[bluegatty]

Totally valid point - but there are a lot of other strategic consideration.

Especially with 'Social' there are network externalizations like 'critical mass' - that actually compounds across a lot of things.

No European country given size and language is going to be able to create something that resonates as well as the American variation beyond the critical mass needed, at least naturally.

If 'French Facebook' started at one of the 'Grande Ecoles' it would have grown much more slowly, and maybe never moved out of being French centric and therefore not gone beyond borders.

Without the 'momentum' that doesn't attract investors, doesn't make employees want to work 'late nights for the big IPO payoff' etc..

And there are so many other related conventions, such as capitol markets, public markets, so many issues.

So - in order to overcome those limitations there may have to be a lot of strategic thinking and manoeuvring.

Given that Europe took 4 years to adjust to a nation literally invading it ... well ... I wouldn't hold my breath.

There are some winning opportunities: government procurement is powerful but Euros are afraid to negotiate hard with MS Goog etc..

There's a lot of money involved, forcing issues on privacy is entirely possible.

Same for local content, some degree of decentralization.

Requiring government actors to use 'Euro Mastadon' or whatever - it means school, students, parents come abard and then you have 'critical mass'.

Requiring 'open doc format' means you can break the MS Office monopoly.

Requiring 'Linux First' on every IT procurement decision - or even 'Open Soruce First' so local city council must give an excuse for why they are not using 'Approved Euro-Linux Variations' etc..

Lots of things.

[znpy]

> Requiring government actors to use 'Euro Mastadon' or whatever - it means school, students, parents come abard and then you have 'critical mass'.

Not really.

Reality is that people (eg: students) will have the "euro mastodon" (or whatever) AND the other social media accounts, and will drop the "euro mastodon" when not legally enforced anymore (eg: when finishing school).

> Requiring 'open doc format'

If you're talking about OpenDocument, it's not european really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument - It was originally built by Sun Microsystems, a very american company (RIP).

[bluegatty]

You're misunderstanding the concept of critical mass as it relates.

People wanted to move to BlueSky, but they couldn't move away from the others because the critical mass did not shift.

I governing bodies require certain use, then the critical mass for those platforms then exist.

People don't need to go to the other platforms.

There's zero reason for Europeans to use Facebook.

Now Twitter is another story - but as we see with Russia, where they have 'engineered' the critical mass on Telegram, and where Twitter is 'available' - it works. Telegram is #1, and Twitter is #2.

The same would happen in Europe.

There are standards for various things, it doesn't matter where they originate from that much, any number of them can be adopted, the key is there has to be hard requirements for parties to support them.

If 'all government procurement' required participants t adhere to those standards, it'd open up for others to participate.

[znpy]

I think you’re misunderstanding user experience.

I was on online social networks before Facebook, one of them (kly.it) was very local (national) and very similar to facebook.

And yet, facebook was better, it took off and other european platforms like kly.it or netlog died miserably.

[psychoslave]

You are aware that most French locutors are living in Africa right now. And more in the realms of hazardous projections, it might become the first spoken language by 2050 IIRC, depending on actual demographic evolutions.

[bluegatty]

Africa is less important to extra-regional critical mass effects because of less access to internet, significantly lower income / advertising opportunity, and social and political influence (news tends to travel one way) and not a lot of integration of material concerns with France (individuals may have relations, but not a ton of business, entertainment etc.) - although the 'Football Factor' obviously looms large.

English wins because many people speak it and most people with influence do as well.

All of that will probably evolve a bit by 2050 but probably not enough to move the needle.

India and Philippines with huge numbers of English speakers will probably bulwark 'English as the Commons'.