Mathew Lowry

Next week I’ll be in Berlin for a European Digital Sovereignty Summit satellite event to help launch @eurosky.social.

So it's time to ask: what does #sovereignty look like in the #socialmedia space?

mathewlowry.medium.com/building-res...

Building resilient social media

Next week I’ll be in Berlin, speaking at a Franco-German “Summit on European Digital Sovereignty” satellite event to help launch…

"This wait-and-see-posture only hurts users and strengthens and further entrenches Big Tech incumbents."

www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

European Commission Chooses to Keep EU Users Locked Up Behind Big Tech’s Gates

Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms...

Finally wrote up my #EuroSkyLive Berlin presentation from last month so that I have something more to refer people to than "watch me bounce around the stage for 19 minutes".

mathewlowry.medium.com/how-newsroom...

How newsrooms, scientific institutions & governments can best use Bluesky

Large organisations need dedicated tools and processes to manage their Bluesky presence and get the most out of ATproto.

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Interesting! Here in Brussels we recently cut the speed from 50 to 30. One year later, deaths are down 50%, transit times are stable. www.rtbf.be/article/bila...

Bilan zone 30 à Bruxelles : le nombre de victimes sur les routes divisé par deux

Le 1er janvier 2021, rouler à 30 km/h devenait la norme en Région bruxelloise. Un an plus tard, quel bilan tirer de...

Priority 1: "empower the builders, let them compete. They'll figure it out" - @rose.bsky.team #euroskylive

There is hope after all. Who'd have thought?

Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis @jeffjarvis.bsky.social

FINALLY MSM writes about Fox as the malign political actor it is. (Gift link) Republicans Who Do Not Regularly Watch Fox Are Less Likely to Back Trump www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/u...

Republicans Who Do Not Regularly Watch Fox Are Less Likely to Back Trump

Survey data shows more of them believe he acted criminally.

Didn't get to ask my question, so here they are @anna.wsocial.eu (I'm in the room :))

But firstly, welcome to the Atmosphere! It's always great to see another app join the OSW (open social web).

I thought it'd be fun to do some YouTube short interviews with people here at #AtmosphereConf, just to ask them about the moment they realised that atproto was worth building on. So here's my very first with @tylerjfisher.com of @sill.social

youtube.com/shorts/oOiS4...
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Tyler Fisher on what his app Sill does in brief, and why he decided to build on Atproto

YouTube video by Mathew Lowry

Reply to @eurosky.social

Swedish Lapland says Hi with a smiley for #Europeday.

Great talk from @aendra.com on journalism, atproto & AI at #atmosphereconf.

"Why do we still trust big tech with news distribution?"

Custom feeds offer an answer.

"There's SPAM on my app!"

@seabass.bsky.social and @erikologic.bsky.social demoing @eurosky.social's CoCoMo (content moderation) service running on Seb's @flashes.blue at #euroskylive

Uplifting multiple European startups on multiple protocols.

That's infrastructure, and #wecanjustbuildit

Forgot to include the all important #atscience & @atproto.science when I posted direct from leaflet.

Mathew Lowry @mathewlowry.eurosky.social

Managing scientific knowledge for policy on the ATmosphere

Two types of Atmosphere toolkit are needed if ATScience is to help scientists do science and better communicate it to other audiences: one serving the researchers and their teams, the other focused on aggregation and synthesis.

In other news, the jokes continue to write themselves on the other side of the Atlantic.

Mediapolitic @mediapolitic.bsky.social

You guys, the White House accidentally ordered 10x the amount of Porta-Potties that they needed. The lawn is just acres of Porta-Potties. It’s all fenced off and you can’t see, but I took this photo through a hole in the fence netting.

100x this. Noone should try to pick one winner. Instead, we should be supporting entire ecosystems of startups. Each startup's success will not only grow its user base, it will grow the entire Atmosphere, supporting *all* the startups.

Robin Berjon @robin.berjon.com

"Why do people keep calling for a 'European X' or a 'European Instagram' when instead, by sharing infrastructure as we're doing with @eurosky.social, we could have 20 or 30 social networks?" — @seabass.bsky.social

Putting a childporn-generating stochastic parrot fine-tuned on the ketamine-fuelled ravings of the world's richest Nazi in charge of European defense does not seem... great?

Reuters @reuters.com

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the integration of Elon Musk's xAI platform, Grok, into military networks as part of a new "AI acceleration strategy" during a visit to SpaceX.

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Huge shoutout to the @eurosky.social team for last week's #EuroskyLive in Berlin. Here's my "one week later" first take: mathewlowry.medium.com/politics-mee...

Politics meets protocols in Berlin

What happens when you put politicians, media businesses and protocol engineers in the same room to discuss European sovereignty?

"There are so many more businesses models beyond ads" @rose.bsky.team points out at #euroskylive. "It's just that developers haven't been able to experiment with today's social media".

@paulnemitz.bsky.social at #EuroskyLive recommending www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/regu..., by an American legal expert, for calling out the "bullshit" narrative that European regulation is anti -innovation.

h/t @bmann.ca

Regulation and Innovation

Mathew Lowry @mathewlowry.eurosky.social

Let's be realistic about EU digital law simplification, says @paulnemitz.bsky.social at #euroskylive: "When society is complex, the economy is complex, technology is complex, laws cannot be simple"

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Been asking that a lot recently, and have been really disappointed by the responses. So I wrote this for them.

mathewlowry.medium.com/x-strategy-o...

X Strategy or eXit Strategy? A cost-benefit analysis framework

Some considerations to help you clarify your eXit Strategy.

Reply to @faineg.bsky.social

Not just US agencies. When Facebook/Twitter took off, I'd been building online communities for the EU Commission for ~10y. That all stopped - "easier & cheaper to build an audience on social", they decided, in complete ignorance of Faust.

We lost a decade. mathewlowry.medium.com/from-ep2009-...

From #EP2009 to #EP2019: a lost decade?

It’s taken me over ten years to move from enthusiasm, through frustration into a Zen-like state where I no longer blog about EU comms. But…

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Yeah this tracks. The warning about the long-term future of companies who replace 90% of their entry level jobs chimes with this from last year.

mathewlowry.medium.com/cultivate-yo...

Can you spot which stories are on the www.visittheusa.com website, and which ones aren't?

Take your time, it's pretty tricky. h/t @lukelebrun.ca for some of them

For those not in the US, then, a slightly modified version: "Build international networks that don't rely on, or are owned by, or are beholden to, the government".