Financial Times, 2 January 2026
Some quotes below:
Europe is so far behind the US in digital infrastructure it has “lost the internet”, a top European cyber enforcer has warned.
Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), told the Financial Times that it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure.
“We’ve lost the whole cloud. We have lost the internet, let’s be honest,” De Bruycker said. “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”
The Belgian official warned that Europe’s cyber defences depended on the co-operation of private companies, most of which are American. “In cyber space, everything is commercial. Everything is privately owned,” he said.
[…]
Europe needed to build its own capabilities to strengthen innovation and security, said De Bruycker, adding that legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, which regulates the development of the fast-developing technology, was “blocking” innovation.
He suggested that EU governments should support private initiatives to build scale in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies.
It could be similar to when European countries jointly set up the planemaker Airbus, he said: “Everybody was supporting the Airbus initiatives decades ago. We need the same initiative on [an] EU level in the cyber domain.”
Europe is the center of open source. The experts are here, the problem is the legislation preventing them from taking the internet back. Allow nerds to reverse engineer the shit out of US products and you will be rid of their shitty lock-in services in just a few years.
Lemmy doesn’t take over the Reddit space. The lock-in comes from network effects that cannot be overcome easily. Legislation is just an additional hurdle, as is funding. There is not a bunch of magical nerds waiting for the law to change so that they can bring liberty to Europe for free.
That is mainly a legal problem.
EG you could have a combined Reddit/Lemmy client that fetches messages from both. You create a Lemmy community that complements a Reddit community. The client fetches posts/comments from both and combines them in your interface.
That’s illegal even in the US (case law). In the EU it’s hyper-illegal because you go up against copyright, database rights, and GDPR.
The EU has actually picked up on the importance of interoperability and mandates it in the DSA, but I have no idea how that is supposed to work, given all the other regulations.
The client can’t just fetch them from both but has to publish them on both.
Reddit offers a paid API so it should already be possible.
The price is an issue but I doubt that a competitor can be established like that. It would essentially be another Reddit client.
You don’t need an API. The law says that you need permission.
Another technological possibility is to scrape a subreddit to migrate the discussions to EG Lemmy. That might actually be legal in the US but certainly not in Europe.
There are other Reddit clients so the permission exists.
Maybe take a look at that link I posted above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventures,_Inc.
I did. They copied Facebook without permissions. The alternative Reddit clients have them so it is not the same.
That’s not quite what the judgment was about. Anyway, I don’t understand what point you are trying to make.
Scraping doesn’t solve the network effect issue. Having a ghost town where all the ghosts are mimicking a real town doesn’t give you a real town. You actually need people to come over and join the community.
True. It only makes migration easier, but that’s still something.
Does it make migration easier? I don’t think it does. I think it makes migration harder.
If I switch to Lemmy and join my favourite migrated community (all posts and comments scraped and reposted from my favourite subreddit) and then I try to reply to those messages on Lemmy, nobody is there to reply to me! It’s a ghost town where I’m the only one who’s not a ghost! That sucks, so I leave.
I was thinking about a scenario where the moderators, or some part of the community, decide to migrate. I should have clarified that.
Cory Doctorow has been screaming about this anti circumvention law stuff for years now but the powers that be dont seem to want a solution.
Yes. The problem is that those are very American solutions. In Europe these ideas are just unacceptable. European values, fundamental values, and all that.
I was about to mention Cory Doctorow. He has been a force for years. For everyone new to him: His talk at 39c3 some days ago was awesome!
Yes, but I would like to see a visual editor. Now a bold is shown as a double asterisk. A link is a mixture of square and round brackets. You can click on Preview, but to edit it, you have to leave it again.
Have you checked the various frontends? If none has it you could start something like a kickstarter campaign to finance it.
The lack of visual editor arises with the web version on lemmy.world and with the Mlem app. I have not checked anything else. (And I don’t see it as my role to start a kickstarter campaign).
The nerds prefer markup. If you want it and you can’t code, why not use the skills that you have to get it?
I hope that is sarcastic remark. 🙄
Are you a lemmy developer?
No, my background is in user experience. Hence my comment on the interface design.