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Netherlands universities start alternative to #BigTech.
Goals are digital autonomy, safeguarding public values & a healthier digital ecosystem.
Who needs oligarchs Tr*mp, M*sk, Z*ck? Who needs BigTech imposing BigAI? Let's build our #Eurostack!
Obviously, this pilot is only one of many efforts we will need to build a #Eurostack: a European digital public infrastructure.
For a good introduction to the concept, I recommend this article:
'The Quest for European Technological Sovereignty: Building the EuroStack'
@AliceStollmeyer 
May *all* universities and institutions that claim to defend democracy join them!
@AliceStollmeyer Small steps. It would be proper, and perhaps more motivating, to call it 'digital sovereignty' rather than 'digital autonomy'. Because that is how essential initiatives like this are.
@martinvermeer @AliceStollmeyer
It's also worth pointing out that "digital autonomy" suggests a more individual initiative, like home or at most neighborhood servers, whereas a lot of what I've been hearing WRT the EU has more to do with seize control or independence on the country and/or continental scale, and trying to throw their weight around on the global scale (which is what "digital sovereignty" would imply).
@AliceStollmeyer
The internet is coming around full circle. It started with universities linking up to share info.
Maybe we'll see a collection of universities and other organisations that will become trusted sources of info. As long as the main search engines allow us to find them.
@iain_bright @AliceStollmeyer if we can get them off the algorithm controls of other platforms and onto Mastodon we have a chance of disseminating their information
@iain_bright @AliceStollmeyer
Or if we can figure out a way to have independent, not-for-profit search engines that also aren't government-controlled. Getting rid of every perverse incentive and every lever for grabbing power in search while still having a functional search engine seems like one of the big problems that needs solving... though the "how" is unfortunately way over my head.
@AliceStollmeyer Maybe og interest to you @jeppe
@tryberg @AliceStollmeyer og imens nyder vi trygheden i feudalherrernes fængslende haver.
@AliceStollmeyer I love the hashtag #Eurostack!
Here is some #EuropeanTech that could be part of the concept
@protonprivacy
#Mastodon
#DeepL
#Toggl
#IntelliJ_IDEA
@Vivaldi
#OVH
@WeAreFairphone
@murena
I wrote about them here:
https://europeanperspective.news/how-to-be-a-free-european-citizen-online/
Wide Angle 
This needs to be done right though!
We don’t need bureaucracy based privacy. We need privacy by design and information access on per need basis.
Sharing in the open what’s open. Make knowledge accessible.
But also offer strong encryption in open/exportable standards by default.
Let’s not turn Nextcloud to yet another gatekeeper.
This ought to be discussed and acted upon in the open, especially by universities.
All these tools can and need to be open source and in the regulated public domain. We need to stop the grifting and the manipulation… it is getting out of hand.
@AliceStollmeyer I really wonder about the specifics though. If they're running it on AWS or Azure it's not much use.
And of course there's maintenance, support etc.
@bert_hubert has written a pretty good piece about this:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/open-source-by-itself-is-no-alternative-for-big-tech/
@bert_hubert @AliceStollmeyer @wlaatje I say you wrote a good article:)
@maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @wlaatje ha thanks but I’m hoping @wlaatje can weigh in on the hosting :-)
@bert_hubert @AliceStollmeyer @wlaatje Ah ok, missed that:)
@maartenpelgrim @bert_hubert @AliceStollmeyer @wlaatje hosting is on our own infrastructure in datacenters in Amsterdam. And of course, SURF has been Owncloud instances for Dutch universities for data storage for ages, with the same public values in mind.
@baszoetekouw @bert_hubert @AliceStollmeyer @wlaatje Good to know!
Is there a way we can follow this project?
@maartenpelgrim @baszoetekouw @AliceStollmeyer @wlaatje They are here on Mastodon @algosoc but not posting a lot (yet).
@maartenpelgrim @baszoetekouw @bert_hubert @AliceStollmeyer
As @baszoetekouw mentioned it’s hosted on SURF owned infrastructure. We have 10+ years experience indeed with SURFdrive running on an OwnCloud-motor! Same will be the case for the NextCloud pilot. Differences (besides licenses/Kiteworks/enterprise support options) is the focus on full blown collaboration with the NextCloud suite where SURFdrive is extensively used and for storing files in a (community) cloud and sharing those files.
@maartenpelgrim @baszoetekouw @bert_hubert @AliceStollmeyer
We will share the pilot results as best we can, during use. Both the lessons, failures and victories and best practices for successful deployment.
@bert_hubert @maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @wlaatje I am also curious about this and wondering whether it will be something fully new or is related to surfdrive.nl which already exists for many years (so that it used to be own-, not nextcloud) as far as I remember.
@maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert
The press release states that " AlgoSoc and SURF will jointly organize a pilot with Nextcloud on their own infrastructure".
@jtig @AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert Oh drat, should've read the article more closely...
@maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert it was all the way at the bottom, below the images. I missed it too the first time I read it.. :)
@maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert
Perhaps governments and big businesses are the wrong market for open source to get its foot in the door.
There are a myriad small businesses, and small firms the manage their IT. These might be a better choice. They will certainly be looking to cut their costs.
@maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert
I'd say the biggest problem FOSS has when it comes to competing with Big Tech is insufficient documentation. Your article does mention training, possibly because it's more focused on the large scale, but there's the widespread small-scale perspective to consider too if Big Tech's going to be defeated on both fronts.
@maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert
It can be a problem. I set my instance up on Linode, which was a great small hosting provider specializing in Linux systems (and they still provide great service), but they were soon bought up by Akamai. 
It's better than getting bought by Amazon or Google, I suppose, but it's still worrisome. I may have to move at some point.
@bruce @maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert aye, I was also on Linode and so am now on Akamai. So far, it doesn't seem terrible.
@simon_brooke @maartenpelgrim @AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert
To Akamai's credit, they haven't yet done anything to disrupt the service, but they are a huge corporation and #enshittification may soon follow. We'll see.
@AliceStollmeyer@eupolicy.social Reading the article they're just hosting NextCloud, which is not a full cloud stack. Its a decent start, I guess, albeit a decade late or so.
That said, I'm not sure how using NextCloud is going to get rid of "BigTech" and their "BigAI", especially considering they have their own LLM integrations.
This post sounds like a very big overstatement, and anyone who would get excited by it will be promptly disappointed the moment they even read just the header of the article you linked.
As an aside, self-censoring makes you like a bit silly to say the least. Also, it makes it so people using filters annoyed, as you're intentionally trying to circumvent them.
@AliceStollmeyer be also aware that the #AI #LLM be feeded by aggressive bots which collect all data they get there hands on. Even if you don’t want it. See open.ai bots. They steal your data.
This is being actively fought against by my home Government.
( Well hello, Germany ! Welcome to election wars 25 ! )
Instead, many german counties are instead charging forward into Microsoft snares, while still blocking digitalisation at every step. Except of course if they can get our health data to market them to the highest bidder...
Still, thank you for the posting. You will be followed.
@AliceStollmeyer The problem is (at least here in Germany) that every politician talks about digital autonomy while crouching even deeper into the rectums of Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Building and even more important: maintaining an own infrastructure is much more effort than just buying the stuff from big companies.
I wish we would be spending 2% of the BIP on digital infrastructure in Europe rather than spending it on military.
@AliceStollmeyer I'd love to see this.
There is however a stumbling block Europe is going to have to find a better solution for; perhaps something that folks don't always correlate with EU tech competitiveness.
Other than salaries, the single largest opex cost for running servers is electricity.
The cost of wholesale electrical power in European markets is anywhere from 3x to 20x the price in the US & Canada, & it's gotten a lot worse recently with the (self-inflicted...) German energy crisis.
Just a quick rental example, for one bare-metal hosted GPU:
Vultr, US:
NVidia L40S is $0.85/hour/GPU
NVidia H100 is $2.30/hour/GPU
Scaleway, France:
NVidia L40S is €2.06/hour/GPU
NVidia H100 is €4.80/hour/GPU
Bulgaria, Spain, & the Nordics seem to be the lowest-cost EU electricity markets, but it's still in the neighborhood of 3x North American wholesale pricing.
EU electricity pricing is also far more volatile (whereas NA pricing is quite stable), which makes it hard to build long-term economic models & pricing plans.
cc @bert_hubert
@AliceStollmeyer @bert_hubert
This is why successful EU machine learning platforms like Mistral host as much compute as they can in North America...
@AliceStollmeyer @fritjof "eurostack" sounds like a tech stack of which one is proud that it is european. screw europe! source of colonialism, capitalism, racism and fascism. and the hypocrite union that claims to implement humanitarian values while doing illegal pushbacks with frontex.
a good response to bigai would be bottom-up-empowering radical socialist structures
This is a good first step.
Same movement and spirit in Germany:
https://digitalcourage.social/@sl007/113803699829694648
In this reply I am arguing that the important next step is that students grasp the underlying fediverse protocol as a tinker tool and join us to build new fediverse softwares best suited to power universities.
@peterfr now look at this!
Mask up @AliceStollmeyer Amazing! I love it. This sounds very similar to the work being done by the state of Schleswig-Holstein in DE, also with NextCloud and other OSS providers.
My personal view is that these approaches (autonomous, open source) should be implemented by all public bodies and authorities in EU member states.
(Here in IE, most universities are public bodies, so I include these, also.)