3. November 2026
Builders ask Brussels to let people take their social network with them
A joint position paper from builders of new social apps calls on the EU to give every social media account a personal data server, built to one common standard, so people can use any app and keep their network.
Today, startups and tech organizations building new social apps published Freedom of movement in digital Europe: opening the social internet up to competition, a joint position paper coordinated by Modal Foundation and signed by more than 38 builders.
People who want to move from Instagram, TikTok or Facebook to a better social app can already sign up for one. What they can’t bring with them is what makes a social network worth using: their identity, their content in a usable form, and the people they are connected to. When you change bank or mobile provider, your payments and your phone number come with you. Social media has no equivalent.
EU law already gives people the right to take their data with them, but builders have found that what platforms hand over is often incomplete and hard to use anywhere else, even when it meets the rules on paper.
The transfer tools the largest platforms offer under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) are open only to services the platform approves. None of them lets your network come with you. As long as switching means starting over, challenger apps can’t compete with the dominant platforms on quality, and people have little real choice.
The paper’s core ask is that every platform hold its users’ data, connections and interactions in a personal data server (PDS) built to one common standard, with the AT Protocol’s PDS as the starting point. Any app could then use that data with the user’s permission. Someone could move from Instagram to Flashes, a European alternative, and still see their friends’ posts on Instagram. And anyone could move their account to another host without losing their followers.
The builders ask the Commission to make this mandatory through the Digital Fairness Act, expected in Q4 2026. In the meantime, they call for the DMA’s existing portability rules to be enforced properly and for an end to platform practices that stop people finding each other elsewhere.
European builders are already making better social apps, and the paper asks that they be in the room as Brussels decides what comes next.
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