Our research

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is the independent supervisory authority for the protection of personal data and privacy in the EU institutions and bodies. Their pilot project "EU Voice/Video" was one of the first projects to integrate self-hosted Fediverse instances into interinstitutional (EU) public administration. The two platforms EU Voice and EU Video are a privacy-oriented environment based on Mastodon and PeerTube software.

The pilot project, initially planned to last one year, was extended by another year due to its success with the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (EUIs) and their users. EU Voice had 40 institutional accounts, including EU Commissioners and Members of the European Parliament, and EU Video had 6 accounts, making EUIs the largest group of public authorities on the Fediverse worldwide. The project officially closed on 18 May 2024.

This pilot project demonstrates that community-driven, decentralised social media can prioritise users' privacy and personal data while strengthening the EU's digital sovereignty.

For our research on this pilot project, we examined all relevant data on how the 40 institutional EU Voice and 6 EU Video accounts, were created, how they were used, and to what extent they were experienced.

To this end, based on The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, art. 15, we requested the relevant documents (reports, correspondence, presentations, manuals, evaluation reports, etc.) from 21 institutions involved through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and we conducted 10 interviews with people who were directly or indirectly engaged in the pilot project.

Our study uses a qualitative method that combines the research styles of Grounded Theory (GT) (Charmaz, 2006; Strauss and Corbin, 1990) for the interview data with the method proposed by Prior (2003) for document analysis of the text documents, called Using Documents in Social Research.

Through a thorough analysis of the generated data, we aim to highlight both the challenges and advantages of decentralized social media solutions. Our report, set for publication in early 2026, will serve as a catalyst for discussions at the NOAW unconference.