We're starting a sprint to rebuild European social platforms.
2025 has been a year of reflection. Celebrating the 30th anniversary from founding one of Europe's first internet companies with all the people from the journey, an old friend and I are organizing a get-together of people from the 00's in April to look forward. Lot's of conversations about Europe. Conversations across every field on how to move Europe.
From it emerged a path. That Europe was one of the birthplaces of inventing social platforms. A lot of people of my generation spent some of our best years working on it. For eventually see almost all of it consolidated into a few companies. We can easily do it again, because we've done it before.
We've reflected in Europe, now it's time to build. To rebuild what we lost. Along the way I met our patron Margrethe Vestager and we started discussing how to rebuild. From those social conversations Rebuild started emerging.
Rebuild is here because...
Social platforms are critical communications infrastructure.
They augment our human relationships at any scale from a couple, a family, a group, a housing block, an association, a city, to our society. They are about identity, what we share, reputation, presence we have, the groups we form, the conversations we have. At some point the saying became "all we got was a photosharing app", when social platforms are at the core some of the essential challenges of our time. Sharing resources, finding connections in our cities, creating connection instead of loneliness, they truly are the social fabric of our lives. It's critical as industry creating strong growth in Europe, it's critical to build on our values and models and today it's even about our basic sovereignty.
We need to build a new generation of social platforms.
Social platforms built for the 2020's, built consciously to be good for humans and communities, built with all new design principles, built at human scale. With the barriers to build and design lower than ever, we need to get the sharpest and most driven minds of our generation to build social platforms. To encourage risk taking, investment, experimentation and dreaming again.
We need to build every type of social platform.
The first two decades in social platforms was the great bundling of every innovation into a few platforms. In Rebuild we're working from a perspective of encouraging and diversity. From Bundled, Networking, Marketplace, Resource sharing, Forum, Community, Location, Messaging, Microblogging, Creator platform, Groups, Photo sharing, Dating, Video sharing and Events. The taxonomy at the start, probably more.
Build on any model.
Rebuild is agnostic to what model works. Commercial from venturebacked to bootstrapped. Nonprofit models. Opensource models. Cooperative models. Societal models having copay or cities contributing to infrastructure. Combination of models where 200 social platforms across Europe runs on the same opensource stack.
We need to move to build vertical ecosystems in Europe.
Not comparing startup ecosystems, startup capitals or who's got the most happening startup event. But shifting to fully integrating Europe. Rebuild as such is a sprint to build a vertical ecosystem, an European industry that's defined by the topic of social platforms, not by our nations and cities. That's the next layer in the entrepreneurial stack in Europe and we probably need one in every vertical. Therefore we'll open source the method and lessons after 12-months of sprinting to serve as blueprint for the next many vertical ecosystems in Europe.
Rebuild is a platform to build.
Running three gatherings in Paris, Helsinki and Copenhagen. Shipping concrete tools to build, a directory of social platforms at the core. At the start there's 5 tools in beta and an invitation to the first gathering 1-3rd of March.
Rebuild is built as a sprint to reignite, to re-enchant, to reconnect, to rebuild. It will run for 12-months before sunsetting. We're not here to take space, but to create space. The hope is that Rebuild can facilitate all the social platforms in Europe to organize themselves and create the permanent vertical ecosystem and industry. And start the general mobilising to get European citizens to shift social platforms, what we call the big shift.
My personal hope is that we can come together. Entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, activists, investors and government leaders. Not focus on our differences. But to support a new generation of entrepreneurs and builders that are doing one of the hardest and most important things in Europe. To rebuild our critical communications infrastructure, our social platforms.
To believe in building the new. Designing a better future. Building and getting it to happen. That's the Europe I hope to live in. Rebuild is a bottom-up NGO supported by a few passionate European entrepreneurs with room for more that want a better future. if we can move our confidence and perspective just an inch to be about building it's enough.
We've already gotten an incredibly talented core team together, some of Europe's sharpest minds as ambassadors, a lot of the new social platforms that needs all of our support involved. But it's only the start.