Verified identities, trusted news, sovereign infrastructure – and virtual cats. Meet the startups building European values into social media.
“Social media infrastructure is overwhelmingly built around American business models, American technology and American assumptions,” says Juha Palotie, co-founder of ThisCussion, a social platform aiming “to do Facebook the way it should be”. Many of the startups pitching at Rebuild2 were focused on how Europe can build its own values into new social platforms.
ThisCussion, for example, has the look and feel of Facebook 20 years ago, Palotie says, but already has guardrails against bot-enhanced hate and misinformation. “With verified identity, we tackle the problem that there’s a whole lot of content out there, but there’s very little accountability,” he says. On most platforms, users can be anonymous, have multiple accounts or, in many cases, aren’t even human. On ThisCussion, you need to verify your identity – currently, with a bank card – to progress on the platform.
“You can still express controversial opinions, and you should,” Palotie continues. “But you can’t manufacture an army of fake identities to make those opinions appear more popular than they actually are.” This, he says, is a more European way forward.
“We’re not trying to build a slightly nicer Facebook, we’re asking a much more basic question: Does social media really have to work this way at all? Or could it be something more meaningful?”
“You can still express controversial opinions, and you should. But you can’t manufacture an army of fake identities to make those opinions appear more popular than they actually are.”
Juha Palotie
Freemind, another young social networking alternative, poses a similar question. The app, founded out of Berlin, is a moderation-less space for people with opposing views to talk with each other. “We have plenty of spaces where we can meet people with the same view,” says founder Iwan Ittermann, who’s hoping to build a social platform that brings people together rather than siloing them into algorithmic bubbles.
“It’s not built to foster consensus, but to form understanding,” says Ittermann. It’s still in the very early stages, but a test with 30 users saw a 50% retention rate and a significant reduction in polarisation. Users are encouraged to be respectful by a scoring system; if other users – especially those with opinions different from your own – give you a positive review, the built-in algorithm boosts your rating upwards, jettisoning your profile closer to the centre of the platform’s dynamic opinion graph. Ittermann hasn’t yet figured out what benefits come from being the most respectful members, but it could be anything from attention to crypto.
Lide.cz, the word for “people” in Czech, is a social platform for trusted news. “We’re basically something like X, but done right,” say founders Peter Jančárik and Pavel Bouška. “We combined 70 publishers, including us, and aggregated all the comment sections into a social platform.” Lide restructures the power dynamics of X, giving publishers back some control, and already has 2 million monthly users. Also opposite to dominant US social channels, Lide is focused on countering misinformation. The startup partners with three universities to provide balanced fact-checking.
“It’s not built to foster consensus, but to form understanding.”
Iwan Ittermann
Eurosky’s first app, Mu, has also reimagined social media in publishers’ favour. The Eurosky-owned website launched in June 2026 and within two months reached 200,000 active monthly users entirely organically. “We have the largest hyperblogging app in Europe by a factor of 100 compared to the second one, and we didn’t even plan for that,” says Robin Berjon. “We were just experimenting.” Another accidental success was the virtual pet cats you can add to your account. Users pick from a variety of cats, and their chosen feline then strolls around the screen, sometimes it purrs, sometimes it sleeps, sometimes it meows. Why? Eurosky co-founder Sherif Elsayed-Al says: “Socials should be fun!”
The site is run on the AT Protocol, like Bluesky, and has built-in “newsrooms”, spaces where all the communication from specific outlets can be consumed at once (from articles to journalists’ social posts, based on an RSS feed). “This is the very beginning,” says Elsayed-Al. “Coming next will be curation, users will be able to curate the content, videos, podcasts, whatever.”
“Socials should be fun!”
Sherif Elsayed-Al
Not all publishers are fans of Mu, however, the founders tell us excitedly. Their company has received a lot of hate from US right-wing news outlets. “Just this morning there was a brilliant article,” says Berjon, about how Mu is built by bad people trying to bring back the Iron Curtain. “And I’m like ‘guys, that’s so nice’; we’re psyched.”
“Almost everything we build runs on American infrastructure, even when it says EU region.”
Pedro Pamplona Henrique
Another platform fighting against the dominance of American ideals on social platforms is Olaia, but it’s doing it with infrastructure. Trump’s CLOUD Act gives US law enforcement the ability to access digital data held by American tech companies no matter where that data is stored in the world, so EU data centres are not exempt and neither are EU citizens. As Microsoft’s Anton Carniaux told the French Senate – when asked if he could confirm that French people’s data, stored in EU data centres, wouldn’t be handed to US authorities without French consent – “I can’t guarantee it.”
“Almost everything we build runs on American infrastructure, even when it says EU region,” says Pedro Pamplona Henrique, Olaia’s Lisbon-based founder. “And that’s not really okay, so we want to change that.” Olaia, using rented equipment from various suppliers, allows companies to task an AI agent to take their web services from America to Europe. “The infrastructure has been there for a long time, so we’re building on top of it,” he says. “It’s fully European, sovereign.”