In Europe, calls for a European social network are growing louder. Recently, 75 well-known organizations from civil society, churches, trade unions, and open source technology developers (here is a complete list of all participating organizations: https://www.germanwatch.org/de/93066 ) addressed an open letter to the parties negotiating for a government in Germany, calling for a counterweight to the opaque social networks of Big Tech corporations in the US and China.
But other European countries are also increasingly demanding online platforms that are independent of corporations and that comply with European citizens' rights in the digital space.
With the UNA CMS Framework, we have exactly the right technology to fully meet the EU's legal requirements for transparent digital online media and platforms, such as the Digital Service Act, Digital Markets Act, AI Act, and GDPR. Big Tech media corporations, with their advertising-based business model, are clearly struggling here.
So, will new, small online media operators in Europe be able to displace the large social network operators? That depends...
Users are certainly annoyed by the constant irrelevant information in their feeds because the algorithm is constantly trying to improve the statistics for advertisers. However, the connection to the social media platform, based on the hope of finding relevant information about their own interests or about their friends and contacts in the same network, seems to prevail.
It therefore takes considerable persuasion to bring users from the large digital media platforms to a new, unknown platform. But I remember this video by Andrey Yasko from UNA announcing NEO, in which he characterizes various Big Tech networks with a wink and also provides the crucial information on how this can be achieved: The user must immediately understand why it makes sense to participate in a new social network. My theory goes even further. I think that once users understand that it's more meaningful and useful for them personally to participate in a new social media platform, they'll also become a multiplier for that platform, as they'll suddenly, of their own volition, try to bring their friends and contacts onto the same platform. The UNA Framework provides us with all the necessary modules and functions. As social network operators, we have to take care of the unique selling proposition and the added value for our users ourselves.
We have high hopes for the new NEO by UNA. In my opinion, a social network or media platform without an optimized, native app doesn't have a chance, even remotely, of being seen by users as an equivalent replacement for the major social networks.
Back to my headline - will we miss the opportunity?
Well, in the world of large, commercial online media platforms, there's a rule: time is money. If you don't get to market quickly enough with an innovation, you've lost because others will push you out of the market with their innovations. But what if you don't participate in the market at all?
We decided very early on not to participate in the social networking market. Therefore, we operate our social community platform not as a company but as a non-profit association. For this reason, our community platform is naturally completely unattractive to venture capitalists and external investors. On the other hand, by using open source technology and eliminating the need for constant algorithm optimization and the high costs of an expensive advertising engine, we can finance our platform independently through annual membership fees. Another advantage: Our users aren't just customers. As association members, they are co-owners of our social community platform. And we treat them as such. They are actively involved in all decisions – thanks to UNA's Polls module. But our vision for the future goes even further. We want to turn co-owners into co-creators. Design, modules, content, moderation, technology. Thanks to open source and the UNA framework, we can essentially put everything in the hands of our users, co-owners and co-creators. As the association's board, we are then primarily responsible for coordinating and overseeing the projects of our co-creators. Thus, users not only determine what benefits the platform should provide, they even will help implement them.
Our decision, as a non-profit organization operating a social community platform, not to follow the same business model as the major social networks offers us an additional advantage: time is not money.
Essentially, the offer of information in exchange for personal user data and its more or less unrestricted use to maximize profits by large corporations is countered by the offer of direct user participation in a social network that is not profit-oriented and respects users' rights regarding their personal data.
I apologize for the length of my post. But I would be very interested to hear your views on this.
Is there a chance to break the dominance of the major social networks by providing added value for users? What is the situation in your countries regarding personal data protection?
Did anybody successfully integrate the Perspective API and can lend me a hand on what I'm missing? I generated successfully an API key and filled it into the respective field in Studio settings. In google console there seems to be an activity when testing toxic, but it doesn't seem to integrate with the frontend. What's the trick?
Can anybody confirm the same behavior on 14-RC3? Please see screenshot. I tried it with Protean as well as with Artificer in Chrome. Results in the same js error in console.
Hi @LeonidS ,
maybe you can try that on the devs system as well. Here in the forum, the "Unresolved" filter in status doesn't seem to work. Tried it in combination with the "Partaken" list filter.
I just asked AQB Soft for a solution of a problem that comes up quite frequently when I set up my copy of the UNA framework. So, I thought I gonna address this to the whole community, since I suppose that there will be others who experience the same challenge as me regularely, when working with associations (or different types of membership organizations).
My case is, that my community consists of associations that I can service very well with the mods and fuctions the UNA framework offers. They can build special interrest groups, events, publish their docs, journals and congress reports, etc. That's the part I really appreciate.
But, on the other hand, the only thing that they can't do is to tell members from non-members. Let me explain in detail.
If there's a congress of a bigger association, it will invite their member organizations at no additional attendence fee, because attendence fees are already covered in their own yearly membership fee. Non-members should also have the option to attend, but they will have to pay for their attendence. This rather common use case for associations organizing events cannot be depicted in UNA events (and other paid content) mod, because when creating a new event, it's either every member has to pay (paid event) or nobody has to pay for it (default event).
Since I think, that associations are a perfect target group for the UNA community builder framework, I'd suggest that such a use case should get more consideration in the module development of UNA.
If I set permissions for the Wiki mod, the rules seem to be ignored in the frontend. Can anybody confirm this?
Dear @LeonidS ,
Counters for connections are still not accurate. My guess is, that the count includes depreciated connections. Here as an example, the counter shows 25 following connections, whereas the showcase view displays only 5.
