As I understand, it a variety of of such open source federatable systems and services already exist, such as Mastodon. But they haven't won out in the market, with most users going to the proprietary networks instead.
What's your theory about what governments can or should do to induce people to want to use these services?
I'll answer the 2nd part first. What governments should do is decide what end outcome they want and then use all the levers of the state to get it. If that's not the "market" outcome? Then fuck the market.
What they can do includes such things as:
1. fund creation of open source software
2. fund startups that are social media companies (maybe using the software in 1).
3. require use federated / open source / UK controlled companies for all govmt and public sector social media Accounts.
4. require ISPs to degrade or block all social media platforms that aren't federated, put legal or technical steps to prevent others from downloading/scraping user-generated content, or block/reduce visibility of content based on its politics.
The end goal is to build our own infrastructure, make it open source so other countries/individuals can easily copy it (many are also fed up with US dominance), encourage people to use it, and when that is all done cut off contact with foreign sites that don't like our rules.
Well, in general, governments have been quite bad at making software, and quite bad at directly providing consumer goods and services people actually want to use. And committees are worse at getting things done the larger they are. So I'm not optimistic that a supercommittee of multiple national governments is going to actually be able to create a social media service that people actually want to use. I think it's quite likely that in the end only a handful of people actually use EuroVoice or whatever you call your state-approved social network, while many people use VPNs to illicitly access Facebook and TikTok.
As I understand, it a variety of of such open source federatable systems and services already exist, such as Mastodon. But they haven't won out in the market, with most users going to the proprietary networks instead.
What's your theory about what governments can or should do to induce people to want to use these services?
I'll answer the 2nd part first. What governments should do is decide what end outcome they want and then use all the levers of the state to get it. If that's not the "market" outcome? Then fuck the market.
What they can do includes such things as:
1. fund creation of open source software
2. fund startups that are social media companies (maybe using the software in 1).
3. require use federated / open source / UK controlled companies for all govmt and public sector social media Accounts.
4. require ISPs to degrade or block all social media platforms that aren't federated, put legal or technical steps to prevent others from downloading/scraping user-generated content, or block/reduce visibility of content based on its politics.
The end goal is to build our own infrastructure, make it open source so other countries/individuals can easily copy it (many are also fed up with US dominance), encourage people to use it, and when that is all done cut off contact with foreign sites that don't like our rules.
Well, in general, governments have been quite bad at making software, and quite bad at directly providing consumer goods and services people actually want to use. And committees are worse at getting things done the larger they are. So I'm not optimistic that a supercommittee of multiple national governments is going to actually be able to create a social media service that people actually want to use. I think it's quite likely that in the end only a handful of people actually use EuroVoice or whatever you call your state-approved social network, while many people use VPNs to illicitly access Facebook and TikTok.
I'm not saying the governments should directly create the software, merely fund startups and groups doing so.
> I think it's quite likely that in the end only a handful of people actually use EuroVoice or whatever you call your state-approved social network
The idea is there will be lots and lots of different social networks, running different software, that will all intercommunicate.