Overview:
The community to discuss buying European goods and services.
Related Communities:
Buy Local:
Buying and Selling:
Boycott:
Credit to https://www.reddit.com/user/lukakopajtic/
There might be some changes that could improve it further:
Any other suggestions?
I get the desire to post "simple" answers like this. And while some of the recommends do make sense... I believe the lists should be better researched. A few other comments also pointed out some of the issues already.
I've noticed with a lot of these lists that worse/unreasonable/less private/less secure/not even European or FOSS are being recommended as alternatives and I think they do more harm than good for people that might need genuine help making this process more simple. They also tend to miss a lot of excellent alternatives.
For what it's worth, these lists oversimplify and can't take into account individual needs, so own research is always necessary IMO.
For me, it's paramount that the software we use is secure and privacy respecting / transparent. A great resource for good recommendations is: privacyguides.org .
I see that this is focused on foss alternatives streaming wide I would suggest mubi and your local library which often include streaming services. At least here in Germany.
I recently found edupad.ch for collaborative writing.
It's very simple, and - most important of all - doesn't require an account.
I'm using it for the first time, so I don't have much of a review, but the first impression is very good for my use case.
Bluesky absolutely belongs in the left column.
It's not Transparent, Decentralized or Open Source.
It is a centralized social media network exactly like Twitter. The only 'open' part is a protocol that lets you interact with their, private, service.
The fact that it is 'open source' is largely a red herring, if Bluesky decides to no longer support their protocol then it is worthless. It cannot simply be forked and remain useful.
Bluesky is simply engaging in a PR campaign to steal customers from Twitter. It is exactly the same as Twitter in all of the ways that matter. It can be purchased by Musk or manipulated by the existing owner in the same way as Twitter.
Making a Bluesky account is simply trusting a new corporation to not act like a corporation in the future... which is a pretty naive position.
Ecosia is not open source, or decentralized. It is a private search engine based in Germany that provides search results from the major search engines and sells advertisements via Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks. These ad networks are part of Surveillance Capitalism and earn their money primarily by spying on you, collating your data and selling it/using it to place ads.
Stremio is largely a piece of software used to funnel people into paying for monthly for pirate streaming services. It's not getting rid of Netflix or Disney+, it's giving you the option of paying Russian or North Korean supported cybergangs instead of Netflix for access to streaming content.
The real open source alternative is Jellyfin. Then using qBittorrent along with Sonarr and Radarr to self-host your own media server.
The other suggestions are mostly okay with minor gripes.
+1. Was really surprised to see ecosia (searx!?) and stremio as the only options of their categories; kinda sketchy...
Graphene should also for sure be included, even if it's Pixel only. I don't care that much about Bluesky as I've dealt first-hand with trying to get my gen-x mother on mastodon, and failing spectacularly. It's not better in the long run, but in the short term it's good to leave Twitter, simply to lose Elon some money. Either way, the list is kinda weird.
Edit: also, only mention droidify and not plain f-droid, obtainium, and Aurora? What?
Edit: corrected last edit
lol… Brave… Come on man.
Yeah, I was gonna say… Recommending Brave isn’t a great look right now. Especially right in the wake of the Brave CEO going off on that unhinged ultra conservative rant.
And Firefox recently had its own controversy, with the removal of their “we promise never to sell your info” section of their ToS. When questioned, they basically responded with “well some jurisdictions define “sell” as “exchanging for money”… We don’t agree with that. But because some jurisdictions do define it that way, we need to remove that section. All we want to do is exchange your info for money. But again, we don’t think that should be considered selling your info.”
Fucking brave shows it's ugly head again. The only thing worse than a browser owned by a greedy corpo is a browser that is owned by two greedy corpos, one of which is mostly a crypto scam corpo.
Don't use Brave. It's got a lot of privacy issues, even compared to the Mozilla foundation. Underneath, it's still Chrome.
Plus the CEO is MAGA
I don’t think BlueSky is a great alternative, it’s still American and also still pretty big tech
I also still don't fully understand if it can be categorized as decentralized.
Nope, its a twitter clone
Lots of these are still American, and Bluesky isnt any-less of a walled garden, they just haven't reached enshitification-critical-mass yet.
Yeah, the list does not fit this community
Headquarters Seattle, Washington, United States
Delta Chat is European and is better alternative for messaging apps
I’m very curious about Delta Chat! You have a good experience with it? I just downloaded it but haven’t started telling people to get it with me yet.
OP, quite a few of these are still American, some open source, some not. It's more like a generic list of alternatives to mainstream.
Saying “this FOSS is American” is a little like saying “any wheat in a meal makes it Egyptian because that’s where wheat comes from.” FOSS doesn’t have borders, because it can be used, forked, and modified by anyone. Even if an American created it, as soon as it becomes FOSS, it is a worldwide project.
When it's FOSS it doesn't matter so much where they're based, fortunately
BlueSky and Brave for sure aren't FOSS.
I like how it starts with getting off Twitter and trying out Lemmy and ends with switching to Linux.
Revanced is just a cracked YouTube app isn't it?
It goes beyond just cracking, with support for features like SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike, but essentially yes. It's not a meaningful YouTube "alternative", just a tweaked version of same.
Ecosia is a German web search engine based on Bing and Google's index.
Qwant is a French web search engine based on Bing but which has been working on its own index for a while.
I just found out that Ecosia and Qwant started teaming up last year to build a European search index. I hope something will come out of it.
https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/
PeerTub is developped by French non-profit Framasoft, which also develops multiple de-gooling apps: collaborative docs, forms, agenda, or host other open-source collaboration tools. https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
I strongly support Homeassistant. The sheer amount of features they've added and the community built around it make it a no brainer for home automation.
While this list is itself could use a major rework, I'm happy to see that this list, originally posted on reddit specifically, gives visibility to lemmy as a reddit alternative.
I'm a millennial, so I'm still checking the nightmare that is Facebook here and there, what's the alternative?
Edit: On second look I'm not so sure how good this list really is...