The harsh truth: most people don’t care about decentralisation, protocols or who owns the server. They care whether their friends, memes and creators are there. Don’t sell them the Fediverse as digital vegetables.

Find them a great app, help them follow 20 interesting accounts, and make it fun. Network effects beat ideology every time.

I’d start with Loops.video: TikTok already proved that vertical short videos are basically social media crack, so don’t ask your friends to suddenly become Mastodon power users reading federation essays.

Give them a familiar format without the TikTok ecosystem: Fediverse adoption probably needs to feel boringly familiar before anyone cares that it’s decentralised.

That reminds me that I really must finally mention this on: Fedizen.EU

Europe spent decades outsourcing its digital infrastructure to US companies because it was cheap and convenient. Now everyone is shocked to discover that dependence creates leverage. A US tech kill switch doesn’t even need to be used: the possibility alone is reason enough for Europe to build its own stack.

Absolutely. Europe doesn’t lack ideas or founders: it lacks one deep, liquid capital market. A real Capital Markets Union could let European savings fund European scaleups instead of watching them head to New York for serious growth capital.

Germany quietly setting startup records while everyone keeps insisting Europe can’t innovate is pretty funny. The real test comes next though: founding 3,000 companies is great, but if the successful ones still need to move to the US to raise serious growth capital, Germany has only solved half the problem.

It’s easy to underestimate how different these facilities are: Traditional data centres are built to run millions of separate workloads efficiently. AI data centres are engineered to make tens of thousands of GPUs act like one giant supercomputer. The building may look similar, but the power, cooling, networking and economics are almost an entirely different industry.

This is a significant step for Europe’s AI ambitions. Access to large scale compute has become one of the biggest barriers to building competitive AI models. If executed well, these gigafactories could give European startups, researchers, and companies the infrastructure they need to innovate at home instead of relying almost entirely on US or Chinese providers.

This is why media ownership matters: When the people deciding what gets amplified are also celebrating political power brokers, it becomes harder to separate journalism from influence. Even if Politico’s newsroom stays independent, the optics alone are enough to make readers question where the lines really are.