So what happens now?

I couldn't talk about this until I was no longer with my former employer, but I now am able to announce what I'm going to do next:

Like many of us, I've been concerned for some time that social media has been sliding toward becoming a collection of unwelcoming, even tangibly dangerous, hellsites. As the Trump administration has pushed these companies to capitulate to his regime, we've seen both internal changes with them being forced to abandon internal DEI programmes, as well as adopting trust and safety policies that accommodate (or are at least less unfriendly to) fascist hate speech.

This is disenfranchising a substantial proportion of the population, making it less and less safe for them to participate in public life. In extremis, if Project 2025 is fully deployed, many minorites, including but certainly not limited to queer and trans people, will be pushed entirely off the internet, and likely much worse. This also makes many allies extremely uncomfortable – no decent person likes to support fascism even tangentially, but many people, myself included, depend on social media for much of their social contact.

It's not good enough to pick platforms that are less fascist. We all know which platforms are the worst offenders, I need not repeat them here, but the 'better' platforms many of us drift toward are still basically run by the same cohort of billionaire and billionaire-adjacent people, and are located and controlled in the US.

We need and deserve something better than this.

I'm going to build it.

My vision for Euravox is that it will be a fully-featured social network platform, at least as capable as any legacy platform, so nobody will feel that they are missing something by moving to it. It will support posts and chat in a way that will be familiar to Facebook users, but with richer support for things like typography and inline images. It will (eventually) support other media types too, including music, podcasts, ebooks, audiobooks and of course video.

I also want to enable it to support a creator economy, with a large proportion of income redistributed fairly to creators. There will be three kinds of account: free accounts that are ad-supported, low cost ad-free paid accounts, and (still pretty low cost) creator accounts whose content is monetized. Anyone will be able to sign up for any account tier – I won't make people jump through ridiculous hoops in order to become a creator

The need to carry advertising is not something I can avoid. For the system to be self-funding, in order to have a user tier that is free at the point of use, ads are the only way to do this. When free tier users consume content, I need to be able to pay the creators, and that money has to come from somewhere. Most of it will in fact go to the creators, with the rest supporting the platform infrastructure, salaries, etc.

Trust and safety will be central to the platform. Hate speech will absolutely not be tolerated. Though membership will be open to anyone, the focus is on people who have been displaced from legacy platforms, so this will be reflected in the trust and safety policies and terms of use. To be clear: Euravox will not tolerate transphobia, homophobia, racism, fascism or any other similar abuse. This is not negotiable and is an immutable founding principle.

As hinted by the name, the company will be European, with our main operations in Europe. I see European privacy legislation as a selling point, not a threat to our business model. Our users will own their own data and are free to download and/or delete it at any time. Users will need to grant the bare minimum of (non-exclusive) rights in order to enable the platform to legally operate, and no more. They will own and retain their copyright.

My intention is to primarily use hardware directly owned by the company and to run it in multiple, geographically distributed, colocation datacenters. This is the most cost-effective way to scale the service, and dramatically cheaper than, for example, deploying on AWS or Google Cloud. It also keeps our technology owned by us from the bare metal upwards, which is very important for data sovreignty – I can't trust cloud provider(s) not to hand over our user data to bad actors.

Currently the business is just me. Bluntly speaking, I'll be coding my ass off for a while getting this thing running. I'm hoping to have a closed alpha by roughly the end of the year, and a more open beta in the early new year, followed by a (minimum viable product) public rollout probably toward the end of Q1 2026.

Once there is revenue, I'll be looking to hire. You'll hear about it when I do, so there's no need to bug me about it just yet. It's a bit unclear exactly how and where I'll hire people, though where legally feasible, I'll help people move from dangerous locations to Europe. I'd like to keep most roles fully remote, but I'll probably need at least something somewhere, probably in mainland Europe, in order to stage hardware before moving it out to DCs. I'm not sure where the DCs will be yet, but very likely Germany, Spain and one of the Nordic countries (TBD).

I've started a very basic corp website at corp.euravox.eu – there's a bit more there, with more details about the membership tiers, etc., as well as a manifesto that makes the motivation behind doing this stuff clearer. Note that the sign-up button is disabled right now, there being nothing to sign up to just yet!

I'm not looking for business partners or investors at this time. I am not willing to dilute control over the business, because I see retaining that as absolutely vital in order to be able to deliver this to the people who need it the most. I've done some careful numbers, and it should be self-supporting fairly quickly. For this same reason, Euravox will be a company, not a nonprofit, because the latter would potentially be an attack vector for someone powerful enough who wanted to weaken our user protections.

The fash will hate this, and IDGAF. It's not for them. They literally have the whole rest of the internet to spew their bile. I want somewhere that the rest of us can be safe. I want to found the kind of community that existed back in the early LiveJournal days, before algorithms driven by rage bait destroyed everything.

I should probably talk a bit about The Algorithm. I am well aware that many seasoned social media users, particularly those of us who started in the LiveJournal world, Usenet and even BBSes, really appreciate a time ordered view of posts by people we care about. We're going to have that as a fully supported thing. We'll also have a discovery algorithm that can show you posts about things you commonly interact with, but this will be tuned specifically for that, not for user retention (this is what causes the rage bait on other platforms, and I just am not interested in that toxicity). I want people to use Euravox because it's a nice place to be, with nice people, not because they have been deliberately addicted to it by an algorithm that manipulates them into feeling constant fear, hooking them on dopamine.

I also want to make Euravox a really good platform technically, which is why I want to support other media types like books, podcasts and audiobooks, things that have been entirely overlooked by legacy social media. And music, of course, is close to my heart because, being a musician myself, I am disgusted by the way that current internet streaming services pay almost nothing to creators. They will get a far better, fairer and more transparent deal on my platform, meaning both more money and a way to interact with fans that is completely missing from legacy streaming.

Realistically, Euravox is not going to replace legacy social media, but if we can even take an appreciable fraction of their users, the project will be very successful. In order to compete with us effectively, legacy social media will be forced to shift its Overton window to the left – something that's currently implausible given their alignment with the Trump administration. So we'll just take our chunk of the market, and make a better world for ourselves in the process.

Getting the thing to scale, and do so quickly, will be the biggest challenge. I have a plan for that. I'm not going to talk about it much, because for most people it's technical TMI, but I may post about it at a later date. Needless to say, this isn't going to be a LAMP stack. I know what works, and what doesn't, when scaling systems to enormous size, so I'm going to build this the right shape from the outset.

I'll post updates as I'm getting closer to the alpha and then beta releases. I'm also very keen to hear from anyone who has strong feelings about how they would like social media to work – obviously I can't make any promises to implement anything specific, but I don't want to take decisions in a vacuum either.

Some of you probably think I'm completely freaking insane trying to build something like this, essentially solo. You'd have a point! I definitely have WTF am I doing moments. However, I have all the technical knowledge and experience I need, and I'm certainly sufficiently determined. This is also far from being my first startup. I am intending to retain control as CEO, and if anyone suggests that I should hand that over to some 'more experienced' dude they will lose a testicle.

This project is going to happen.

Many people reading this will probably be wondering what they can do to help. I'm not looking to do a kickstarter/gofundme or anything like that. All I really ask is that, once the time comes, create an account and (hopefully!) enjoy helping each other create the community we all deserve. 😸