The World We Are Building

We are creating a new world. It isn’t built from whole cloth, most of the technology already exists and most of the governance methods are taken from non-digital systems, but the resulting proposal can still feel abstract with its protocols, infrastructure, and institutional arrangements. To help give a clearer, more concrete feel for this new digital world, this section offers a series of very short vignettes illustrating how life works there. This isn’t a utopian vision — we are keenly aware that democracy is often messy and that it doesn’t magically fix our problems. But it is a much better world all the same.

Instead of focusing on the imagined story, each vignette primarily provides context and explains the improvements that this new world offers.

Data Management Scandal Leads To Temporary Ban. When there is a scandal with how today’s social media companies operate, for instance regarding privacy, the media cover it, people complain, regulators wag their fingers and occasionally issue a parking ticket, sometimes a CEO will apologise — but there is only limited power available (or mobilised) to address the root of the problem.

We can replace this with forms of collective governance that have stricter and more specialised enforcement against violations. When social media ceases to be a monolith and instead becomes an ecosystem of actors with different responsibilities, it becomes possible to intervene against hostile behaviour.

Our headline refers to a situation in which a provider of Personal Data Servers (the component that stores people’s own data in social media) mismanaged the data they were hosting (presumably by data mining it in invasive ways). Since that is a violation of the covenant that sets the rules for the network, the provider was temporarily banned (after due process), which is to say that it can no longer be used to participate in the social media system. Because Personal Data Servers are interoperable commodities, users (who would be affected by the ban) can switch to another provider with a single click.

Rininsland Nets Curation Pulitzer. In legacy social media (and search), the service operator alone has a say over the algorithm that sources information, deems it eligible, and ranks its relevance. Not only has this led to abuses of power and a decreased user experience, it is also incompatible with democratic values of pluralism.

In our new world, a multiplicity of feeds is available, sourced and ranked according to an endless combination of approaches. User-friendly services like Graze Social make feed creation easy for everyone.

In our headline, the Pulitzer committee has recognised the contribution of curated feeds to quality journalism — it has emerged as a respected editorial function. They are awarding that year’s prize to Ændra Rininsland, a technologist currently with the FT and creators of the Verified News and Trending News feeds.

Internet Community Opens Bowling Alley. The ActivityPub protocol (that powers the Fediverse and partly Mastodon) is well suited for “human-sized” communities that have an existing but lesser connection to the wider world — something that many people find highly desirable but that isn’t offered by legacy social media companies. One great use case is social networking for a city or neighbourhood. ActivityPub and AT Proto complement each other well, and in fact running the former on top of the latter makes for a powerful combo that enables just this sort of use case.

In our imagined world, one such local community has pooled its resources in order to open a bowling alley in which to meet in person in addition to online.

Advertising Governing Body Debates Privacy Change. Two-sided markets create tremendous power. Whoever gets to operate the marketplace itself is dealing with two captive audiences, both of which needs to reach the other and neither of which can decide to leave on its own. That is how today’s advertising market is (predominantly) structured and, unsurprisingly, the parties in the middle are making use of that power. Neither buyers nor sellers have any visibility into what happens inside the marketplace and we know from what has surfaced in court cases that the monopolies in charge manipulate auctions in their own interest. Companies lose billions a year to this arrangement all the while publishers see their work defunded.

The way forward is to have the marketplace operating under strict rules of fairness (of infrastructure neutrality), and the ideal approach to that is to have it be governed by its stakeholders. For open social media to stick to its public interest mission, it’s going to need to be sustainable, and advertising will have to be part of that equation.

The headline alludes to the fact that a governing body for adtech will have to make difficult decisions that balance out the interests of publishers, advertisers, and people. However, such negotiated outcomes stand a very good chance of being better than anything we currently have.

European Search Index Cracks Down On Friends-For-Pay Scheme. Back in the 90s, Google’s founders stumbled onto underexploited information: the web’s link graph. By ranking results based on the structure of the web’s links, they were able to produce a search engine with greater relevance than its competition. Unfortunately, that link graph was gameable by people who decided to create sites linking to one another for not purpose than to increase their ranking. Before long, that information lost most of its usefulness.

