Last week, the Modal Foundation coordinated the publication of Freedom of movement in digital Europe, a position paper on improving consumer protection against social media monopolies and growing user choice. It highlights that as long as switching platforms means starting over, European consumers have no real freedom of movement online, and this lock-in puts them in harm’s way.
Over 85 builders and organisations across Europe have signed it, alongside many professionals and citizens. Our central ask is for the EU to require every platform to facilitate the transfer of identity, content, and social networks to other services, in forms that are actually usable by consumers.
We propose to accomplish this by mandating that platforms hold their users’ data, connections and interactions in personal data servers built to one common standard, as part of the Digital Fairness Act. The AT Protocol’s PDS is the starting point, as it already allows people to switch apps without losing their networks. We also ask for a ban on practices that stop people finding each other elsewhere, and for the Digital Markets Act’s portability rules to be fully enforced.
We see these asks as a step towards a social web where your identity, data and connections belong to you, whichever apps you use.
The problem we’re trying to solve
Platforms offer data exports, but getting one is a slow, multi-step process, and the file you end up with from Meta, X, or LinkedIn contains your connections and content in a format that makes it difficult to upload elsewhere. In theory, you could rebuild your network, but it would need all your contacts to set up new accounts and track down their own connections one by one. In practice, it’s virtually impossible. While exports exist on paper, they do nothing to break consumer lock-in.
What a personal data server does
A personal data server, or PDS, is a permanent location for your account: your posts, who you follow and who follows you. A PDS works on a different mental model: your data stay in one place, and apps read that data, combine it with data from others to create social spaces, and present it to you on their surfaces. You can set up your own, or get a virtual one from a provider, such as the one we set up at Eurosky. Apps read from it and write to it with your permission. When your account is kept separate from the apps you use, you can switch apps or use several at once without starting from zero.
If all platforms stored accounts this way, to a shared standard, leaving would no longer mean losing your network. Apps, feeds and moderation services could all be built on top, and they would compete on how well they treat you, because holding all your data would no longer give any of them an advantage.
Why AT Protocol is the starting point
Policymakers need something concrete to point to, so we recommended a model that already works at scale. AT Protocol already allows you to move your account, your social network, and your content to new platforms. It already runs at scale across a wide range of apps, and Eurosky runs a PDS on it, hosted in Europe under European law.
Choosing AT Protocol as a starting point doesn’t mean choosing between protocols. Accounts held in a PDS can be bridged to ActivityPub. Bridging the other way doesn’t let people move their accounts to new hosts, which is why we started with AT Protocol.
The open social web is an ecosystem constructed atop several protocols. It includes both people building on ActivityPub and people building on AT Protocol, as well as others such as Matrix. These specifications may have different origins, but they share a goal: social media that people control. They also share a problem: a handful of platforms that make leaving too costly.
Starting now, building together
Policy runs on its own timetable. The Commission published its Digital Fairness Act proposal on 11 November, and decisions about how social media works in Europe are being shaped now. If we wait until every builder agrees on every technical detail, the Commission will make these decisions without us.
That’s why the paper’s main ask is one structural change, with a concrete starting point. How the interoperability standard develops is still open. We want builders working on a range of protocols to help shape it. Our priority for the next year is to advance the principle, and work out the technical details as we go.
The long view
This is long-term work. Our aim is to shape the next generation of social technologies which has been emerging over the past few years. We’re invested in approaches that lead to a range of solutions for a range of needs, while aligning on principles. This is why we’re a founding member of European.social. Building this future takes technical work, funding, and collaboration across protocols and communities. The paper is a first step.
Get involved
If you’re building on ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Matrix or elsewhere, we’d like to hear from you. We’ll share more as the work develops, including a more technical post on how the standard could work across protocols.
Read the full paper and add your name at dfom.eu. The more voices behind it, the harder it is to ignore, so please share it with your network. And if you’d like to help in other ways, from reaching policymakers to writing or recording something with us, get in touch here.