Governments want to move away from “platforms over which we have no control,” says Dutch minister.
Sure, that is fair enough. But why is EU not setting up their own servers for whisper or activity pub or whatever OSS protocols and just make that their only official and approved communication channel?
The problem isn't setting up the servers, they already exist for the most part. It is getting anyone to use them.
I've seen this play out a few times in Europe. People are extremely resistant to giving up WhatsApp. These rules are so widely flouted that no one takes them seriously, including the people making the rules. It is a bit of theater, meanwhile everyone continues to use WhatsApp. There is no will to actually make this change.
If your boss keeps sending you messages over WhatsApp, why would you do any different?
Maybe I'm just too American to understand, but it still baffles me that WhatsApp is used for business purposes. It makes a lot more sense for regular personal messaging, but it seems incredibly unprofessional to me. I would think it bizarre and a bit invasive if my boss tried to text or iMessage me. Are they at least using different accounts for work messaging?
Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...
You guys use iMessage and go all weird unless the bubble is blue, so I’m not sure why you can’t understand that other countries have their own cultural messaging practices.
Alot of people use iMessage or WhatsApp for out of band messaging.
The global usage is nuts. All of my Indian friends live on WhatsApp even if they are iPhone users. When I was in Portugal and Spain recently it’s literally the way businesses work.
Plus, you’re out of your mind for putting Teams on a personal device.
It was kind of a cultural shock that people companies) in the US still leave messages on my voicemail. Last time I remember using the voicemail in the EU was like 2005 or around that time
WhatsApp is a much nicer platform for business (and messaging in general), and the rest of the world would find the American idea of "professional" rather laughable.
At my workplace we only use WhatsApp for personal comms. Like chatting about which restaurant we go for lunch, who's at the office tomorrow, when is everyone's birthday, what did we do this weekend, that kinda stuff.
For work related stuff we use teams and that it's kinda needed too because we can only link to internal resources there, like SharePoint.
Where my wife works they simply have a WhatsApp group because there _is_ no messenger, and while they don't use it for work stuff, they couldn't even have anything but group emails for discussing lunch plans or reaching someone who is not present at the office without calling (and in the case of reaching someone, they don't have access to anything on personal devices and they 90% have no work phones).
Clicking through and stumbling upon Croatia, which specifies only "Classified deployment", has left me absolutely cackeling. Seems hilarious that they're willing to say that they use it, but unwilling to state if it's for early testing, civilian-level beaurocracy, or Croatia's equivalent of specialized armed forces.
That they publicly use it at all is great though, as it likely helps shift the Overton window of what's normal, and what fits standard useage of Matrix-Synapse
Question, with so many major orgs using it, are there no plans for manual status? The one thing I miss vis-a-vis teams is the ability to manually set myself away, appear offline, busy etc.
Matrix shows me as active (green dot) when I have the client open but there's no way to override that. At least none that I found. I'm a bit surprised all these big governmental clients didn't ask for such a feature :)
There's a big gap between lots of orgs using it, and lots of orgs paying for development of it. That said, BWI in Germany is currently funding custom status so it should be coming soon :)
Aren't they about to handle DigiD to the U.S? You know, the tool we use for absolutely any sort of identification when interacting with the government?
They're setting up matrix servers. Nato uses matrix.
Too bad the UX is dogshit and the end users lose their keys every 90 days. Even though they're explicitly warned, loudly and clearly, to not lose the keys.
Matrix software stack isn't idiot proof; Signal is.
The key is only necessary as a backup these days. You can share the key from one client to another which works well. As long as the user has a laptop and phone it should be ok unless they lose both.
But yeah it would be nice if the key could be escrowed somewhere for big organisations.
You'd think right? But most of south american and southeast asia political scandals were cause by political figures using whatsapp and messages "leaking" thanks to a "hacker".
I understand the move but I also see bears on the road.
When the politicians control their communication apps then it is sooner or later also very convenient for politicians to ask the operators to disappear conversations that shouldn't have taken place or conversations that somehow are political liabilities.
Yeah. But then the EU lost the plot a very long time ago. There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one. It's ASML.
From 2008 to today, in USD and inflation adjusted, the eurozone saw no growth. While both the US and China skyrocketed.
