Featured speaker this time was Euro Member of Parliament @kimvsparrentak who passionately spoke on the need for a more free Internet detached from #bigTech and more focussed on #Democracy and real #Social interaction.
When confronted with her presence on X and Insta, and the lack of active presence here on the #Fediverse we promised to help her.
Please help us get a decent follower-base here and follow her account right now, before she even gets a chance to get more active. A follower base of more than a 1000 people will surely help her convince her party members to spend time and money on a real presence here.
Many politicians agree with us that #BigTech centralization is bad. Yet their primary presence is on Meta/X in most of the cases. When asked “then why are you not on the Fedi?”, many respond with “because there aren’t enough people for me to justify the jump/investment”.
And that in turn feeds the other feedback loop - “why do you still have an account on X?” - “because most of the politicians/public figures are there”.
Building presence in the social infrastructure one actually believes in, even if that requires extra effort, shouldn’t be something contingent to the probabilities of getting thousands or followers on that platform.
That is why I am very happy and exited that Kim revived her account and actually started to take part in the #Fediverse today. I hope a lot of other politicians will soon follow suit!
That said, it does help (to convince the 'established advisors') when politicians join that they are welcomed and followed and I will actively promote that.
That's the commercial mindset, though. Their goal is not interaction and getting info out there as far and wide as possible. They only care about eyes on their material if it generates revenue somehow. And the fediverse doesn't. Their goal is fundamentally at odds with the goals, such as they are, of the denizens of the fediverse, who just want conversation and information.
@amerika@kimvsparrentak@koen@gemeenteamsterdam@DeGroene@sicco@waag to be fair, recent European laws are as anti-monopolistic as they can get. The DMA is a good piece of legislation that, if implemented right, can really lower many of those barriers erected by those monopolies - from hostile approach towards 3rd-party integrations to the tyranny of the app stores.
IMHO you don’t have to explicitly encode incentive structures when you are dismantling existing barriers. The goal of dismantling barriers arbitrarily created by someone else (e.g. by E-E-E of open protocols like RSS/XMPP, by takeover of potential competitors, by hindering inter-operability, by opposing alternative clients/stores etc.) is to re-establish the level-playing field.
Once the level-playing field is restored, competitors have a fair access to the market again, and have market incentives to create e.g. alternative clients for Facebook, alternative app stores, social platforms that support cross-posting across walled gardens, experiment with alternative business models without having to compete with the established stalk-and-throw-ads monster, etc.
There’s demand for these things (the number of screenshots posted on walled gardens about stuff that happens on other walled gardens are a sad manifestation of such demand), there’s potentially supply to fullfil those demands too, the only thing that stands in between is a handful of monopolies who have no incentives in opening up.
You don’t need to give those monopolies incentives to stop monopolizing and implementing rent-seeking behaviour. You just need to hit them hard where it hurts them the most, because they will perceive any change from the status quo as a net loss and will oppose it with all the means they have.
The retreat of a monopoly is already a great incentive structure for competitors to fill in the gaps. The only additional incentives should probably be directed towards businesses and entities that instead embrace openness (sticking to the “pick the willing, not the winners” principle). And this is probably an area where the EU could do more (e.g. through direct investing into companies like Nextcloud or Fairphone, or funding to medium-sized Fediverse server admins), so they have a better chance of standing against multibillion companies and build credible alternatives.
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