The social graph that connects people has similar properties to those of the web’s link graph, and can also be used for relevance ranking. Indeed, information trusted by people you trust is likely to match what you would consider relevant. And, interestingly, this is much harder to game because people have limited incentives to undermine who they trust.

Because we’re building on an open and interoperable social media protocol, people’s social graphs can be used specifically to rank search results based on the people they trust. (Evidently, to make this valuable people have to choose to ask the search engine to use that information.)

The headline hints at a world in which a search index — the part of search that takes crawled information and makes it (technically) easy to query and that can then be used for ranking and with a user interface — has been developed as shared public infrastructure. While such a project is out of scope for EuroSky, it is just as desirable and is entirely feasible. (See the Initiative for Neutral Search.) A powerful aspect of the approach we are taking to open infrastructure is that open infrastructural systems reinforce one another, as we see here. Making social media democratic helps bring democracy to other parts of the digital sphere.

The Teletubbies Return! The internet has been unkind to children in many ways. Children are easy targets of attentional techniques and require safe curated spaces that are of little interest to incumbent monopolies as they are challenging to monetise with their preferred methods.

Understandably, this has a led to a flurry of regulatory measures to limit access of children to online content. But the internet was envisioned as a source of knowledge and wonder, and age-gating to keep children from the worst of what we have shouldn’t be the only solution: we need online spaces that are good for children.

AT Proto supports composable moderation, which is to say that instead of having just one source of content moderation coming from a monopolistic platform, multiple sources can come together to moderate content together. This makes it possible for any content to be age-labelled. Creating new feeds is open to all such that curated child-directed content is possible — for instance by public broadcasters or other parents. And because the protocol is open, anyone with some programming chops can create a child-directed product that builds on top of these capabilities and can have additional smart features such as limiting duration or engagement.

Our headline proudly announces that hit children’s series Teletubbies is scheduled for a (second) reboot. The headline doesn’t mention that this happens through the BBC’s social media presence, with content labelled correctly and syndicated through a variety of child-friendly feeds — in this future, every parent knows that.

ATMOS Gains Ground In Mobile. We rarely think of it that way but every time we load a web page we are basically setting up a small ephemeral application that we can interact with until the tab is closed or we navigate away. This model has a huge potential to offer a much better experience than we get from installed apps, especially now that AI agents can interact with multiple systems at once without incurring UI excessive complexity. This opens the door to people being able to use computers in a task-centric rather than application-centric way. To offer an example, this is the difference between selecting a picture from your collection, editing it lightly, and inserting it into a document (tasks) and going to your photo management application to select a picture, exporting it, opening it in your photo editor, exporting the result, and bringing that edited version into your document editor (apps).

However, the web’s security model is a poor fit to compose services together. The approach that AT has taken, however, makes it possible to create small single-purpose applets that are good at carrying out a single task — and then composing them based on needs.

The headline is reporting on the gains made by ATMOS (AT Mobile OS), and imagined operating system built entirely atop this exact model. Such a system has the potential to break open app stores and liberate developers from that 15-30% tax that Apple and Google arbitrarily collect from them. The transition to that world can be progressive, starting from a social media app all the way to taking over the system.

Publishers Alliance Commits To Zero-Paywall During Elections. News media has long been torn by a challenging tension: on the one hand, people prefer to read news from an aggregator that gives them access to multiple sources at once, but on the other hand aggregator offerings like Apple News, Google News, AMP, Facebook News, etc. have offered publishers poor deals that actively defunded their work through lower advertising revenue and decreased subscription conversion rates.

To address this, in 2026 a group of enterprising publishers and technologists joined forces to launch Lede, a news aggregator built atop shared social media infrastructure and governed by (and for) participating publishers. On Lede, publishers rely on a shared advertising system that respects people’s privacy and does not share hard-won audience data with third parties, and on which they can also support direct deals. They also benefit from an integrated subscription system in which people pay for a bundle and publishers are paid a prorated chunk of that based on what people read.

