There is no lack of tech innovation in Europe. There is lack of a huge domestic market, lack of investments and mergers, and – most importantly – lack of collaboration and interoperability. Take social platforms as a perfect example. The solutions are called Activity Pub and maybe AT Protocol

Denmark, February 2026. Danes, who want to break up with Facebook and Facebook Messenger are overwhelmed with choices. Should they go to Danish alternatives like Meningspunktet, Socii, Konnected, Zen Social, Lifebonder, Boblberg or Oase? Where are my friends going, should I bring them there and will I be able to keep my friends there, if they go go out of business? Why not Norwegian Hudd, which seems to already have attracted hundreds of thousands of people? Or should I sign up to multiple platforms? Being a social media user today, is so confusing. There are simply too many choices, that are not interoperable, meaning that they cannot work together and easily exchange information.

It is so positive and cool to see so many new initiativs and so much innovation power. Unfortunately, many of them will have to fight for survival, unfortunately. This has happened with search, web analytics, messenger apps, and now social media – the latter for the second time as Facebook managed to kill a lot of cool European startups in 2010s (see Flashback below).

Every European country houses wornderful entrepreneurs and start-ups, who want to do better and safer and fairer than Big Tech. Now, for example in the wake of Facebook’s huge unpopularity and the geopolitical situation, we are seeing so many new European social platforms. Just look at rebuild.net who is trying to collect them. TopicsChat from Portugal. SoMo App from Sweden, GG from Poland, Tum-Tam from Bulgaria. Novoville and We are8, UK. Happy, France. Jodel, Germany, all the above mentioned just to mention a few. Most countries have several start-ups within the social platform category.

Europe Must Take Over

In the era of digital sovereignty, I do hope European platforms will finally take over from Meta’s platforms and Microsoft’s LinkedIn. I have personally been working towards it since 2011. It is naive of us to host our national political discussions on commercial US-based platforms like Facebook, who does not give a damn about democracy. But in stead of starting from scratch and try and build social platforms, we could build platforms that are interoperable. I am, for example, active on Mastodon (@pernillet@mastodon.online). It is build in Europe, it is based on open source, and decentralized (no one can ever take power over it). It is not as convenient as signing up to Facebook, because you have to chose a server (chose anyone suggested here) and then there is another challenge; You have to know your friends’ handle, unless you are using the same server (so choose a big one, e.g. .social or .online). Otherwise, it is easy using Mastodon.

Anyone can set up their own Mastodon server – and thus have their own little social network, where they decide the rules, and they can moderate, if they want. If for example Denmark wanted, it could establish five big servers and have a social network for Danes to discuss politics. I don’t understand why all new social media startups don’t use the same protocol as for example Mastodon does. It uses the protocol ActivityPub, which is a template or a standard used in the so-called Fediverse (decentralised social networks). All emails, for example, use the same protocol and can thus talk together. ActivityPub is also used by Pixelfed, PeerTube, Meta’s Threads and others, and as a user you can thus use them all via the same logon, and if one goes bankrupt you don’t lose you friends.

From Bluesky To Eurosky

Of course there is a US competitor to ActivityPub, it is developed by the social platform Bluesky and is called AT Protocol. An upcoming new European social media platform, EuroSky, is being build on that out of the Netherlands. It is a digital infrastructure project to enable social applications empowering users and businesses – built in Europe, run on European cloud, ruled European laws, they say. As with AcitivityPub you can build all kinds of applications, from micro-blogging, to visual social media, search, e-commerce, event apps and much more on the AT Protocol.

According to people with knowledge of protocols, the AT Protocol is not decentralised (note that almost everybody on Bluesky sign up to the same server) in the same way as AcitivityPub, and it is thus much more expensive to run. May be that is why we only see Bluesky using it for now. In that way, it is unfortunate, that Eurosky has decided to use this in stead of ActiviyPub. Even though other experts point to the fact that the AT Protocol is more updated than Activity Pub. The co-founder of ActivityPub Christine Lemmer-Webber explains the differences here.

Lack of Investments
We know in Europe that we need much more capital investments in tech start-ups. But we definitely also need more mergers and cross border initiatives. Germany and France might have pretty big domestic markets and therefore some of their innovations also work well today (Xing, Mastodon, BeReal, for example), but most European countries are so small that their innovations most often have a hard time scaling (of course there are exceptions). So, if you cannot merge, then collaborate. And finally, if you are a social media platform, do use the same protocol, ActivityPub or AT Protocol, then your chances of getting more users fast are bigger.

I support everybody building alternative social platforms to the ones from the US (or China, of course) with a focus on individual autonomy, privacy and ethics as opposed to only profit. We don’t need one new enormous European Facebook, but we do need several larger social media platforms with a lot of interaction among Europeans.

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A flashback to the former decade. We described it in 2016 in the DataEthics – The New Competitive Advantage which I wrote with Gry Hasselbalch.

Nettby. In this millennium’s first decade, a thriving social network called Nettby cropped up in Norway. It was an open place where anyone could create a page and publish images, express opinions and interests, and share other information. In your guestbook, friends and everyone else wrote messages, and you could read what others had written. There were thousands of groups discussing everything from politics to child care. Users were moderators or volunteers, while Nettby itself had nine employees. Over 800,000 people inhabited Nettby; it was a solid success. It’s main shareholder, VG, exported Nettby to Sweden and laid out a plan to expand to the rest of Europe. But in 2010, Nettby closed. One reason was that some municipalities in Norway blocked access to Nettby in schools in 2009 because students simply spent too much time on the social network. Everything started to go downhill and users left Nettby in favour of other social networks – particularly Facebook that the municipalities never blocked access to. Nettby is one of several European social media companies that did not survive the web’s first commercial chapter. In Holland there was Hyves, which had over 10 million users at its peak but closed in 2013 because its online community moved to Facebook and Twitter. In Denmark there was Arto, which, considering the country’s size and e-readiness in 2007, had a good half a million users. Arto ended up as a ghost town before it finally closed in 2016. In the UK there was Friends Reunited. They thrived, struggled, then finally gave up.