Who Owns Our Digital Public Square?
The fight for open digital infrastructure isn't a technical debate —it's a fight over power. That was the core argument we made at EUMANS' Civic AI Open Webinar, and it's one worth sitting with.
Every time a European citizen posts, organises, or connects online, value flows to a handful of mostly non-European platforms. Platforms that face little public accountability, that are built to extract attention rather than serve communities, and that increasingly shape the information environments in which democratic life unfolds.
➔ FediVariety's talk at EUMANS' Civic AI Open Webinar; "Shaping our Digital Commons"
The infrastructure already exists
The good news: we don't have to start from scratch. The technology works. Costs are low. Pilots like the EU Voice/Video project have already proven feasibility. What we call the European Social Stack —a suite of open, federated infrastructure for public communication— is not a distant dream. It is a political choice.
Redirecting even a modest share of existing public digital spending toward these alternatives would sustain local developers, reduce dependency on foreign platforms, and help build something genuinely different: democratic infrastructure, not just a tech experiment.
Algorithms are political
On the question of algorithms, the picture is both urgent and honest. Engagement-optimised platforms produce polarisation, addiction, and misinformation not as side effects, but by design. Optimising for time-on-platform is optimising against the public interest.
Public alternatives need algorithms built around different values: diversity, relevance, reliability. But as researcher Nikolaus Poechhacker showed at our Amsterdam unconference, translating values into working rules is genuinely hard. You can't just swap one ranking function for another and call it democratic.
Public-interest algorithms can't be shipped and forgotten. Like any public institution —a broadcaster, a library, a regulator— they need ongoing democratic oversight. That means governance structures, transparency requirements, and the political will to maintain them over time.
Cautious optimism
Our talk on "Shaping our Digital Commons" ended on a note of cautious optimism. The infrastructure exists. The models for adoption are clear. What's missing is political will —and the coordinated effort to turn it into reality.
That effort is what FediVariety is part of. We'd love for you to be too.