Because Lede stories are published on AT Proto they are natively social, and can be integrated under multiple formats in any number of other social experiences. And because search is built-in and exposed through the shared index, they need not provide extra work for SEO nor do they need to worry about substitutive use based on generative AI.

While media never returned to its pre-internet profitability (during which they were more or less printing money), they have returned to a world in which reporting is funded and investment is possible again. It turns out that journalism never needed a business model for the internet — it just needed to lose its parasites.

In our headline, the publisher multistakeholder group in charge of governing Lede and its infrastructure has reached an agreement to systematically offer unpaywalled articles during elections in all relevant jurisdictions — because they can afford to.

Youth Assembly Remains Torn Over Proposed Anti-Bullying Measures. Young people often understand the problems that the digital world creates for them much better than adults do. In spite of this, they are rarely empowered to take an active part in the world that affects them. Instead, their lives are governed entirely by a tussle between Silicon Valley product directors and some policymakers, neither of whom they have much access to.

Our approach to social media makes it possible to establish distinct spaces that have their own governance — which is to say that everything from what kinds of content can be posted to what type of content moderation is enforced can be decided by a given group. This makes it possible to create a youth-governed social media, only accessible to a specific age range and governed by them.

In this headline we imagine a world in which the governance of this system takes place through a democratic assembly of the youth network’s users. Establishing democratic self-governance doesn’t make hard problems disappear, but it does empower the affected parties to make difficult decisions for themselves and to learn how to exercise democratic power.

CSAM Prevention Struggles Persist; New Research Promising. A persistent challenge for social media systems, particularly decentralised ones, is to combat the sharing of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). It is difficult because of a heightened duty to the victims, of the revolting nature of the content that takes a toll on moderators, because those who distribute it are often very practiced at evading interception, and because it puts small social media operators in legal jeopardy.

Rather than requiring every social media operator to reinvent CSAM prevention from scratch, an interoperable protocol makes it easier for different operators to pool resources and combat a shared problem together. We are already working on common infrastructure for precisely this purpose.

The headline reflects the fact that even with a better, shared system some challenges will remain, but hints at the fact that shared, open research is our best bet to tackle them.

Emergency Social Messaging Gets Upgrade In Wake Of Floods. Disinformation is a problem at the best of times, but it is both particularly rampant and deadly during emergencies. People have often used social media to coordinate during emergency situations but this has come into conflict with both the tendency of legacy platforms to interfere with valuable content and their strength at promoting deceptive or false (but sensational) information.

AT Proto improves this situation in multiple ways. First, every message is authenticated (“AT” stands for “Authenticated Transfer”). This makes is easier to distinguish official messages from the rest. Second, the labelling system means that official emergency management sources can be labelled as trustworthy even if people may not know the name of the agency in charge of emergencies in the area they find themselves in. Third, unrelated feeds and social apps can decide to make emergency messages more prominent (in fact, emergency messaging could be supported at the protocol level). And finally, because feeds can be manually curated it is possible for a trustworthy source to create on the spot a feed for a given situation in which they relay credible information being shared by people on the ground. Put together, this makes for a much healthier and more reliable information environment, particularly in crises.

Our headline refers to a world in which these capabilities were not fully put to work during a tragic flooding event. As a result, a group of interior ministries, emergency management agencies, and technologists came together to establish better practices and capabilities.

Our Approach

Our goal is for social media to be good for the people who use it, to be compatible with democracy, and to support a thriving ecosystem of innovative businesses that are internationally competitive. This leads us to build from multiple requirements:

