Last week, Berlin hosted the Franco-German Summit for European Digital Sovereignty. The Summit indicated building momentum towards limiting the EU’s technological dependencies and fostering a more resilient and competitive domestic ecosystem.
In parallel, the Eurosky initiative—which aims to build public-interest, open social media infrastructure hosted in Europe—organized the first Eurosky Live conference in Berlin (videostreams are now available). The message is clear: the digital sovereignty agenda is intertwined with the efforts to build alternatives to centralized Big Tech social networks, which remain a critical space for contemporary public discourse and social exchange.
Eurosky is part of the broader Free Our Feeds initiative. Its vision is ambitious: rather than simply creating an “X-like” alternative, it aims to operate across social media, search, news, and e-commerce. The project describes itself as “building European infrastructure for the open social web,” with an emphasis on providing infrastructure for developers and companies rather than consumer-facing applications.
Eurosky will build on the ATProtocol—the same protocol underlying the Bluesky app and infrastructure—which offers a decentralized alternative to centralized social media platforms like X or Instagram. Such efforts sit alongside broader experimentation around decentralised and federated networks, with Mastodon (and the ActivityPub protocol it is based on) being another prominent example.
ATProtocol-based platforms unbundle the different functions that platforms usually perform, such as hosting accounts and content, moderating for trust and safety, and curating content. This unbundling allows different actors to provide these services, opening up space for more competition and plurality. This architecture decentralizes control over the network and enables the possibility of public-interest social media models.
In practice, this means developing alternative social media infrastructure that is not controlled by Big Tech or venture capital-backed US corporations, anchored within EU jurisdiction, and designed to foster a more pluralistic information ecosystem. Crucially, this would not require splintering from the 40 million users already on the Bluesky network and forcing a choice between competing, incompatible platforms.
A timely step forward
We have previously explored a central challenge with digital public spaces: the algorithms that curate our feeds are premised on logics of attention capture and data extraction. They are structurally tuned towards polarization, amplifying sensational and harmful speech, and remain vulnerable to coordinated campaigns of misinformation and harassment. Regulation plays a key role, but there is a requirement to build alternatives.
The rise of decentralized and federated networks—like the ATProtocol, ActivityPub, and the networks built on top of them—is a positive step in that direction. Decentralized architectures can reduce lock-in and limit centralized control over these infrastructures. Alternative providers of hosting, moderation, and curation services can operate on the same network, allowing users and institutions to choose between them without losing access to their data or social connections.
Towards sovereign and pluralistic digital public spaces
There are two principal sovereignty risks at play in the context of social media platforms:
- interference with the integrity of public discourse, and
- the reliance on infrastructure over which foreign actors effectively hold a “kill switch.”
Put differently, the problem isn’t simply that social media infrastructure is not “European”—it stems from the incentives and business models that shape and steer content. We identify this most recently as a key pillar in a sovereignty agenda that foregrounds public value.
The decentralized architecture of the ATProtocol enables the provision of a diversity of algorithmic recommendation systems, including models that are not tied to advertising or commercial incentives. A more pluralistic information environment—with multiple algorithmic providers and meaningful user choice—can strengthen resilience against threats to the integrity of public discourse.
Eurosky advances this vision further as it seeks to deploy the underlying hosting infrastructure within the EU. This mitigates the sovereignty risk of relying on providers subject to foreign jurisdictions and strengthens the network’s resilience and availability in the face of geopolitical pressures.
Safety first
According to Eurosky’s Development Plan, the first priority on their roadmap is to build a Commons for Content Moderation (“CoCoMo”)—”a shared moderation system for developers and startups building applications on top of ATProto.”
This is a promising place to start, partly because of the way the protocol works, and partly because content moderation is arguably the most critical function of online platforms.
Under ATProtocol’s architecture content moderation—deciding what kind of actors, behaviour, and content are permissible on the platform—is an infrastructural dependency. Without a dedicated moderation infrastructure, anything Eurosky would build would remain dependent on the internal moderation systems of Bluesky Social PBC, the US-based public benefit corporation leading Bluesky’s development of the ATProtocol. This creates a dependency that could undermine the viability of the Eurosky project and its vision of sovereignty. Creating truly sovereign social media infrastructure requires the creation of such independent moderation infrastructure. Without this, key decisions about content would remain downstream of the choices made by Bluesky PBC.
Starting with shared moderation infrastructure is a positive sign also because moderation— deciding who and what belongs in a particular information environment—is constitutive of a platform. It is difficult work, involving complex questions about permissible speech and behaviour, ethical and sustainable labour practices for moderators, and (partly as a consequence) has significant resource demands. It also represents the highest-stakes element of online platforms, determining whether people can use platforms safely, and whether the platform itself is resilient against coordinated threats from well-resourced actors.
What next—bringing together the public, the private, and the commons
Building the alternatives we need—safe online places that are not dependent on Big Tech logics and are hosted on resilient infrastructure—will require coordination between the technical community, civil society, and the public sector.
As we argue in our Strategic Agenda for the Digital Commons, public funding will play a critical role in maintaining plurality and resilience within digital infrastructures. Publicly supported recommender systems can offer alternatives that are not driven by commercial incentives and better aligned with the public-interest function of curating how people encounter content online.
Ensuring the safety and integrity of spaces that host public discourse is also fundamentally a public responsibility, requiring stable investment to guarantee that it serves society rather than commercial imperatives. Leaving such critical societal infrastructure solely in private hands creates dependencies that undermine their reliability, accessibility, and alignment with democratic values. Funding for such infrastructures could then be anchored within proposals for an EU Sovereign Tech Fund, tied to a more expansive vision of sovereignty.
As the technical infrastructure develops, civil society must also have space to participate. Building these platforms raises critical questions about speech, harm, trust, and safety—questions that are not purely technical. Civil society organizations play a vital role in shaping responsible and inclusive responses.
Commons-based decision-making structures are especially valuable for addressing questions around moderation and curation. Grounding these decisions in participatory governance makes them more sustainable and better aligned with the values and needs of the communities that inhabit these spaces.
Eurosky signals a growing focus on building real alternatives to Big Tech platforms. Creating these spaces isn’t a purely technical project, and public funding will be critical in the sustainable provision of what are essentially public functions. Collaboration between civil society, the commons, and the public sector remains central to making these spaces safe, resilient, and truly public-interest driven.
