agencies spying on them etc. Some German users picked up on this and voiced a lot of frustration over it. There was a clear cultural divide. Even more ironic, I think it was the German department of privacy or something to that effect.

      Nonetheless, it was quite interesting to see a tension between the small hacker aspect of the fediverse and the “this is the new internet” aspect and how much the US dominated perspective probably completely missed the mark.

      EDIT: European Govt from “European” to clarify I was referring to government run instances.

      • fediverse_report@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        ha yeah I remember that, that was fun.

        To riff on this a little bit further: its also visible in how little attention in the gazillion conversations about Threads is paid to the fact that the entirety of the EU cannot even access it yet due to the new DMA and DSA.

        Or one of the articles I wrote that got relatively low traction, that was specificially about how all of the Nordic countries got an official recommendation to use ActivityPub for their governmental communications. I dont mind that some articles get less traction than others, but it does stand out when you consider how impactful such things are for the long term structure of the fediverse. Lots of EU governments are now talking about needing sovereign public digital spaces, and are actively looking how ActivityPub can help with that. And that matters way more than whatever Elons latest shenanigans are.

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Well it was reflexive choice I think. American anti government sentiment without thinking through whether the instance or government department in question was providing a service that some would benefit from on the fediverse.

    • moitoi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      With the internet being so dominated by american voices,

      Europe has to build something new that isn’t a big corp, that isn’t centralized. It has to find its own way, and the Fediverse model is a good beginning. It’s to show we can do something but in the European spirit.