Financial Times, 2 January 2026
Some quotes below:
Europe is so far behind the US in digital infrastructure it has “lost the internet”, a top European cyber enforcer has warned.
Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), told the Financial Times that it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure.
“We’ve lost the whole cloud. We have lost the internet, let’s be honest,” De Bruycker said. “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”
The Belgian official warned that Europe’s cyber defences depended on the co-operation of private companies, most of which are American. “In cyber space, everything is commercial. Everything is privately owned,” he said.
[…]
Europe needed to build its own capabilities to strengthen innovation and security, said De Bruycker, adding that legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, which regulates the development of the fast-developing technology, was “blocking” innovation.
He suggested that EU governments should support private initiatives to build scale in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies.
It could be similar to when European countries jointly set up the planemaker Airbus, he said: “Everybody was supporting the Airbus initiatives decades ago. We need the same initiative on [an] EU level in the cyber domain.”
You could start with going through all the comments on various forums (not just Lemmy) where people have written about user experience (UX) problems and place those issues in a quadrant (easy or difficult to implement vs major or minor impact on the UX). The immediate priority is of course those that are easy to implement with major impact on the UX, meanwhile also picking up some of those with lesser impact on the UX. In a second step you select two-three issues that are major but more difficult to implement. I noted today an article in The Guardian on how Reddit is strongly growing in the UK. So there is a sense of urgency.
You don’t seem to understand the open source developer user experience. If it is not a job, developers implement what they need.
If others want other features they either have to pay for it or motivate the developers who do it for free.
So the lemmy environment needs somebody who creates a user experience that facilitates others to do that.
Since Lemmy is a volunteer community-driven initiative, I would start with creating a community called “Lemmy user experience” (or Lemmy UX, Lemmy User Interface or Lemmy UI, it doesn’t matter) and start collecting community suggestions. Possibly also encouraging others who have written about that topic on Lemmy or other forums to contribute. That way you start creating evidence for developers that help them prioritise their efforts.
That could help but the developer user experience is that they prioritize their needs. Gimp is what developers want while Photoshop is what designers want.
There is a rift.
So it is a hopeless case?
There is always hope. Maybe a user experience designer comes up with something.