I thought Bol only serviced Belgium and Netherlands?
they do
So not a truely European replacement for Amazon.
Bol was great while I lived in NL, but now I’ve left, I’m struggling to find a good replacement
yeah thats why i included bol. i couldnt find anything like it thats “truly european”
How is Telegram US based? It is a Pavel Durov’s offshore company from some Virgin islands. Not European, but not US either.
In this case, I think the creator just avoids Telegram, for good reason:
It’s not E2EE encrypted by default.
The list is not named appropriately “US etc” but it’s not a bad list either
These lists are almost always stupid.
The worst part is that usually the maker hasn’t used half of the things they recommend… If they had, they wouldn’t have recommended them.
I’m guessing they tend to make these lists because of a personal connection to one or two companies they put in their list. Just as bit of free marketing.
OP writes “instead of their american counterparts”, and then puts signal.
Firefox as well any opensource doesn’t have a country. You can build it and use it. Avoid any centralized service.
The 4 freedoms of software are:
Freedom 0: The Freedom to Run You can use the software for any purpose, without restrictions. Freedom 1: The Freedom to Study and Modify You have access to the source code, allowing you to study how the software works and make changes to suit your needs. Freedom 2: The Freedom to Distribute Copies You can share copies of the software with others, whether for free or at a cost. Freedom 3: The Freedom to Improve and Share Improvements You can modify the software and share your changes with the community, helping others benefit from your improvements.as long as these freedoms are observed it doesn’t matter the country of origin.
Some of these products would not exist without their American counterpart, which directly fuel their existance.
Librewolf is just a hardened version of Firefox. It would not exist without the Firefox team continuing to develop Firefox and to fix its security issues.
Ecosia primarely uses Bing and Startpage uses Google for search results. Both would not exist without the search engines backing them.
I’m not saying these are bad products and I don’t mean to criticiseze. I’m actually a librewolf user myself. I just think it is important to point out that the European label might be deceiving in this instance and might mislead people into thinking they are using something different than they actually are.
It might also not be so important. Perhaps focusing our energy on good open source projects and NGO-backed initiatives is desirable regardless of their origin?
idk food for thought
I would rather see people use Firefox than Vivaldi. We need a more diverse browser engine market to keep the web open. More here: https://better-tech.eu/web/article/switch-browsers/
We need a more diverse browser engine market to keep the web open.
We definitely do, but it’s a tall order considering making a fully functional and daily usable browser engine is one of the most difficult programming projects to under take
At least we got Ladybird with its brand new from scratch engine coming up though! (In 2028…)
It’s absolutely not a simple thing, but if we let the web turn into Chrome-only then Ladybird doesn’t stand a chance. For now, more market share for Firefox and Firefox-based browsers is the only argument against making websites only work in Chrome.
Especially if Chrome is bought by OpenAI or some of the other players who want to enshittify it even faster and have shown interest.
I can’t get behind a browser built from scratch with C, not Rust, considering how integral browsers are to security these days. Plus there’s the whole controversy around their pronouns and politics in coding stances.
i use librewolf on PC (which is a firefox fork) and vivaldi on phone :3
I use Floorp (a Japanese Firefox fork) on PC, and Ironfox on Android.
Fennec or Vanadium are good alt phone browsers, too. I do my best not to use chromium stuff at all, but keep the latter around on the work profile of my phone.
Waterfox too!
Did’t know HERE we go, seems very good, thanks!
I like it too and do use it, but unlike Foss alternatives they do use your data for commercial purposes, just so you know.
American telegram? 😂
i know its soviet technology😔
Not sure it’s a good idea to recommend Arch Linux to newbies migrating from Windows; maybe prioritize Mint or similar?
this is not a recommendation post. this is what i personally use as i said in the title. i would always recommend Mint to a Linux beginner
I misread, my bad. Good for you 👍
Signal is based in California, but they’re a nonprofit.
I thought it was odd to see it in an European alternative list.
I don’t personally have issues with nonprofits or FOSS as exceptions to my own personal boycott of US companies, but if anyone is looking for an alternative to Signal, SimpleX is probably the closest analog.
It’s decentralized and funded globally. It’s based in the UK.
Awesome stuff. Also don’t forget European DNS companies like Quad9.
And Mullvad
You can also easily host your own DNS with Unbound
Do DNS make any money?
Yes, you have to pay to add a domain to the servers. They also probably use the requests data commercially.
Ah, I did not know that. Added 9.9.9.9 as my secondary DNS (after adguard)
EDIT I misunderstood the post, this is what you’re using, not what you’re recommending, sorry about that!
I will still include my original comment below.Still, I use and can recommend XMPP and the provider magicbroccoli.de! Arne the admin is also a swell guy!
Bold move recommending US Signal over European Telegram!
I’d personally trust neither very much; one’s US funded and the other clearly not as secure outside “secret chats”.
But what about Threema? Or a European XMPP provider like the excellent magicbroccoli.de?
Tell me you’re for weed dealers without telling me you’re for weed dealers xD
any reason for XMPP over Matrix?
Decent list, but I’d recommend Threema instead of Signal
doesnt that cost money?
Nothing is for free. If not with money, youre probably paying with data
The problem is, getting people to start using it. What’s app is free and everybody uses it. If you want them to switch, rather use somthing that’s also free over something with a cost barrier.
True
Signal was made in the US and paid for with US funding though?
I switched from chatgpt pro to lechat and have been using lechat for several weeks now.
It’s so bad comparitively that I am considering to just not use AI anymore.
I used chatgpt daily many times and minstral le chat is just… Incapable of understanding contextual things. It has still a long way to go before it can really compete, sadly.
It’s so bad comparitively that I am considering to just not use AI anymore.
This is the way.
i barely use AI anyway, so to me Le Chat is just as good :3
I found this too and looked if there is something I could do to use chatgpt anonymous. I figured that might be better than continuing to use them in cases I expect le chat to be subpar. DuckDuckGo has an interface for this, although i haven’t figured out much ‘better’ of a solution this is. You can go to http://duck.ai/ chat anonymous with:
- GPT-4o mini
- Llama 3.3 70B
- Claude 3 Haiku
- o3-mini
- Mistral Small 3
According to DuckDuckGo (which is also US-based) your chat will not be used as training data. If someone here has more knowledge please provide it because I’m just not sure if this is much better than using ChatGPT directly except that openai doesn’t get to build a user profile of me.
I can highly recommend https://mapy.com/