• We need to replace social media consumer products with shared social media infrastructure that supports a greater multiplicity of consumer products. Replacing Instagram or Twitter with a hypothetical European social media would achieve very little. Social media is too powerful to be concentrated in a single product no matter where that product is headquartered. An approach based on infrastructure allows us instead to open the way to an explosion of creativity in social media applications.
• We need to break apart monolithic social media systems into independent operators with simpler, more focused responsibilities. Legacy social media concentrates all functions into one big system: identity, data storage, feeds and curation, social graph, user interface are all bound together. This creates dependencies between these components that make the overall system hard to govern. Instead, we are building a system in which different components have clear and narrow responsibilities such that they are easy to govern, and those are then integrated into a comprehensive system thanks to open, interoperable protocols.
• We must support global interoperability with strong subsidiarity such that states may apply their own regulatory frameworks with full sovereignty while integrating into a global social internet. We achieve this by supporting interoperability at the protocol level — which describes how pieces of infrastructure operated by different entities work together — while simultaneously localising infrastructure in the relevant jurisdictions, subject to the relevant laws, and with the operational capacity to make their own decisions.
• We see no need to choose between regulation and innovation. By creating a content moderation commons at the infrastructure layer, we enable entrepreneurs to build systems that are compliant with the applicable jurisdictions without having to worry about it. We are working to structure the network such that hostile behaviour like invasive privacy practices can be rooted out directly by users.
• Instead of targeting symptoms of an unhealthy information environment for instance with fact checking, we address the root causes of disinformation notably through algorithmic pluralism. We are bringing to social media the same resilience and diversity that sustains the traditional media ecosystem.

Deliverables

European AT Proto Infrastructure

We are working to operate social media infrastructure in Europe using AT Proto. Our goal is to ensure that social media in Europe cannot be disrupted at the whim of hostile foreign companies, to make social media operate according to European laws, and to support emerging novel social products that can be built quickly and easily because they don’t need to reinvent core infrastructure. Just as unbundling telecommunications infrastructure sparked innovation, the unbundling of social platforms is creating space for new entrants.

• A Personal Data Server (PDS) is a system that stores a person’s data in a way that guarantees that they can always take it to another PDS without losing their identity or followers. We will set up a European PDS provider and a service to help people move between PDS providers easily.
• A relay is a system that asks PDSs for the latest posts, likes, etc. that people have made and produces a firehose of events for that data which can be consumed for instance by feed generators, content moderation systems, apps, etc. We will set up and operate a European relay.
• The PLC Directory is the primary system used for people to register their identity with AT Proto. There can be only one PLC Directory (to guarantee unique identifiers). We will either host or take part in shared governance of the PLC Directory.
• An index makes the content of an AT network searchable, so that people, posts, or the like can be found. We will work with a search partner (perhaps the European Search Perspective) in order to operate an index.

Commons Content Moderation

Europe urgently needs its own stack to preserve information integrity, built with public interest values and legal compliance in mind. To guarantee robust defense against manipulations and foreign interference, integrity standards need to be rooted in the design of the technology. We think of information trust and integrity as foundational design elements, not afterthoughts.

We are thus seeking to build a foundational component for the Eurostack: a Commons Content Moderation (CoCoMo).

A CoCoMo will provide a shared moderation system for developers and startups interested in building applications on top of AT Proto, encoding regulatory standards and simplifying and reducing the cost of managing the moderation obligations of technology platforms. It will also ensure that moderation processes happen in accountable and sovereign infrastructures. This system makes it possible to deliver both regulation and innovation at the same time.

The CoCoMo will:

• Provide a modular and transparent moderation relay for decentralised platforms.

• Feature label-based filtering, geo-specific content controls, audit logs, user appeals, and policy transparency.
• Support apps, app views, and smaller operators by design, without centralizing power.
• Be field-tested on Flashes, a European social media app that is pioneering new uses for AT Proto.

This commons-based and interoperable approach is aligned with emerging trust and safety and moderation practices. It complements and builds upon projects such as those of our partners ROOST, a user safety initiative also joined by most current industry leaders, and launched at the recent AI Action Summit in Paris.

Building a CoCoMo for Eurosky will both support the integrity of our information ecosystem, and support entrepreneurial opportunities in Europe.

Governance

Social media forms complex systems that require substantial governance at multiple levels. We do not propose to single-handedly govern the entire system as that would just reproduce familiar dynamics of power concentration, but we can host, organise, and contribute.

