The Commission provides information to the public via various commercial, closed-source and centralised social media and content hosting platforms which are not based in the EU and are accessible only to users who agree to legally and ethically controversial practices. Thus far, it has not provided information to citizens via federated (i.e. interconnected) platforms that support open-source social networking protocols such as ActivityPub (e.g. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Diaspora, Friendica, Peertube). These federated platforms (also known as the Fediverse) currently have 4 million users and counting, which is a non-negligable number of people to be potentially reached out to. Their development has been co-funded by the EU.

1. Which EU policy objectives (such as IT security, resilience, EU technological sovereignty and/or autonomy, interoperability, competition and user choice) is the use of open-source interconnected social and publishing platforms by public authorities consistent with?

2. Is the Commission looking into disseminating its messages also via open-source interconnected social networking and publishing platforms, at least by means of cross-posting and/or mirroring the content produced for existing channels?

3. Has the Commission looked into setting up its own equivalents of such services?