A broad European movement has formed under the umbrella of European.Social with the aim of building an independent, decentralised and open social media infrastructure for Europe. Opposing the dominance of large, monopolistic platforms with ‘authoritarian governance’, the initiative advocates digital autonomy, European technology and democratic control over the social web’s infrastructure.
Save Social – Networks for Democracy is one of the movement’s founding members and initiated the process alongside the UK-based Newsmast Foundation. Other founding members include organisations such as Mastodon, the Matrix.org Foundation, Framasoft/PeerTube, the Social Web Foundation and Waag Futurelab. The network explicitly advocates social networks that serve democracy, and the alliance’s core aim is to establish open, decentralised structures to protect European democracy and digital sovereignty.
The focus is on connecting existing open protocols and platforms, including the Fediverse (with Mastodon, PeerTube and Mobilizon), the Atmosphere platform based on the AT protocol (with Eurosky, Flashes and Tangled) and open messaging standards such as Matrix and XMPP. These are complemented by projects such as Eurobridge, which is a Europe-run bridge between the Fediverse and Atmosphere, as well as distributed identity systems, DSA-compliant moderation infrastructure, and multi-protocol integration. The movement is calling on governments, local authorities and public media outlets to primarily publish content on open European networks and to fund their development. This will not only ensure democratic resilience against foreign influence, but also keep the value generated by social media — in the form of thousands of jobs and billions in revenue — within Europe