• Keeping AT Proto open requires well-governed standards to ensure that it is interoperable and usable by all. We will either host the standards process or support standard setting, either in the community or in a formal organisation.
• We will develop an AT Covenant and the corresponding institutional structures to ensure that participants in the AT network are well-behaved, for instance that PDSs aren’t used for data mining.
• We will help support the governance of AT open source projects, notably working to ensure a strong feedback loop with the standards process, community involvement, and that developers are funded.
• We will support integration between AT Proto and other protocols (specifically ActivityPub) so as to work in the direction of a universal standardised protocol that serves everyone.
• We will develop sustainability models for all components of the infrastructure, to ensure that it is sustainable.

Ecosystem

Infrastructure is successful when it supports a thriving ecosystem of downstream uses.

• We will support emerging novel social products and startups operating on this infrastructure.
• We will establish collaborations, for instance with media, to grow interest and develop a healthy information environment.
• We will partner to develop feeds and ensure the durable pluralism of the platform.

Conditionalities

On the assumption that this system will receive public funding, we are elaborating conditionalities to match. At a high level:

• High level of privacy protection. People remain in charge of their identity and data. No PDS or Relay can be used for profiling purposes.
• Public interest. The system will keep operating in the public interest and it will not be possible to buy it.
• Healthy algorithms. To the extent that we develop feeds or recommendations (which may not happen), they will not involve toxic algorithms.
• Credible oversight involving amongst others civil society.
• Compliance with European law and respect for fundamental rights. We also endeavour to create as much subsidiarity as possible so that Member state laws can apply too in their own sphere.

Beyond

AT Proto & ActivityPub

A common and important question is why we are focusing our efforts on AT Proto (that underlies Bluesky and a growing number of other systems) rather than ActivityPub (that underlies Mastodon). The short answer is: because AT Proto provides us with much greater flexibility in terms of the governance and institutions that we can build on top of it to guarantee that we have democratic, competitive, capture-resistant social network infrastructure. It provides an unbundling of the social web that makes it possible to establish good governance for social media infrastructure, in Europe, run by a European public interest foundation, following European laws, and running on European cloud infrastructure. It is worth noting that it is possible to implement ActivityPub and the institutions that ActivityPub supports on top of AT Proto, but that the reverse is not true.

Both are open source. Both have (different) cost challenges when operated at scale. ActivityPub is a W3C standard (though note that Mastodon, by far the dominant actor in the that space, is more accurately described as a proprietary system with partial ActivityPub compatibility). AT Proto is being discussed as a potential IETF workstream, though with no formal commitment at this time, and the community is working on taking over the protocol specification.

The protocols have been bridged to one another successfully multiple times.

Ultimately, the kind of governance that ActivityPub is strong at (reasonably-sized communities) is highly valuable and desired by many users even if it is limiting to have it as the primary structure, and our plan is to simply support ActivityPub atop AT infrastructure.

Relevant Organisations

Several overlapping organisations are relevant to this work in one way or another. Here is how they relate.

• The EuroStack project is a big tent alliance of people and businesses in Europe who push for greater digital sovereignty across digital infrastructure (see notably the pitch, the support letter from businesses, and the European Way report). EuroSky is the social media component of the EuroStack.
• FreeOurFeeds is a campaign, led by some of the world’s top public-interest technologists, that aims to establish social media infrastructure that is sustainably free from billionaire control. EuroSky is the European concretisation of this campaign.
• IndieSky is a collective of developers and technologists who are organising open source and open standards work around AT Proto so as to help guarantee the independence of the protocol with respect to Bluesky and to make it easy for people to deploy sovereign infrastructure anywhere in the world. EuroSky is collaborating directly with IndieSky.
• Flashes is a European AT Proto application comparable to Instagram, and collaborates directly with EuroSky.
• Bluesky is an American startup in the social media space and the inventors of AT Proto. They operate one application on top of AT Proto. While they have expressed enthusiastic support for independent AT infrastructure, they are not involved in EuroSky nor have they been invited to be.

Get In Touch

• Robin Berjon (robin@berjon.com). Principal, Supramundane Agency (Brussels); Deputy Director, IPFS Foundation; Custodian, Free Our Feeds; Fellow, Public AI.