There's been this little thing lately that kinda took off: it's called AI. Where's the EU? How much of a leader was the EU in this AI revolution?
Explain how the EU is not long gone?
The EU is not even sinking at this point: it sank years ago. And it's busy making sure it's turning into the third-world.
I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening.
Billions of people exist in the EU. In real terms it has not gone anywhere.
Obsession with preserving political dogma, rhetorical forms, atheist appearing syntax and semantics (language that does invoke specific concepts of theology); political and economic abstraction that do not represent reality is not much different from religion.
By your measure every nation effectively died out centuries ago as some originating principles died with their originators of those principles. Yet here we are still discussing France and Russia and the US as real things. They only ever existed as ethno objects to begin with; things that only exist if we talk about them as existing.
So what if some rhetorical specifics that used to define the economic and political foundations of the EU mutate. That's immutable reality for you. It's bound to happen due to generational churn.
People who live there can still use the term EU to define whatever political structure and economic model they land on next.
Economic growth has been slow in the EU, but it's mostly a demographic issue. There are too many retirees, too few children, and the size of the workforce is stagnant.
Measuring economic growth in someone else's currency can be misleading. By the same metric you used, Eurozone economy grew by ~100% between 2002 and 2008.
Economically the EU might not keep pace, but the built infrastructure to live an enjoyable life is there.
I certainly had a delightful time visiting the winter markets across Europe, and it seemed like there were a fair number of people living well.
While the Eurozone might not be a great place to start a new business it is still a going concern, enough that those top 50 companies all have a European presence.
What's frightening to me is that even in the EU people seem to think that unchecked consolidation of services is a good thing. I don't think it is a good thing at all that there exist companies with a budget larger than an average country.
>There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one.
And this is a good thing. All 50 of them should be broken up anyway.
>I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening
I'm in the EU and I love it. It's not perfect, but I wouldn't want to live in any other place. And in the coming fight for digital freedom EU is almost always on the right side.
The problem with these efforts is always the same: organizations make their own messenger, and the fact that these organizations then have control over their own messenger ... means their employees won't use it. And that's ignoring that you can bet your firstborn they cut corners developing these messengers, so they're not pleasant to use to boot. In 2026 you still hear complaints of government employees that they only have 200 mb of mailbox space ... sigh
People "don't trust" in the very abstract sense, Mark Zuckerberg. But in a very real sense they don't trust their manager at all, and they know their own manager can see their messages on the "sovereign" messenger. Zuckerberg wants to sell them stuff they don't want on occasion. Their manager ... well they're cheating their manager.
Oh and it doesn't even buy extra security: the platform owners can spy directly through hardware backdoors, they can "update" any app on the phone, and they have the root keys to the secure element, and so it isn't secure to them. And if you look under the covers ... the backend is on AWS? No? Must be on Azure then.
So annoying lots of people, reducing functionality, for no actual security.
Sure sounds like EU governments are behind this ...
> “Everyone in Europe is getting more and more awake on sovereignty ... For us it’s data sovereignty.”
If Julian Assange wasn't the wakeup call necessary to put this into action then I don't think the whims of a few government ministers amount to a hill of beans.
European civil servants are also usually banned from using AI — perhaps with the exception of Microsoft copilot. They live in a bubble where they just don’t know. This goes for most academics as well.
Europe has been irrelevant since 2008. Basically 0 growth and pensions larger than paychecks. Even if young Europeans had the skills or the desire, which they don't, they wouldn't have the capital.
The US is preparing to siphon most of the EUs wealth with this AI bubble. This title is just one in a long line of smoke and mirrors meant to distract Europeans from the fact that trillions are being spent to build datacenters in the US.
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Sure, that is fair enough. But why is EU not setting up their own servers for whisper or activity pub or whatever OSS protocols and just make that their only official and approved communication channel?
https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/public/local
For example the French government has its own Matrix platform https://www.tchap.gouv.fr/ and its own Mastodon instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/.
I've seen this play out a few times in Europe. People are extremely resistant to giving up WhatsApp. These rules are so widely flouted that no one takes them seriously, including the people making the rules. It is a bit of theater, meanwhile everyone continues to use WhatsApp. There is no will to actually make this change.
If your boss keeps sending you messages over WhatsApp, why would you do any different?
Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...
