I'm all in favour of the EU finally emancipating itself from American tech companies, but trying to recreate Social Media, just in a European way, is the worst possible way to go.

We need less Social Media, not an inferior clone of TikTok or Instagram. Gaia-X would have been a nifty project, if it weren't a committee designing a framework for designing committee design frameworks by committee. We seem to make this mistake way too often. Don't plan to build Neuschwanstein—start to build a humble wooden cabin, and expand from there.

Making people less addicted to social media, or creating other versions of social media that are less harmful, might be the "harm reduction" discussion/tradeoff of our modern times, but they're very different goals and ambitions. Sure, I agree, people shouldn't spend hours mindlessly scrolling through TikTok/Instagram/Whatever, but most likely they will, regardless of what we do. So, why not come up with some alternative that kind of gives them that experience, but not as addicting and with maybe more user choice, like Bluesky letting people chose their own recommendation algos they like?

I think there's space for less crappy social media.

The early days of Facebook, where I actually saw friends and family posting their thoughts, that was great! It wasn't dominated by people resharing political screeds or random videos from groups I've never even heard of.

Any software engineering done in germany is so bureaucratic. You cannot start small, you have to create the EierlegendeWollmilchSau that handles all edge cases, all security constraints and privacy concerns, use the latest architecture buzzwords and needs to be meticulously documented... Most projects turn into Stuttgart 21 within a year