Europe's social media path dilemma

Article brough to you by LeafPlaza : the sovereign European social platform built entirely on European infrastructure, owned and operated in the EU.

Why it matters

The Commission's recent workshop on the future of social networks shows that Brussels sees social media as infrastructure, not just apps. It matters because the the platforms people use to talk, publish, and organize shape who holds the power online.

It is also about autonomy. If the social layer is controlled by a handful of non-EU companies, Europe can regulate the outcomes, often after the fact, but not the architecture.

The protocol debate

Two models are at the centre of the conversation.

The Fediverse is built on federation: many services, many communities, shared standards. It favours local governance, community moderation, and independence from one central owner. The biggest name is Mastodon.

The AT Protocol is a more modular approach. It is about portability, identity, and composability. It makes it easier to move between services and build new products without rebuilding the whole social graph. The biggest name is Bluesky.

Trade-offs are straightforward: the Fediverse is stronger on community control, while AT Protocol is stronger on product flexibility and user mobility.

We would argue here these protocols should not compete. Instead, they should be empowered in their own use cases. Additionally, we should aim to make them work in a complementary way whenever is relevant.

The Silicon Valley risk

The biggest mistake the EU could make is to reuse Silicon Valley's old playbook. That is to build one giant platform, chase engagement, centralize power, and call it innovation. That approach weakens user choices and also ties moderation and algorithm to opaque incentives.

Also, it just shifts dependency from US private platforms to EU private platforms. European policy will continue reacting to systems it does not control.

Where W Social fits

W Social is an interesting example. It shows the appeal of a European alternative to X. It is pitched around trust, verification, privacy, and European hosting. These are themes that resonate in a sovereignty conversation.

However, there is also a red flag. An EU-clone of a Silicon Valley managed with the same old California principles is not the same as a sovereign social stack. Ownership matters, but the architecture and transparency matters more (in ownership too, but also in legal, and in technical matters).

What Europe should build

The better path is a social ecosystem, not a single social app. That means:

open protocols

interoperability

portable identity and data

multiple competing services

better moderation and discovery tooling

That's a stack that Europe could call an asset in sovereignty

The bottom line

It is not about beating Silicon Valley at the game they perfected. It is about Europe building an open, resilient, and independent social layer. The goal is to remove dependency from individual platforms. That's real autonomy.