The global usage is nuts. All of my Indian friends live on WhatsApp even if they are iPhone users. When I was in Portugal and Spain recently it’s literally the way businesses work.
Plus, you’re out of your mind for putting Teams on a personal device.
Most biz dont have the kind of money to hand over to Goog workspace or M$. therefore, you get what its free, and thats WA biz
For work related stuff we use teams and that it's kinda needed too because we can only link to internal resources there, like SharePoint.
Where my wife works they simply have a WhatsApp group because there _is_ no messenger, and while they don't use it for work stuff, they couldn't even have anything but group emails for discussing lunch plans or reaching someone who is not present at the office without calling (and in the case of reaching someone, they don't have access to anything on personal devices and they 90% have no work phones).
That they publicly use it at all is great though, as it likely helps shift the Overton window of what's normal, and what fits standard useage of Matrix-Synapse
Matrix shows me as active (green dot) when I have the client open but there's no way to override that. At least none that I found. I'm a bit surprised all these big governmental clients didn't ask for such a feature :)
But sorry that they are not contributing. That's pretty bad tbh.
This is the Mastodon server of the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI). Embrace decentralization.
Too bad the UX is dogshit and the end users lose their keys every 90 days. Even though they're explicitly warned, loudly and clearly, to not lose the keys.
Matrix software stack isn't idiot proof; Signal is.
But yeah it would be nice if the key could be escrowed somewhere for big organisations.
> Good. The US is gone.
Yeah. But then the EU lost the plot a very long time ago. There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one. It's ASML.
From 2008 to today, in USD and inflation adjusted, the eurozone saw no growth. While both the US and China skyrocketed.
There's been this little thing lately that kinda took off: it's called AI. Where's the EU? How much of a leader was the EU in this AI revolution?
Explain how the EU is not long gone?
The EU is not even sinking at this point: it sank years ago. And it's busy making sure it's turning into the third-world.
I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening.
Billions of people exist in the EU. In real terms it has not gone anywhere.
Obsession with preserving political dogma, rhetorical forms, atheist appearing syntax and semantics (language that does invoke specific concepts of theology); political and economic abstraction that do not represent reality is not much different from religion.
By your measure every nation effectively died out centuries ago as some originating principles died with their originators of those principles. Yet here we are still discussing France and Russia and the US as real things. They only ever existed as ethno objects to begin with; things that only exist if we talk about them as existing.
So what if some rhetorical specifics that used to define the economic and political foundations of the EU mutate. That's immutable reality for you. It's bound to happen due to generational churn.
People who live there can still use the term EU to define whatever political structure and economic model they land on next.
Measuring economic growth in someone else's currency can be misleading. By the same metric you used, Eurozone economy grew by ~100% between 2002 and 2008.
I certainly had a delightful time visiting the winter markets across Europe, and it seemed like there were a fair number of people living well.
While the Eurozone might not be a great place to start a new business it is still a going concern, enough that those top 50 companies all have a European presence.
>There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one.
And this is a good thing. All 50 of them should be broken up anyway.
>I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening
I'm in the EU and I love it. It's not perfect, but I wouldn't want to live in any other place. And in the coming fight for digital freedom EU is almost always on the right side.
People "don't trust" in the very abstract sense, Mark Zuckerberg. But in a very real sense they don't trust their manager at all, and they know their own manager can see their messages on the "sovereign" messenger. Zuckerberg wants to sell them stuff they don't want on occasion. Their manager ... well they're cheating their manager.
Oh and it doesn't even buy extra security: the platform owners can spy directly through hardware backdoors, they can "update" any app on the phone, and they have the root keys to the secure element, and so it isn't secure to them. And if you look under the covers ... the backend is on AWS? No? Must be on Azure then.
So annoying lots of people, reducing functionality, for no actual security.
Sure sounds like EU governments are behind this ...
> “Everyone in Europe is getting more and more awake on sovereignty ... For us it’s data sovereignty.”
If Julian Assange wasn't the wakeup call necessary to put this into action then I don't think the whims of a few government ministers amount to a hill of beans.
Good luck.
The US is preparing to siphon most of the EUs wealth with this AI bubble. This title is just one in a long line of smoke and mirrors meant to distract Europeans from the fact that trillions are being spent to build datacenters in the US.